[Republican officials in New York sharply denounced the embattled
representative, even as leaders in Washington have said they will not
push him to step down. Meanwhile Speaker McCarthy said he woulld
resist calls to get Santos to resign. ]
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GEORGE SANTOS FACES CALLS TO RESIGN FROM 4 G.O.P. CONGRESSMEN  
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Michael Gold and Grace Ashford
January 11, 2023
New York Times
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_ Republican officials in New York sharply denounced the embattled
representative, even as leaders in Washington have said they will not
push him to step down. Meanwhile Speaker McCarthy said he woulld
resist calls to get Santos to resign. _

The first-year Republican lawmaker, representing parts of Queens and
Long Island, admitted to lying about his background, education and
finances., Photo credit: Tom Brenner for The New York Times

 

Dozens of Republican officials in New York State, including four
recently elected congressmen, urged Representative George Santos to
resign on Wednesday in a fracturing of local party support for Mr.
Santos. Their call represented a sharp break from congressional
Republican leaders, who insisted they would not push the embattled
congressman to resign.

Even as Mr. Santos’s former allies in New York insisted that his
fabrications on the campaign trail had significantly violated the
public trust, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he not only would
resist calls to push Mr. Santos out, but that he planned to seat him
on a congressional committee.

“The voters elected him to serve,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters in
Washington, adding that Mr. Santos “has to answer to the voters and
the voters can make another decision in two years.”

Mr. Santos, who was elected to represent New York’s Third
Congressional District, a consequential swing district in Queens and
Long Island, emphatically resisted calls to leave office, saying on
Twitter
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he remained committed to serving the people of his district.

But at a news conference, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, whose
district neighbors Mr. Santos’s, said that Mr. Santos had so deeply
lost the faith of voters on Long Island that he did “not have the
ability” to adequately serve in the House of Representatives.

Mr. D’Esposito, who joined the event via video from his office in
Washington, added in a statement that he would not associate with Mr.
Santos and would encourage “other representatives in the House of
Representatives to join me in rejecting him.”

In the hours that followed, three other first-term Republican
congressmen joined the push: Nick LaLota, who also represents parts of
Long Island; Nick Langworthy, the state Republican chair whose
district is in New York’s rural Southern Tier; and Brandon Williams,
whose district covers an area near Syracuse.

The calls for Mr. Santos to step down were the sharpest denunciation
yet of the congressman’s behavior from Republicans after reporting
in The New York Times
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that Mr. Santos had made false claims about his educational and
professional background and raised questions about his business, his
financial disclosures and his campaign expenses.

The Nassau County party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said that Mr.
Santos, a first-term Republican, had lost the support of Republicans
in his district, saying that Mr. Santos’s campaign was one of
“deceit, lies, fabrication.”

“He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not
consider him one of our congresspeople,” Mr. Cairo said at the news
conference. “Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican
Committee, I am calling for his immediate resignation.”

Leaders outlined a scenario in which Mr. Santos would be cut out of
the day-to-day functioning of local government, barring him from local
meetings and events. Constituents of his with requests would be
referred to other representatives. While such moves would hamper Mr.
Santos’s reach, they could also curtail basic constituent access and
potentially hinder the government’s ability to address local needs.

In response, Mr. Santos said on Twitter
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he was committed to serving his constituents, “not the party &
politicians.” He added that he regretted hearing that Long Island
officials would “refuse to work with my office to deliver results to
keep our community safe and lower the cost of living.”

The unified outcry from Nassau County Republicans adds to the pressure
facing Mr. Santos, who is currently the subject of inquiries by
federal and local prosecutors over whether his financial dealings or
lies on the campaign trail warrant criminal charges.
 

Joseph Cairo, the Nassau County Republican Committee chairman, said
that local Republican leaders no longer “consider him one of our
congresspeople.”  (Credit:  Johnny Milano for The New York Times)
This week alone, Mr. Santos, 34, has been the subject of two formal
ethics complaints. On Tuesday, two Democratic lawmakers filed a
formal complaint
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the House’s bipartisan Committee on Ethics to investigate whether
Mr. Santos ran afoul of the law when he filed his required financial
disclosures late and without key details about his bank accounts and
business.

A day earlier, a watchdog group, the Campaign Legal Center, called on
the Federal Election Commission to investigate the congressman,
accusing him of improperly using campaign funds for personal expenses,
misrepresenting his spending and hiding the true sources of his
campaign money.

Brazilian law enforcement officials have also said they intended to
revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos tied to a 2008 incident
involving a stolen checkbook, after the case was disclosed in The
Times’s report.

The calls by Mr. D’Esposito, Mr. LaLota, Mr. Langworthy and Mr.
Williams for Mr. Santos’s resignation could create a lane for other
Republican House members to join them, though none did so immediately.
The party holds a slim majority in the House, giving it little
political incentive for pushing Mr. Santos to step down.

Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said he believed Mr.
Santos’s actions were wrong. But he blamed Democrats for failing to
raise concerns about Mr. Santos before his election and said there was
little chance of removing him from Congress now.

“If the Democrats had done their research and exposed things, the
voters would have had more information,” Mr. Buck said. “I think
what he did was wrong, but whether he gets a committee assignment is
up to Kevin,” he said, referring to Mr. McCarthy.

Mr. Santos’s committee assignment remained unclear on Wednesday, but
he did not receive a spot he coveted on the House Committee on
Financial Services. Mr. McCarthy had said earlier in the day that Mr.
Santos would not get a spot on choice committees.

In the weeks after The Times’s story, Mr. McCarthy largely remained
silent about the ongoing controversy, including reports by CNBC and
The Washington Times that someone working with Mr. Santos’s campaign
impersonated Mr. McCarthy’s chief of staff in order to raise money
from donors. Mr. Santos supported Mr. McCarthy in his protracted
fight to become speaker
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week.

On Tuesday, the Republican majority leader, Representative Steve
Scalise of Louisiana, said that party leadership would handle
questions over Mr. Santos “internally” but acknowledged that
“there were concerns” he and others wanted addressed.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the fourth-ranking House
Republican, told a Spectrum News reporter
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“this is going to play itself out.”

Were Mr. Santos’s seat to become vacant, a special election would be
held to fill it. Mr. Cairo said it was too early to speculate whether
his party had potential candidates in mind.

Mr. Cairo’s rebuke, in particular, represents a significant break
between Mr. Santos and an organization that was integral in helping
the congressman secure his seat, which covers a large swath of Nassau
County and a much smaller section of northeast Queens.

Mr. Cairo was among roughly 30 local and federal Republicans who
attended the news conference to castigate Mr. Santos and call for his
resignation. The Nassau Republican Committee confirmed that it had
refunded the more than $120,000 that funds associated with Mr. Santos
had given to the county committee.

Mr. Santos’s claims about his Jewish ancestry and his family’s
experience with the Holocaust, which multiple media organizations have
since called into question, drew particular anguish. Once describing
himself as a “proud American Jew,” Mr. Santos has since walked
back that assertion, saying instead that he was “Jew-ish.”

The Nassau County executive, Bruce Blakeman, said that Mr. Santos’s
claims were beyond the pale, particularly given the large population
of Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Nassau County. “It
is simply tragic and outrageous and disgusting,” he said.

_Grace Ashford reported from Albany, N.Y. Nicholas Fandos contributed
reporting from New York, and Stephanie Lai from Washington._

_[MICHAEL GOLD is a reporter covering transit and politics in New
York. @migold [[link removed]]_

_GRACE ASHFORD is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York State
politics and government from the Albany bureau. She previously worked
on the Investigations team. @gr_ashford
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* George Santos
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* Kevin McCarthy
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* Congress
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* House of Representatives
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* Republican Party
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* MAGA
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* New York
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* Donald Trump
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* ethics
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* corruption
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* bribery scandal
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* Antisemitism
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