Attorney General Merrick Garland and members of the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol could go to jail if Republicans win control of Congress in the midterm elections, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News.
"They are running over peoples' civil liberties," said Gingrich, who was speaker from 1995 to 1999.
"You have both with Attorney General Garland and with this Select Committee of January 6th, people who have run amok. They are breaking the rules. They are going after people in a way which is reminiscent of the British monarchy using closed-door systems that we outlawed deliberately because we had seen it."
Gingrich said the panel is "literally just running over the law" and "pursuing innocent people," insisting that they are "basically a lynch mob" and that Garland is "misusing the FBI."
He warned that "what they need to understand is on January 4 next year, you're going to have a Republican majority in the House, and a Republican majority in the Senate, and all these people who have been so tough and so mean and so nasty are gonna be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every email."
Gingrich stressed that "I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find out that they're now sheep. And they're the ones who are, in fact, going to, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they're breaking."
The two Republicans serving on the House committee shot back at Gingrich for his comments.
"A former Speaker of the House is threatening jail time for members of Congress who are investigating the violent January 6 attack on our Capitol and our Constitution," Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney wrote in a tweet. "This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels."
Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger also responded to Gingrich by posting on Twitter a GIF from the movie "Billy Madison."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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