George Santos hit with new motion to expel after ethics report: Live

The report found that the 35-year-old had violated ethics guidelines, the rules of the House and criminal laws, and that he had been aware that he was crossing the line.

House Ethics panel chairman GOP Rep Michael Guest of Mississippi filed the motion on Friday. The chamber can take up the motion on 28 November upon lawmakers’ return from Thanksgiving recess.

A lengthy report from the committee published on Thursday stated that there was credible evidence to indicate that the Republican misused campaign funds for a wide range of personal expenses, committed fraud, and misled the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

It was a damning end to a months-long investigation which had, until now, been Mr Santos’s golden ticket to survive the repeated efforts by his fellow lawmakers — including Republicans from his own state — to kick him out of Congress. Now, his days in Congress are presumably numbered as it is overwhelmingly likely that the House will vote to expel him in the coming days.

Lawmakers tried as much only a few weeks ago, with Mr Santos being saved once again by colleagues who did not wish to set a precedent of prejudging a member under investigation by the Ethics Committee. The New York congressman was already facing numerous felony charges in New York under indictment from the Justice Department.

Congressman Ritchie Torres, a fellow New Yorker of the opposite party of Mr Santos, became the first member of Congress to speak about the issue in late December. On the 26th, he called for the House Ethics Committee to investigate the surge in wealth that Mr Santos self-reported.

Apparently unsatisfied with the grilling he received in local New York media hours earlier, Mr Santos appeared on Fox News for the first time. Clearly expecting a friendly interview, the congressman-elect was instead subjected to a reprimanding from former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, sitting in for Tucker Carlson.

“Do you have no shame?” she questioned him at one point during the excruciating confrontation.

Lamenting that he was just trying to “serve my country” by running for Congress, the man who has been exposed for lying about everything from 9/11 to being Jewish claimed that his “rights” had been taken from him.

“My year from Hell,” he began.

“Running for office was never a dream or goal, but when the opportunity to do so came I felt the time to serve my country was now.

“Looking back today I know one thing, politics is indeed dirty, dirty from the very bottom up. Consultants, operatives, the opposition, the party and more… the one thing I never knew was that the process in Congress was dirty. I will continue to fight for what I believe in and I will never back down.

“What the “ethics committee” did today was not part of due process, what they did was poison a the jury pool on my on going investigation with the DOJ. This was a dirty biased act and one that tramples all over my rights.”

After days of crying foul and denouncing reporters as political hatchet-men through his attorney, George Santos finally came clean. Turns out, those journalists weren’t lying or launching “attacks” — Mr Santos really did lie about working at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, he really did lie about being Jewish, and he really did lie about attending college.

But those lies, he said, were mere attempts to “embellish” his resume — a practice he faulted Americans of all political shades for supposedly engaging in.

And he remained adamant about serving two years in Congress, despite the criticism.

Letitia James’s office joined the fray just one day after The Forward’s investigation was published, with prosecutors clearly feeling the pressure to examine whether any of Mr Santos’s actions had risen from the level of mere dishonesty to criminal fraud or worse.

No official charges have been filed against Mr Santos, and it remains unclear what criminal charges he could actually face.

Just two days after the Times published its investigation, Jewish-American news agency The Forward went public with its own findings.

At the top of the list was a lie that Mr Santos had apparently told just a month earlier: That he is Jewish. That ended up being a lie he had told on multiple occasions, in multiple forms. It even expanded, in some instances, to claiming that his maternal grandparents had fled from the Holocaust.

Such things are easily verifiable, and a review of several genealogy websites by The Forward revealed that Mr Santos’s maternal grandparents were born in Brazil.

While far from the only fiction he told to get elected, this may prove to be the most damaging (if not surely the most offensive) of the congressman’s fictions. It has already led to his blacklisting from future Republican Jewish Coalition events, as well as condemnations from across the political spectrum.

In an expansive investigation, the Times summarises its findings in a headline: George Santos’s background is “largely fiction”.

The first revelation of Mr Santos’s lies came in the form of an avalanche. In this one story, he was accused of lying about working for two different companies, attending a college, and even potentially about managing a “family firm” and controlling millions in assets.

Mr Santos couldn’t (or wouldn’t) answer for most of the revealed falsehoods, which led other reporters at competing outlets to smell blood in the water.

Following a defeat in 2020, George Santos finally saw success in his bid to join the House of Representatives in 2022, following more than a year of campaigning. New reports indicate that he was fundraising at Mar-a-Lago and in other GOP circles as early as mid-2021 with the help of operatives for Rep Elise Stefanik, chair of the House GOP conference.

He was swept to victory easily, with Democrats in the state spending little to oppose him.

Just two months before he would go on to be elected as a member of Congress, George Santos was the subject of a story in a small Long Island-area newspaper called The North Shore Leader. With no suggestion of how it occurred, the Leader pointed out that Mr Santos’s financial disclosure forms had indicated a shocking surge of wealth in just two years’ time.

“Controversial US congressional candidate George Santos has finally filed his Personal Financial Disclosure Report on September 6th – 20 months late – and he is claiming an inexplicable rise in his alleged net worth to $11 million,” wrote the paper’s reporter, Maureen Daly.

“Two years ago, in 2020, Santos’ personal financial disclosures claimed that he had no assets over $5,000 – no bank accounts, no stock accounts, no real property. A net worth barely above “zero”, Daly reported.

It was an important story, but drew little notice either from other journalists or local Democratic Party officials.