New York Congressman George Santos admitted his days in the Capitol are numbered in a rollicking, three-hour-long Friday conversation on X Spaces, formerly Twitter Spaces, hosted by journalist Monica Matthews. Despite growing calls for him to resign, Santos, who said he would not seek reelection next year, remained defiant. “I’m not leaving,” he said. “Come hell or high water, it’s done when I say it’s done.”
To resign, Santos said, would be to “admit everything that’s on” the damning 56-page report released on November 16 by the House Ethics Committee, which investigated Santos over nine months and uncovered what it described as a “complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.” Santos also currently faces 23 criminal charges, including wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.
“I’m not running for reelection, not because this was a damning report,” Santos claimed Friday. “I’m not running for reelection because I don’t want to work with a bunch of hypocrites.”
During the stream, Santos wildly lashed out at his colleagues, accusing Congress of being filled with “felons galore” and “people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds.” Some House members, he said, are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on.”
At one point in the conversation, California Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia joined the space and encouraged Santos to apologize and resign, vowing that the House would vote to expel him.
Garcia has been at the forefront of Democrats’ efforts to oust Santos. In February, the California Democrat introduced a resolution to expel his colleague, and forced a floor vote in May. Republicans voted on party lines to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee instead of voting to oust the freshman congressman. Santos easily survived a second attempt to expel him on November 1. Garcia told Axios that he plans on submitting a privileged resolution to expel Santos “the second that the House opens” on Tuesday.
Garcia’s isn’t the only expulsion resolution floating around Congress. Less than 24 hours after the House Ethics Committee released its report, committee chair and Mississippi Republican Michael Guest introduced a resolution to expel Santos, but hasn’t exercised the option to bring it forward as a privileged resolution. Santos openly goaded his fellow Republican on Friday, calling on him to “stop being a pussy” and force a vote on his expulsion.
Santos acknowledged that he knows he will “get expelled when this expulsion resolution” comes to a vote when the House returns to session after the Thanksgiving recess.
A whip count compiled by Politico on the day the House Ethics Committee report was released found that nearly 60 Republicans were already planning to expel—more than double the number of GOP representatives who voted to boot Santos less than three weeks earlier.
“I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good,” Santos said, adding that if expelled, he’d “wear it like a badge of honor. I’ll be the sixth expelled member of Congress.” (Three of the previous five House members to be expelled were booted for encouraging secession during the Civil War. The other two were convicted of federal crimes.)
The Long Island fabulist is planning to hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol on November 30.
Jack McCordick
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