George Santos Recuses Himself from Committee Assignments
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Representative George Santos (R., N.Y.) told the GOP conference on Tuesday that he will step down from his committee assignments after he was caught lying about his resume and background.
An aide to Santos said in a statement to CBS News that he is “reserving his seats on his assigned committees until he has been properly cleared of both campaign and personal financial investigations.”
Santos, who was given seats on the Science, Space and Technology Committee and the House Small Business Committee, has repeatedly rebuffed calls to resign from Congress altogether.
House GOP chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) confirmed during a House Republican leadership press conference on Tuesday that Santos had “voluntarily removed himself from committees.”
Asked if he should resign, Stefanik said: “This process is going to play itself out … but ultimately voters are going to make that decision, whether it’s in the primary election or in the general election.”
The decision comes as Democrats have called House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a hypocrite for allowing Santos to serve on two committees while removing Representatives Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) from the House Intelligence Committee and seeking to oust Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“So, staying true to my constituency and to what I believe in, Ilhan Omar must be removed from Foreign Affairs — that is out of the question. So if I was going to distract or take away from that opportunity that was the decision,” Santos said, explaining his choice to step down from his committee assignments.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) told CNN’s Manu Raju after the closed-door meeting that Santos “just felt like there was so much drama really over the situation, and especially what we’re doing to work to remove Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee.”
Santos apologized to the conference for being a distraction, sources told CBS News.
Santos’s decision comes one day after McCarthy summoned the embattled freshman congressman to his office for a “check-in,” according to CNN. McCarthy reportedly asked Santos when he plans to publicly address his various scandals.
Since Election Day, a number of the stories Santos told about himself on the campaign trail have been debunked. He has admitted that he never graduated from college, despite previously claiming to have earned a degree from Baruch College in 2010. While he claimed to work at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, neither firm has record of Santos as an employee. He said on his campaign website that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Nazis during World War II but now says he is “clearly Catholic.”
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos has claimed. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Federal prosecutors are investigating Santos’s finances, with questions swirling over his personal wealth and loans totaling more than $700,000 he made to his 2022 campaign.
A whopping 78 percent of voters in Santos’s district want him to resign, including 71 percent of Republicans, according to a new Newsday/Siena College poll. Eighty-three percent of voters in the district view Santos unfavorably.
