The Jan. 6 Committee Would Like a Word with Newt Gingrich: ‘You Have Knowledge and Information Directly Related to Our Investigation’
The House select committee investigating the 2021 Capitol riot wrote a letter to Newt Gingrich seeking information from him in its probe.
Dated Sep. 1, the letter states the former Speaker of the House has knowledge of and was involved in, the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Donald Trump lost. Trump and his close allies have falsely claimed the election was rigged against him.
“The Committee has obtained information indicating that you have knowledge about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and we write to seek your voluntary cooperation,”
the letter from committee Chair Bennie Thompson says. “Some of the information that we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisors to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”
In the letter, Thompson alleges Gingrich plotted with members of Trump’s team to pressure officials in states he had lost to reverse the results.
“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate,” the letter continues. “Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place. They encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election. To that end, these advertisements were intentionally aired in the days leading up to December 14, 2020, the day electors from each state met to cast their votes for president and vice president.”
The letter goes on to quote from an email Gingrich sent to Kushner and two other members of Trump’s inner circle in December 2020:
The goal is to arouse the country’s anger through new verifiable information the American people have never seen before[.] . . . If we inform the American people in a way they find convincing and it arouses their anger[,] they will then bring pressure on legislators and governors.
“In short, you have knowledge and information directly related to our investigation,” the letter says.
Thompson states Gingrich was involved in a now-infamous “fake elector” scheme, where Trump’s allies hatched a harebrained plot to replace legitimate presidential electors in the Electoral College with alternate pro-Trump slates.
“The Committee is also interested in other communications you may have had with the White House, President Trump, the Trump legal team or any other persons involved in the events of January 6th,” the chair writes. “We ask that you preserve all records of such communications.”
The letter says the committee would like to interview Gingrich about what he knows, though it is unclear if he will comply without being subpoenaed, as the committee has done with several former Trump officials.
Gingrich has been a staple on conservative media where he routinely boosts the former president. Just hours before the letter was released, Gingrich claimed on Fox Business Network that Democrats are “going to set the stage for stealing” the upcoming midterm elections.
