Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sounded off on Thursday following Democratic accusations against former President Donald Trump on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
In an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the Georgia Republican said that current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is primarily in charge of providing security for the Capitol.
“Wasn’t it Nancy Pelosi’s responsibility to oversee the protection and defense of the Capitol and if so why isn’t she facing more scrutiny?” Ingraham asked Gingrich.
Gingrich explained, “Well, I think she is the person who is the most responsible for what happened. It was her job to ensure that there was adequate police, and if they didn’t have adequate police it was her job to ensure that the National Guard was there.”
“So a lot of this, I think, is a dance by the Democrats, who don’t want us to look very closely at what actually happened,” he continued, adding that Pelosi’s handpicked Jan. 6 committee is only looking at “political things.”
He continued, “They’re not looking at the various ringleaders who’ve not been arrested. They’re not looking at a lot of the details about whether or not the FBI was as involved as provocateurs.”
He went on to tell Ingraham he was “deeply offended that anybody would do what they did on the Capitol grounds,” adding, “I was also really offended that the current speaker, Pelosi, failed so totally in her job, which was to make sure this didn’t happen.”
In August, Gingrich ripped the California Democrat as the “greatest threat to liberty” in his lifetime.
“As a 20-year member of Congress and four-year Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, let me speak bluntly and directly,” Gingrich said.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the greatest threat to constitutional liberty in our lifetime,” he added in a column at Fox News.
Gingrich knocked the California Democrat for iron-fisted rule over the House that he said was more akin to dictators like the Castro brothers in Cuba or Chinese President Xi Jinping before going on to list a number of recent examples.
“Pelosi ordered and kept the fencing around the U.S. Capitol for months – even when members of her own party were calling for it to come down,” he wrote.
“She stripped a duly elected Republican of all her committee assignments,” he noted further, citing freshman Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, who was removed from committees over controversial tweets.
“In recent weeks, she has dictated to the minority party what members it can have on a bipartisan commission,” Gingrich continued, a reference to Pelosi’s refusal to seat two Republicans, Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana, nominated to select committee investigating the prelude to the Jan. 6 riot — a decision that many have called unprecedented.
“Now, she is threatening to have members of Congress and their staffs arrested if they do not follow the mask mandate which exists by her own decree,” he continued.