There’s a new hit piece coming out this week on House Speaker John Boehner; only this time, you can’t blame the liberal media. In fact, it comes from an old Republican colleague of Speaker Boehner, former Representative Bob Ney, who represented a district in Boehner’s own state of Ohio for 11 years before his conviction in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal.

Ney also enjoys a certain renown as the lawmaker who made “freedom fries” an official selection on the menu of the House of Representatives cafeteria, but his new stab at fame comes in the form of a tell-all memoir, “Sideswiped: Lessons Learned Courtesy of the Hit Men on Capitol Hill.”

The book makes some scabrous claims regarding Boehner’s character and describes the House Speaker as “a man who was all about winning and money. He was a chain-smoking, relentless wine-drinker who was more interested in the high life—golf, women, cigarettes, fun and alcohol.”

Ney also claimed that Boehner, during the depths of the Abramoff scandal, offered him a job if he would give up his seat in Congress. Ney says that Boehner doubled crossed him on the offer, but a spokesman for the Speaker issued a strongly-worded statement to National Journal dismissing Ney’s claims as the work of a “convicted felon with a history of failing to tell the truth.”