In “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Pierre Choderlos de Laclos said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” but former New York representative George Santos is serving the dish piping hot, refusing to disappear after he was ousted from Congress.
Santos, the first gay Republican ever elected to Congress, was expelled Dec. 1 after the House Ethics Committee issued a scathing 56-page report Nov. 16.
It was a dramatic fall from grace for the freshman Congressman who won his election in a landslide, besting a gay Democrat for the seat in a blue district Joe Biden had won by nearly 10% in 2020.
Santos’s charisma won him the election and also allowed him to continue to lure donors. His refusal to succumb to early efforts to oust him secured him easy allies among the Freedom Caucus right and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Santos was a reliable vote and a staunch supporter of the MAGA cause.
Santos should have been investigated long before he ever reached the House, but it didn’t happen. So when Santos was indicted in May by the Department of Justice, Eastern District of New York, on 13 counts — charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud — it was still a shock to many.
Then in October, a superseding indictment upped the charges to 23 counts, leading to the House Ethics Committee investigation and recommendation that Santos be expelled from the House. The charges devolved from “fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations” the DOJ said were intended to enrich Santos as he ran for Congress, according to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace.
Prosecutors said Santos defrauded his campaign donors by luring them to contribute to a limited liability company (LLC) that he controlled. But then Santos allegedly used that money for his personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing from Hermès and Ferragamo and cosmetics at Sephora. Reports show that after one $50,000 payment from the campaign committee to Santos, the “funds were used to, among other things: pay down personal credit card bills and other debt; make a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes; and for smaller purchases at OnlyFans; Sephora; and for meals and for parking.”
He also spent campaign funds on Botox, aestheticians and rent.
Santos had refused repeatedly to resign. Two previous attempts to remove him from office had failed to garner either support from GOP leadership or the requisite two-thirds majority of the House. But last Friday, the resolution to oust him passed narrowly, 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting in favor of expulsion.
All four top House GOP leaders voted to keep Santos in Congress and Speaker Mike Johnson both refused to whip the vote and said he thought it set a bad precedent to oust a member who had not been convicted. The last time that happened was after the Civil War when members of the Confederacy were expelled. Santos is only the sixth lawmaker ever to be ousted from the House and the first who was neither convicted nor a member of the Confederacy.
In previous attempts to remove Santos, key Democrats voted against expulsion, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-08) who said then, “This would be a terrible precedent to set, expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime and without internal due process.”
But Raskin also said that a House Ethics Committee investigation recommending expulsion would serve as due process.
Prior to the final resolution, Santos appeared on the conservative Newsmax network’s popular show “Greg Kelly Reports,” talking about the imminent expulsion, the Ethics Committee hearing testimonies and the various claims against him.
As Santos left the Capitol after the vote, he told reporters: “Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place.” Santos had already gone on a three-hour livestream rant, calling the Ethics Committee chairman Michael Guest a “p***y” and accusing former colleagues of being “hypocrites” who get drunk before votes and cheat on their spouses with lobbyists. He attacked Guest in the livestream, saying the chairman should ‘be a man and stop being a p***y and call the damn motion.”
Santos accused his colleagues of “act[ing] like they’re in ivory towers with white pointy hats and they’re untouchable.”
He added: “Within the ranks of the United States Congress there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of shystie backgrounds.”
After the vote, Santos took to Twitter/X and pledged to file ethics complaints on Monday against three New York Republicans and a New Jersey Democrat while attacking other members on the social media platform.
Santos has not yet revealed if the ethics complaints have been filed. A spokesperson for the House Committee on Ethics declined comment to PGN.
Santos has set up an account on Cameo, the celebrity video-sharing website. His initial price was $75, but his popularity took off and he raised the price Monday night to $200. That’s what Sen. John Fetterman likely paid to have Santos troll fellow senator Bob Menendez. The New Jersey Democrat has been indicted on federal charges and Fetterman has repeatedly called for his resignation.
On Friday, Fetterman appeared on “The View,” again paralleling Santos and Menendez and calling for Menendez to resign. Fetterman told “The View” he’s “not surprised” by the vote to expel Santos from the House, but added, “If you are going to expel Santos, how can you allow somebody like Menendez to remain in the Senate?”
Fetterman said, “Menendez, I think, is really a senator for Egypt, not New Jersey.”
On Monday, it was revealed that serial numbers on Menendez’s gold bars that are part of his indictment indicate they were taken in a 2013 armed robbery. According to the indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors in September, Menendez and his wife were allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme over several years that involved the Egyptian government and local businessmen. These included Fred Daibes, a wealthy New Jersey real estate developer who was a party to the 2013 armed robbery. Prosecutors revealed they retrieved multiple gold bars from Menendez’s home which were allegedly used as payment.
The Menendez case matters related to Santos in that Santos’s alleged crimes are low-level and only involve his own misuse of funds for personal use. But the Menendez case involves influence peddling, engagement with a foreign government and is directly related to his role as a senator. It is in fact about bribery of a public official: exactly what Democrats have accused conservative Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito of doing.
Some have argued that Santos faced more scrutiny because he was gay and that his singular role as a gay Republican — rare as a unicorn in national politics — made him an easy target with no network of support. Most pundits agree that Santos was only able to withstand pressure to resign as long as he was because of the slim majority held by the GOP.
What remains to be seen now is Santos’s second chapter: Will he continue to build his celebrity status while he can on Cameo or will he reveal more secrets about his former colleagues in an effort to take down the party about whom he now says “I don’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites. It’s gross.”? Still controlling the narrative, Santos said, “These people need to understand it’s done when I say it’s done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it to be done. That’s kind of where we are there.”