George Santos will voluntarily step down from two House committees he recently joined after meeting Tuesday morning with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The move comes after weeks of calls from Democrats for Mr McCarthy to do more to punish the freshman congressman who has now admitted to lying about much of his background and faces a federal investigation by the Justice Department.
It also comes as some critics have hit the House speaker for seeking the removal of three Democratic members of Congress from two committees over what the left decries as partisan reasons — many criticised Mr McCarthy for seeking to punish Democrats for political reasons while shielding one of his own from accountability.
Though Mr McCarthy has faced pressure to strip Mr Santos of his committee memberships or even go as far as some of his GOP colleagues and call for his resignation, it wasn’t immediately clear if the suggestion that Mr Santos step down had come from the speaker.
Nevertheless, it’s a major blow to Mr Santos’s credibility as a US congressman and the third congressional district of New York in general, which now is represented by a member of Congress who has no committee memberships and little sway over the crafting of legislation at all beyond simple votes on the House floor.
The news broke as an NBC News poll released this week found that nearly in ten New Yorkers who live in the Nassau County district Mr Santos calls home want him out of office; this latest development is only likely to intensify those calls for his ouster.
The Independent recentely visited Mr Santos’ district on Long Island, where a local newspaper publisher admitted the lawmaker “was a completely non-serious candidate” and “weird”.
“My initial reaction was that he was sort of childish and boastful, and he bragged about his money and his wealth, but he didn’t carry himself in the way that someone who had been successful in finance would carry themselves,” Grant Lally of the North Shore Leader said.
Mr Santos has remained steadfast in comments to the media claiming that he will not resign; however, he faces a growing list of politicians on both sides of the aisle calling for him to step down and denouncing him as a liar. That list, which includes a fair number of his fellow New Yorkers, grew to include New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week; he joins other Empire State politicians like Reps Anthony D’Esposito, Ritchie Torres and the Nassau County Republican Party.
The controversy surrounding his long list of lies about his background — which included fictions about his work history, education, and other, more shocking fibs — now appears to be causing serious trouble for the freshman congressman as he faces new questions about his campaign’s fundraising tactics.
FEC filings from the Santos campaign last week showed an unusually high number of donations just under the $200 reporting threshold, but that was far from the only problem with the documents. A treasurer for several of his fundraising committees denied that he was working for the campaign, and a number of Mr Santos’s top donors could not be located or even identified as real people by journalists digging in to the filings.
