Newt Gingrich said Nancy Pelosi is living in a fantasy world if she thinks she has dirt on him.
"She lives in a San Francisco environment of very strange fantasies and very strange understandings of reality," Gingrich said Wednesday as he laughed off the notion that the House minority leader could derail his bid for the GOP presidential nomination.
"I have no idea what's in Nancy Pelosi's head," Gingrich said on NBC's "Today" show. "If she knows something, I have a simple challenge: Spit it out."
Pelosi on Tuesday prompted speculation that she has dirt on Gingrich, possibly from his House ethics troubles, that could hurt his presidential campaign. The California Democrat told CNN on Tuesday: "There's something I know."
She also told the cable news network that the former Republican House Speaker will never be president.
"Let me just make my prediction and stand by it. It isn't going to happen," she told CNN host John King. "There's something I know. The Republicans, if they choose to nominate him, that's their prerogative. I don't even think that's going to happen."
Gingrich replied on NBC: "I have no idea what she's talking about."
"The 'something' Leader Pelosi knows," said Drew Hammill, press secretary to Pelosi, "is that Newt Gingrich will not
be President of the United States. She made that clear last night."
"Leader Pelosi previously made a reference to the extensive amount of
information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive
committee report with which the public may not be fully aware," Hammill
added.
A 145-page report
from the Select Committee on Ethics based on documents used during the
investigation has been publicly available online since 1997.
Gingrich has surged in the polls, after fading in December. He won the primary vote in South Carolina last weekend by a wide margin and is a front-runner, with Mitt Romney, for Florida's primary next week. The Sunshine State votes Jan. 31.
The last time Gingrich surged to the front of the GOP field, Pelosi suggested she had information on Gingrich that would bring him down.
“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” she told Talking Points Memo in December. “When the time is right. … I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff."
Gingrich worked with Pelosi in Congress from 1987 to 1999, and Pelosi served on the Ethics Committee that investigated Gingrich for allegations of tax cheating and campaign finance violations in the late ’90s.
Gingrich came back swinging at the time, saying releasing any information that is not already publicly available in the ethics report would be "a fundamental violation of the rules of the House."
The ethics report recently became a point of contention between Gingrich and Romney. Romney called on Gingrich to release any information surrounding the investigation that has not already come to light.
"Nancy Pelosi has the full record of that ethics investigation," Romney said at a campaign stop in South Carolina. "You know it's going to get out before the general election. Sure, he ought to get it out now."
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