Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus demanded a "full-scale investigation" into the Obama administration's record-keeping, but punted on the question of whether Mitt Romney, as president, should maintain some of the same disclosure policies put into place by President Obama.

Priebus assailed the Obama White House for details included in a report authored by Republicans on Capitol Hill, which accused the administration of failing to live up to the standards of transparency set for itself, and accused Jim Messina -- the president's campaign manager -- of trying to avoid disclosure laws.

"It's time for a full-scale investigation ... The Obama White House is actively deceiving the American people, and they're doing it over a Caribou latte," Priebus said on a conference call with reporters, referencing an alleged informal policy of White House officials to meet at a nearby Caribou Coffee in order to avoid having those liaisons appear on White House visitor records.

Those visitor records are released voluntarily as part of the standards put in place by President Obama to increase transparency.

But Priebus declined to say whether Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, would abide by the same standards if he were elected.

"As far as whether or not the policies of transparency should continue ... I'm going to let Gov. Romney set the standards for his White House when he's there," the RNC chairman said.

The GOP has seized upon the new report, assembled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as evidence that Obama hasn't lived up to its own standards of transparency. Republicans pointed to the report, along with administration stonewalling of inquiries into the administration's dealings with Solyndra or LightSquared, as evidence of administration hypocrisy.

Priebus even went so far as to suggest there might have been criminal activity, an allegation he acknowledged could not be substantiated absent the release of more details.

"Certainly there is smoke and a smoldering fire here, and my suspicion is that there would be a lot more uncovered once there is a full-scale investigation," he said.

As to how that investigation might proceed, Priebus was more vague. He seemed to indicate that a House committee could take charge on such an investigation, though their inquiry would inevitably be marked by partisanship since Republicans control the House.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have fought in the closing days of the South Carolina primary to remind voters of the headaches Republicans faced during the speakership of Newt Gingrich, highlighting in particular the ethics investigation that led to his official reprimand.

For his part, Gingrich has dismissed the investigation as an essentially partisan exercise; a spokesman for the former speaker called it "Nancy Pelosi's ethics witch-hunt" on Friday afternoon.

But that hasn't satisfied Gingrich's GOP foes. On Friday, Romney called on Gingrich to release any records relating to the ethics investigation -- a response, in part, to Gingrich's demand that the former Massachusetts governor release his tax records.

"One of the issues that was raised last night by Rick Santorum was the fact that he was pushed out of the House by his fellow members. I think over 80 percent of Republican congressmen voted to reprimand the speaker of the House -- first time in history," Romney said in Gilbert, S.C. "Nancy Pelosi has the full record of that ethics investigation. You know it’s going to get out before the general election."

SLIDESHOW: Newt Gingrich

It cuts to the core of a concern about Gingrich on the lips of many Republicans: While he is credited as a visionary, his speakership was marked by internal Republican discord and personal missteps that made it difficult for the Republicans whom Gingrich had led to Congress to govern. (It's that context which helped give legs to the allegations made Thursday by Gingrich's ex-wife that he had asked for an "open" marriage, or had otherwise asked for a divorce.)

"I don't want a nominee that I have to worry about going out and looking at the paper the next day and figuring out  … worrying about what he's going to say next," Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, said at Thursday night's debate.

But just as Romney's campaign has been reluctant to make public the candidate's tax records, so, too, the Gingrich campaign seems unlikely to release any new documents about the investigation into his actions, which concluded in 1997.

"Unlike Mitt Romney's Tax Returns, the documents and reports from Nancy Pelosi's ethics witch-hunt vs. Newt have been [for] over a decade," Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond wrote on Twitter.

Indeed, the House Select Committee on Ethics has long-posted on its website the entirety of its findings against Gingrich. The Romney campaign is asking for the release of additional documents and details used by the committee as part of its deliberations, a request that goes well beyond what's required of the former speaker. Gingrich has estimated that his office had turned over "1 million pages of material" to the ethics office, much of which may be protected under the private deliberations of the committee.

But a number of other details about the investigation, which culminated in an official House vote to reprimand Gingrich and a $300,000 bill to reimburse the committee's investigation, are a matter of public record.

The investigation was initiated by a complaint filed in September of 1994 by Gingrich's opponent for re-election that alleged a course Gingrich had tought at Kennesaw State College essentially served political purposes despite the class having been advertised as a not-for-profit activity; one that served a primarily educational function.

The investigation was eventually expanded to probe what role GOPAC, the political action committee founded to help train GOP candidates for office, played in support of that college course.

The ethics committee concluded its work in 1997, saying in its findings that Gingrich had misled the committee in its investigations. The eight-member panel stopped short of saying Gingrich had lied, but said the then-speaker had been either "intentional" or "reckless" in his representations of his activities during the investigation. The ethics committee, which is divided evenly on party lines, voted 7-1 in favor of its judgment, and recommendation that the full House vote to reprimand Gingrich and require the reimbursement of $300,000 for extra time spent on the investigation as a result of Gingrich's misstatements.

The House did overwhelmingly approve the reprimand, voting 395-28 to approve the punishment. Twenty-six Republicans broke ranks to oppose the punishment. An official reprimand is a step below censure in severity of congressional discipline.

At the time, as recounted in a Jan. 19, 1997 story in The Washington Post, Gingrich had accepted the penalty and reprimand. But Gingrich ultimately blamed his attorneys for making mistakes that led to the misleading information. "I trusted the law firm to have done the job right. They didn't do the job right and I didn't catch them," he said on Jan. 25, according to a CNN report at the time.

But while the investigation was conducted in a nonpartisan fashion, it's also true that the investigation and reprimand of Gingrich -- the first for a sitting speaker -- was a potent political issue.

According to accounts during the controversy, Republicans were particularly incensed by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., a member of the ethics committee who leaked audio of Gingrich plotting with aides to combat the charges. The leak fueled partisan rancor over whether Gingrich was being targeted unfairly because of his political stature.

(It's also true that the investigation drove some internal Republican dissent. Throughout the course of the investigation, some Republican members called on Gingrich to step aside temporarily, while others suggested they would not support Gingrich for a second term as speaker. He won a second term with 216 votes, despite some GOP defections.)

The sense, though, that the investigation had been a partisan exercise was rekindled by comments made by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in December. Pelosi was a member of the eight-member ethics panel to conduct the Gingrich investigation.

“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," she told the left-leaning news website TalkingPointsMemo.

Pelosi would be barred by releasing that information, since the ethics committee is charged with conducting its inquiries in private. 

That prompted Gingrich to call Pelosi's words in December an early "Christmas gift."

"Just a reminder, that committee was extraordinarily partisan. The job of the Democrats was to get Newt Gingrich," he said on Dec. 6 on CNBC. "They couldn't beat any of our ideas, so they decided to try to beat the messenger. And I think it actually will help people understand what happened in that period and how much of it was partisan."

But it's Pelosi's veiled threat on which Romney's campaign is leaning Friday. "If Nancy Pelosi has this information, Barack Obama has this information," Romney communications director Gail Gitcho said in an email to reporters.

Additional resources on Gingrich's ethics investigation:

• Key Washington Post stories related to the Gingrich investigation
• CNN timeline of Gingrich investigation
• Politifact on Gingrich's claim the ethics investigation was partisan

NBC's Garrett Haake contributed reporting.

NEW YORK -- Newt Gingrich shot back at House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today, after Pelosi threatened to reveal details of the ethics investigation into the former House Speaker almost 13 years ago.

“I want to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift,” Gingrich said during a press conference at Manhattan’s Union League Club Monday afternoon.

“If she’s saying that she’s going to use material that she developed while she was on the ethics committee,” Gingrich added, “that is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House, and I would hope that members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it.”

The remark brought a quick response over Twitter from Nancy Pelosi’s staff.

“[Pelosi] was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record,” wrote her spokesman, Drew Hammill. 

The back-and-forth began earlier today when the left-leaning website Talking Points Memo published an interview with Pelosi, in which she said, “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich.”
 
The blog post was headlined, “Democrats Gleeful At Prospect of Running Against Gingrich.”

“I know a lot about him,” Pelosi told TPM.  “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.”

The ethics investigation resulted in sanctions against Gingrich, and a fine.

Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House in 1999. Pelosi later served as House Speaker, from 2007 until January, 2011.

The two appeared in a 2008 video encouraging action on global warming –- a move that has invited attacks from Gingrich’s opponents in the GOP field.

“We don’t always see eye-to-eye, do we Newt?” Pelosi said in the video.

“No,” Gingrich replied.

The Washington Post: “A report offering new details regarding the House ethics committee’s handling of the investigation of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has led to calls for a new probe — this time, of the panel itself. Politico reported Monday that two of the committee’s former attorneys may have compromised the Waters investigation by improperly communicating with Republican committee members.”

Politico adds, “Rep. Maxine Waters is calling for the House Ethics Committee to dismiss the long-running case against her, claiming she can’t get fair treatment from the secretive panel in the wake of allegations that staffers improperly shared information in an investigation into her finances.”

More: “Waters … was reacting to a POLITICO story Monday that included internal emails, memos and documents from inside the Ethics Committee that revealed bitter internal disputes on the panel over the allegations against Waters. Blake Chisam, the former staff director and chief counsel for the Ethics Committee, accused the two lead investigators on the Waters case of secretly feeding information to Republicans on the Ethics Committee, including Alabama Rep. Jo Bonner. Chisam also accused the staffers of misleading lawmakers and other staff on the status of the Waters investigation. Bonner is now chairman of the Ethics Committee.”

The Las Vegas Sun: “At first he stood firm: the embattled Sen. John Ensign saying that, despite investigations into his conduct, he would stand for re-election. And then, just last month, he said he would complete his term, but not seek re-election.”

“And Thursday he packed it in. Saying the personal cost of staying in office was too much to bear, the man who once was considered possible presidential material announced his resignation, effective May 3.”

The New York Times adds that Ensign’s resignation "will allow Nevada’s governor, Brian Sandoval, to appoint a Republican to fill out the rest of the Senate term, thereby increasing the chances that the party would hold on to what may be a hotly contested seat next year. One likely candidate is Representative Dean Heller, a Republican House member already running for the job. Mr. Ensign had not been planning to run for re-election."

The Washington Post says the resignation comes “amid an ethics investigation into his conduct… The Senate Ethics Committee is investigating Ensign’s handling of an affair with a former political aide whose husband was also a top legislative aide to the senator. Earlier this year, the committee hired outside counsel to begin a more formal phase, which probably would have led to a public hearing on formal allegations against the senator or the public release of its allegations.”

What next for Heller's seat, if he's appointed? "On Thursday evening, officials in the secretary of state’s office pointed reporters to a Nevada law that stated there would be no primary in the case of a House special election… Secretary of state officials also said state law might allow the state party committees to pick nominees for the special election."

The battle over federal funding for Planned Parenthood was not cheap for the women's health group. Roll Call: "For the first quarter of 2011, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America reported spending $400,000 on federal lobbying, up more than 256 percent from the same quarter just one year ago, when it spent $111,000."

The Hill points out what the budget negotiations have demonstrated about Obama's relationships with House leaders. "This year’s budget battles have forged a loose bond between President Obama and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) while revealing some distance between the White House and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)."

BUT the president also predicted at a fundraiser yesterday that Pelosi will get her old job as Speaker of the House back.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah won't support any Gang of Six deficit reduction plan that includes tax increases.