Republicans’ George Santos defies party plea to resign

George Santos lied about his background, family history, work experience and religion to win his seat in November.

George Santos leaves the US Capitol on Thursday. Picture: AFP

George Santos, the Republican congressman exposed as a pathological liar who “fabricated his life story” to get elected, has defied calls to resign.

Four House of Representatives Republicans have now said Mr Santos should step down as representative for New York’s third district after party officials said a CV he used to bolster his candidacy was littered with fabrications.

New York Republicans have declared Mr Santos a “fraud” and a “disgrace to the House of Representatives” for lying about his background, family history, work experience and religion to win his seat at November’s midterm elections.

Mr Santos, 34, presented himself as the “living embodiment of the American dream” at the midterms. He campaigned as the openly gay son of Brazilian immigrants, the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors and a Wall Street banker, but has seen a catalogue of untruths unravel in recent days. He has confessed to lying about working for two Wall Street banks and has been exposed for claiming his mother was killed in the World Trade Centre on 9/11; she died in 2016.

Mr Santos also said his grandparents fled the Holocaust, but no record of them can be found, and he has admitted he was not Jewish, as he claimed, but “Jew-ish”. He now faces local, state and federal investigations in the US, and a fraud case in Brazil.

The uproar surrounding Mr Santos has not abated since the House was sworn in last Friday but he refused to budge.

Hounded by reporters in congress, he repeatedly said he would not step down.

At a press conference on Long Island on Wednesday, Joseph Cairo Jr, chairman of the Nassau County Republican committee, denounced Mr Santos’s election as a “campaign of deceit, lies and fabrication”.

Republican leaders have sidestepped questions about Mr Santos, apparently unwilling to force him out and erode the party’s slender majority in the house.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Mr Santos would not sit on any powerful congressional committees, but insisted: “He will continue to serve … he has to answer to the voters and the voters will make another decision in two years.”

Allegations about Mr Santos’s murky finances continue to swirl. When he first ran for congress in 2020 he claimed to have no financial assets at all. Two years later he was able to lend his campaign more than $US700,000 ($1.07m) and reported a $US750,000 salary and the receipt of more than $US1m from other business interests.

The Times