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Tag: House Ethics Committee

  • Missouri House Democrat faces ethics inquiry, loses committee seats over obscene text

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    State Rep. Jeremy Dean, D-Springfield, speaks in February on the Missouri House floor. (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications)

    A Democratic legislator from Springfield faces a Missouri House ethics investigation because of an obscene text message sent to a Republican colleague during debate over the new congressional district map.

    State Rep. Jeremy Dean of Springfield sent the text message on Sept. 4 to Republican state Rep. Cecelie Williams of Dittmer. Dean and other Democrats were engaged in a sit-in on the House floor and Williams was serving on the House Elections Committee as it debated a bill altering the state’s eight congressional districts.

    The message included a description of an oral sex act with the president and questioned how Republicans could talk while engaged in it.

    House Minority Leader Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City, said she removed  Dean from his committee assignments after learning about the text. 

    “What Jeremy sent was wrong,” Aune said.

    The text also inspired an ethics complaint against Dean. The House Ethics Committee, which conducts all its business confidentially until it has finished an investigation, met Sept. 10 to begin inquiries into two complaints.

    Dean and Williams are freshman lawmakers, both winning their first terms in November.

    Williams confirmed she received the obscene message but declined an interview, citing the ethics committee’s confidentiality rules.

    “It was unwanted and unappreciated,” Williams said of the text. “I feel that the message has absolutely no place in the Missouri legislature or any other workplace at all. And so that’s really all that I can say.”

    State Rep. Cecelie Williams, R-Dittmer, speaks in February during Missouri House debate (Tim Bommel/Missouri House Communications).

    Dean declined a request for an interview. In a text, he also cited confidentiality of ethics investigations and said he is worried about his personal safety.

    “Because of ongoing safety concerns stemming from death threats directed at me, I cannot provide a detailed comment on the allegations,” Dean said. “It is disheartening that some of my colleagues across the aisle have chosen to disregard these laws, though unfortunately, it aligns with their recent pattern of behavior.” 

    The text message to Williams became public when a screenshot of it was shared on social media by former Republican state Rep. Adam Schwadron. The post inspired outrage and vitriol towards Dean.

    “Typical behavior from a degenerate homo,” Aaron Dorr, a longtime gun-rights activist and lobbyist for the Missouri Firearms Coalition, wrote on social media in response to the screenshot. “America needs to make sodomy and trans behavior sinful and disgusting again.” 

    Dean has apologized to Williams, Aune said.

    “I am disappointed that this text was even sent and take it very seriously,” Aune said. “I would argue it was probably not even the worst thing sent between members that day.”

    If Republicans try to make an example of Dean, Aune said, members of her caucus will respond.

    “One of the things I shared with the speaker was that if this rises to the level of a big deal,” Aune said, “then I’ve got news for him and his caucus, because my caucus has receipts, too.”

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  • Former Matt Gaetz Associate Is Cooperating in House Investigation: Lawyer

    Former Matt Gaetz Associate Is Cooperating in House Investigation: Lawyer

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    A chief witness and onetime friend of Representative Matt Gaetz is cooperating in an unfolding House Ethics Committee investigation into whether the Florida politician had sex with an underage girl while in Congress, a lawyer for the witness said Friday.

    Fritz Scheller, who represents Joel Greenberg, said that he had provided documents to the committee and that Greenberg “has and will cooperate with any congressional request,” The New York Times reported.

    In May of 2021, Greenberg pled guilty to several charges, including sex trafficking, and is currently in his second year of an 11-year sentence. The former Florida tax collector was able to secure a more lenient punishment by agreeing to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into Gaetz. In February of 2023, the department announced that it was closing the investigation without charging the Florida Representative with any crimes.

    At the time of Greenberg’s December 2022 sentencing, Scheller said he was “disappointed” that the department hadn’t charged anyone else, and, though he didn’t name Gaetz, urged prosecutors to “pursue others,” including more “higher-level” figures, CNN reported. When the DOJ ultimately declined to prosecute Gaetz, Scheller claimed that the move was evidence of “two systems of justice,” adding, “Why prosecute the privileged when defendants of limited culpability and means provide an easier target?”

    A Gaetz spokeswoman, Jillian Wyant, said Friday that the material Greenberg has provided to the Ethics Committee is the same that was reviewed by the Justice Department, which “deemed it unreliable and declined to press charges.” Wyant added that the media “should not be laundering smears from people in prison.”

    The House committee originally opened the investigation into whether Gaetz “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift” in 2021, when Democrats controlled Congress.

    But the ethics inquiry remained largely dormant until it was revived last year under GOP control. 

    The committee began reaching out to witnesses in July, but it appeared sidetracked by its investigation into disgraced former New York Representative George Santos. The committee asked to interview a witness soon after it released a bombshell report on Santos, signaling that it was beginning to turn its attention back to Gaetz. More recent reporting from CNN suggests that the inquiry is starting to look into possible sex crimes.

    So far, Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing. In private communications reported by The Daily Beast in late January, he claimed that his push to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was driven by a desire to retaliate against the California Representative, whom Gaetz blamed for the ethics probe. On Friday, McCarthy told a media gaggle that the Florida congressman was afraid of the inquiry. “In the end, Gaetz would have a hard time being a member of Congress with staying out of jail too,” he said.



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    Jack McCordick

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  • Rep. Leezah Sun resigns from Arizona Legislature after damning ethics panel report

    Rep. Leezah Sun resigns from Arizona Legislature after damning ethics panel report

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    Arizona House Rep. Leezah Sun resigned on Wednesday moments before House members were scheduled to vote on her expulsion.

    The first-term lawmaker from the West Valley’s Legislative District 22 departed following an ethics report that found she engaged in a pattern of threat-making and abuse of office.

    It also followed an ethics complaint by Democratic leaders and two hearings, in December and January, as part of the House Ethics Committee investigation. In one of the report’s key findings, the five-member committee found that Sun told a group of lobbyists at a Tucson conference in August that if she saw a certain Tolleson official, “I will b—- slap her, throw her over the balcony and kill her.”

    Leezah Sun, a Democrat, represents Legislative District 22 in the Arizona House.

    Leezah Sun, a Democrat, represents Legislative District 22 in the Arizona House.

    Sun has steadfastly denied she uttered a death threat, claiming she said only that she would “b—-slap” the woman. But the committee didn’t believe her, siding instead with witnesses who testified on Jan. 25 that they heard Sun’s statement and didn’t believe she was joking.

    The complaint accused Sun of: using foul language and intimidation tactics during a June meeting with officials at Tolleson’s city hall; sending Instagram friend requests to the officials’ family members; interfering with a custodial dispute; threatening a school superintendent with a legislative investigation and then retaliating against the superintendent by attending a board meeting Jan. 9 to complain about his testimony about her.

    House members were beginning their floor session Wednesday when Democratic House spokesman Robbie Sherwood told news media Sun had resigned. A written briefing of the day’s events included information about a possible vote for Sun’s expulsion.

    Sun wasn’t immediately available for comment.

    Reach the reporter at rstern@arizonarepublic.com or 480-276-3237. Follow him on X @raystern.

    This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Rep. Leezah Sun resigns from Arizona Legislature



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  • George Santos Was Finally Too Much for Republicans

    George Santos Was Finally Too Much for Republicans

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    So long, George Santos, we hardly knew ye—and that was pretty much the problem.

    This morning, House members evicted one of their own for only the sixth time in history, terminating the congressional career of the Long Island Republican barely a year after he won election on a campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold needed to pass. As with most other consequential votes this year, a unified Democratic caucus carried the resolution along with a divided GOP, whose members struggled with the decision of whether to trim their already narrow majority by kicking Santos out of Congress. A slim majority of Republicans stood by Santos, while all but four Democrats voted to expel him.

    Santos’s tenure was as memorable as it was brief; to the bitter end—and it was bitter—he seemed to be auditioning for a reality show, or perhaps the title role in a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. Ultimately, a Republican Party that has largely embraced a former president indicted in four separate criminal cases was unwilling to offer the same support to a freshman member of Congress whom a large majority of GOP lawmakers would not have recognized before January. The vote suggested that some ethical line remains that a Republican politician cannot cross without reproach—at least if that person is not named Donald Trump. Where exactly that line sits, however, is unclear.

    Republicans largely stood by Santos through earlier efforts to oust him this year after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, and theft of public funds; just a month ago, the House overwhelmingly rejected an expulsion resolution across party lines. Then came a damning report by the House Ethics Committee that alleged in striking detail just how flagrantly Santos had deceived his campaign donors. He used campaign funds on OnlyFans and Botox, among other salacious tidbits investigators uncovered. “Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the report concluded. “He blatantly stole from his campaign.”

    David A. Graham: The non-end of George Santos

    Santos denounced the report and generally denied the allegations, but he has refused to offer a specific defense of his actions. Still, Republican leaders resisted expelling him. Speaker Mike Johnson privately urged Santos to resign in order to spare his party the difficult vote of removing him. But Santos, who had already announced that he would not seek a second term next year, was done with party loyalty. “If I leave, they win,” he told reporters, accusing his colleagues of “bullying” him.

    Johnson tried to pressure Santos, but he would not lobby other Republicans to expel him. He described the expulsion resolution as “a vote of conscience”—which is Capitol code for “vote however you want.” But in the hours before today’s vote, he and Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters that they would vote to save Santos.

    The reason GOP leaders would protect Santos was plain: With such a small majority, they couldn’t spare a single vote, even one as ethically and legally compromised as his. “Do you think for a minute if Republicans had a 25-seat majority, they would care about George Santos’s vote?” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the House Democratic caucus chair, asked earlier this week. “They needed him to vote for Speaker McCarthy. They needed him to vote for Speaker Johnson. That’s the only reason why he’s still a member of Congress.”

    A few House Republicans acknowledged that the party could ill afford to jettison Santos when it has had enough trouble passing bills as is. The contingent pushing most aggressively for expulsion was Santos’s New York Republican colleagues, who were both personally appalled that he had slipped into Congress alongside them and most likely to suffer politically from his continued presence. A handful of GOP-held seats in Long Island and upstate New York—including the one formerly held by Santos—could determine whether Republicans keep control of the House next year.

    Santos won his competitive seat in 2022 after somehow evading the scrutiny that usually accompanies closely fought House races; not until weeks later did The New York Times report that he had almost entirely invented his life story. Santos had lied about attending a prestigious prep school and earning degrees from Baruch College and NYU. He lied about working on Wall Street for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He said that his grandparents survived the Holocaust and that his mother was working in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Both were lies. “He has manufactured his entire life,” Representative Marc Molinaro, a fellow New York Republican, said yesterday in a floor speech arguing for Santos’s expulsion.

    Publicly, the Republicans who voted with Santos—mainly staunch conservatives—argued against his removal on procedural grounds. The only other lawmakers the House has expelled were either members of the Confederacy during the Civil War or convicted of crimes in court. Ousting Santos based on accusations alone, these Republicans said, would set a dangerous new precedent and overturn the will of the voters who sent him to Congress. Yet none of them was actually willing to vouch for him. “I rise not to defend Geroge Santos, whoever he is,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida said in a floor speech, “but to defend the very precedent that my colleagues are willing to shatter.”

    Maria Konnikova: What psychology can teach us about George Santos

    Santos was a performer until his very last moments in Congress. “I will not stand by quietly,” he declared on the House floor. It was one statement of his that was indisputably true. Santos was a ubiquitous presence in the days leading up to the vote, willing to attack anyone standing against him. During a three-hour appearance on X (formerly Twitter) Spaces, he accused his colleagues of voting while drunk on the House floor. When one Republican, Representative Max Miller of Ohio, called Santos a “crook” to his face, Santos replied by referring to him as “a woman-beater,” dredging up allegations that Miller had physically abused his ex-girlfriend. (Miller denied the accusations.) Finally, Santos attempted one last bit of retribution by filing a motion to expel Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, the Democrat who pleaded guilty last month to a misdemeanor charge for falsely pulling a fire alarm en route to a House vote.

    “It’s all theater,” Santos declared yesterday with no hint of irony, on his penultimate day as a member of Congress. He had scheduled a press conference outside the House chamber, using the Capitol dome as a picturesque tableau. In the background, however, was a different icon: a garbage truck, presumably there to take out the congressional trash.

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    Russell Berman

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  • House Ethics Committee Will Not Investigate Rep. Jamaal Bowman For Pulling Fire Alarm

    House Ethics Committee Will Not Investigate Rep. Jamaal Bowman For Pulling Fire Alarm

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  • House Ethics Committee Will Not Recommend Expulsion For Fabulist George Santos

    House Ethics Committee Will Not Recommend Expulsion For Fabulist George Santos

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    The House Ethics Committee will not call for the expulsion of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) from Congress in its public report on the investigation into his actions, which will be released later this week.

    Ethics Committee chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters on Wednesday that the report will not include a recommendation of formal punishment, such as expulsion, for the New York representative, who has become infamous for his serial lies, because doing so would have extended the investigation into the next year.

    For months, the investigative subcommittee has been looking at whether Santos engaged in unlawful activity and lied about significant aspects of his personal and professional background during his campaign, Forbes reported.

    Santos has been indicted a New York federal court on 23 charges of fraud, money laundering, identity theft and making false statements. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

    The first-term congressman, who plans to run for reelection next year, allegedly stole the identities of his campaign donors and used their credit cards without authorization, ringing up thousands of dollars of charges, with some of the money ending up in his own bank account.

    Though the committee investigation began earlier this year, the House has attempted to oust Santos multiple times with no success.

    The first two attempts were led by Democrats who cited Santos’ admissions to lies he told during his campaign. The latest attempt, which occurred earlier this month, was led by Republicans and failed 179 to 213.

    Despite the ethics committee opting not to recommend formal punishment in the upcoming report, another expulsion attempt from Congress could still be on the horizon for Santos, Guest predicted.

    Rather than recommending punishment, the investigation subcommittee will unveil evidence and details from the probe — which included interviews with at least 40 witnesses, a review of 170,000 pages of documents and more than a dozen subpoenas — which members can use to decide for themselves whether Santos should be removed from Congress, ABC News reported.

    “The investigative subcommittee decided that they were going to compile the report, they would release the report to the members, into the public, and based upon that, then our members can take whatever action that they felt necessary,” Guest said, according to ABC News.

    HuffPost reached out to Santos’ office for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

    Santos is scheduled for a criminal trial in September 2024, just two months before elections. He has previously said the committee’s investigation and pending report will not deter him from completing his term and that expulsion from Congress will not keep him from running for reelection.

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  • These New York Republicans Said They Wanted Santos Out. Then They Helped Keep Him In Office.

    These New York Republicans Said They Wanted Santos Out. Then They Helped Keep Him In Office.

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    Several House Republicans from swing seats in New York said there’s not enough votes to kick fraudster Rep. George Santos out of Congress ― after they blocked a vote that would have put exactly that question to the test.

    These five New York Republicans — Reps. Mike Lawler, Anthony D’Esposito, Nicholas LaLota, Marc Molinaro and Brandon Williams — joined the rest of their party in preventing an up-or-down vote on the expulsion of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), despite repeatedly calling for him to leave office.

    Their justification? Given the need for a two-thirds majority to expel any member of the House, Santos’ expulsion wouldn’t have passed an up-or-down vote anyway.

    “Since we don’t yet have the needed 2/3 supermajority to expel Santos, the quickest way to rid this institution of this stain is to refer this issue to the House Ethics Committee,” D’Esposito said in a Wednesday statement, after leading the charge for an Ethics Committee referral.

    Here’s how it happened: In response to California Rep. Robert Garcia’s introduction of a resolution to expel Santos, House Republicans instead passed a motion to refer the matter of Santos’ expulsion to the House Ethics Committee.

    All 221 House Republicans, who participated in the vote, voted in favor of the motion’s passage.

    While Republicans involved in the effort depicted it as a matter of adhering to proper protocol — or, as in the case of the New York members, pragmatism — their action amounted to punting on the expulsion indefinitely.

    The bipartisan House Ethics Committee has already been investigating Santos since March. And the Department of Justice, which earlier this month charged Santos with 13 fraud and theft-related crimes, has reportedly instructed the House panel to stand down and allow federal prosecutors to take precedence.

    Instead, House Democrats maintain that their GOP counterparts are simply keen to avoid prompting a special election that would, at the very least, create a temporary vacancy that would jeopardize their ability to pass party-line legislation. Republicans have nine more seats than Democrats in the House, but the routine defection of far-right members of the House Republican Conference has given them even less wiggle room on close votes.

    “This was an effort to bury accountability for a serious fraudster,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a Thursday press conference. “Why? Perhaps it’s because extreme MAGA Republicans need George Santos’ vote.”

    Whatever House Republicans’ motive, their successful tabling of a Santos expulsion effort puts five New York Republicans in purple House districts in a tight spot.

    Those members have been among the most outspoken voices condemning Santos and calling for his exit, either through resignation or expulsion.

    D’Esposito, who flipped a Democratic-held Long Island seat in November, was the first House Republican to call on Santos to resign.

    Asked how he reconciled his decision to vote against an expulsion vote with his previous calls for Santos’ resignation, D’Esposito’s office referred HuffPost to the Congress member’s Wednesday statement affirming that he wished to expel Santos but that there is not yet a two-thirds majority in the House needed to expel him. In that statement, he also described Santos as a “disgusting liar.”

    LaLota, also a Long Island Republican, called for Santos to resign shortly after D’Esposito did, and went on to endorse his expulsion in late February.

    Asked to explain Wednesday’s vote, a spokesperson for LaLota referred HuffPost to his statement from that day.

    “If the Democrats were serious about his expulsion, they would work with us to get a report and referral from the Ethics Committee, rather than offer a political resolution that has no chance of passing the House.”

    – Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.)

    “While I would have preferred there to be enough votes to expel the sociopath scam artist, Congressman D’Esposito has spearheaded the next best option: To refer this matter to the Ethics Committee where we expect a result within 60 days and for the terrible liar to be gone, by resignation or expulsion, before August recess,” LaLota said.

    Rep. Marc Molinaro, an upper Hudson Valley lawmaker, was perhaps the first New York Republican to say he would support Santos’ expulsion in early February, a position he reiterated in March.

    Molinaro also based his vote on an understanding that the House lacked the two-thirds majority needed for expulsion, according to a spokesperson, who also shared a statement with HuffPost.

    “George Santos should not be a Member of Congress. He has irrevocably lost the trust of his constituents and colleagues,” Molinaro said. “I expect the Ethics Committee to conduct an immediate and swift review.”

    Lawler, a lower Hudson Valley lawmaker who ousted then-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chair Sean Patrick Maloney in November, has repeatedly demanded Santos’ resignation.

    After voting for the motion to send Santos’ expulsion to the House Ethics Committee, Lawler accused Democrats of playing politics.

    “If the Democrats were serious about his expulsion, they would work with us to get a report and referral from the Ethics Committee, rather than offer a political resolution that has no chance of passing the House,” he said in a Wednesday statement.

    Finally, Rep. Brandon Williams of central New York has more than once called for Santos to resign. Williams represents a seat long held by the GOP, but where President Joe Biden won in 2020.

    HuffPost did not receive an immediate response from a Williams spokesperson about his vote to send Santos’ expulsion to committee.

    Regardless of these Republicans’ explanations, House Democrats see an opportunity to inflict damage on five of the Republicans they are hoping to unseat in 2024.

    The DCCC, House Democrats’ campaign arm, announced Friday that it was spending thousands of dollars on a small digital advertising campaign blasting the five New York Republicans for their vote. (A second ad blitz is due to target House Republicans in 14 other states.)

    “Vulnerable House Republicans have proven they are too weak to buck party leadership and — instead of expelling serial grifter and indicted criminal George Santos from Congress — they are protecting him,” DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton said in a statement.

    Jonathan Nicholson contributed reporting.

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  • Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

    Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

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    The Republican Party has had no better friend than Nassau County in the past few years.

    Of America’s largest counties, few have turned more sharply toward the GOP than New York City’s neighbor to the east. This collection of Long Island suburbs swept Democrats out of local office in 2021, and last fall, Nassau County voted resoundingly Republican in New York’s gubernatorial race. Most important for the national GOP, the county helped elect three Republicans to Congress, including two candidates who flipped Democratic seats in districts that President Joe Biden had carried in 2020.

    Representative George Santos was one of those recent winners, and now Nassau County Republicans are worried that his abrupt fall from grace will cost the GOP far more than the seat that his lies helped the party pick up in November. They want Santos to step down, even though that means his seat would be vacant until a special election later this year, which the Democrats would aggressively contest. Local Republicans are flummoxed that national party leaders, starting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, haven’t joined their united call for Santos to resign. And they see McCarthy’s continued tolerance of Santos as an attempt to hold on to a Republican vote in the near term without enough consideration for whether he’d lose it—and cause Republicans to lose many others—in the longer term.

    Tom Nichols: Amazingly, George Santos is a member of Congress

    “It’s the right thing to do morally, ethically, and politically,” former Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican who represented the district next to Santos’s in the House for 28 years, told me about trying to oust Santos. “If you want to keep controlling the Congress, you can’t just have the short-sighted view that you need his vote next week or next month. You’re gonna lose all the votes in two years when you’re no longer in the majority.”

    With 2024 in mind, and as the list of Santos’s biographical fabrications grows (seemingly by the day), Nassau County’s GOP machine has treated the congressman-for-now as a boil to be lanced.

    “As far as I’m concerned, he’s nonexistent. I will not deal with him. I will not deal with his office,” Bruce Blakeman, the Republican who was elected Nassau County executive in 2021, told me. Last week, Blakeman joined a group of local GOP leaders, including county Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo and Representative Anthony Garbarino, in demanding that Santos resign.

    Yet for the moment, the political imperatives of Long Island Republicans no longer align with those of McCarthy, who plainly cannot afford to lose Santos’s vote with such a narrow margin in the House. Santos backed McCarthy in all 15 ballots for speaker earlier this month, and McCarthy’s allies rewarded him with a pair of committee assignments earlier this week. The new speaker said that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” but has made no move to sanction him.

    “The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” McCarthy told reporters last week.

    Democrats have already filed a complaint about Santos with the House Ethics Committee, and he is under investigation by federal and local prosecutors in New York who are reportedly looking into whether he committed financial crimes or violated federal campaign-disclosure laws.

    Santos has defied calls to resign, and McCarthy might need his vote even more should another House Republican, Representative Greg Steube of Florida, miss an extended period of time after he sustained serious injuries from a 25-foot fall off a ladder earlier this week.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which traditionally backs GOP incumbents, echoed McCarthy’s ambivalence toward Santos. “Voters in New York will have the final say on who represents them,” NRCC spokesperson Jack Pandol told me by email. “Rep. Santos will have to earn back their trust as he serves them in Congress.”

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    King and others in Nassau County are trying to impress upon McCarthy that the longer he stands by Santos, the more damage he will do to a Republican brand that has been on the rise. “The only reason Kevin McCarthy has the majority is because of the very close marginal seats that Republicans won in New York,” King said. “We can lose all of them in the next election.”

    Even if McCarthy wanted to force Santos out, however, there’s not much he can do. He could try to expel him, but that would take the support of two-thirds of the House, and members of both parties might be leery of setting precedent by kicking out a member who has not been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. King suggested that McCarthy insist on an expedited investigation by the Ethics Committee—the panel’s probes tend to drag on for months—but there’s little history of that either.

    Election to the House “is an unshakable contract for two years,” Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide who has advised lawmakers ensnarled in ethics investigations, told me. “Unless two-thirds of the House say, ‘Get out of here,’ or you give it up yourself, nothing happens.”

    Santos has almost no incentive to leave of his own accord anytime soon, especially now that Long Island Republicans have all but foreclosed the possibility of his winning renomination to his seat. “He’s not going to have a career. He’s not going to have a public life, and he’s going to be ostracized in his own community,” Blakeman told me. Santos was wealthy enough to lend his campaign $700,000. But his present personal finances are, like so much else about his life, a mystery, so he may need the paychecks that come with a $174,000 annual salary. And his seat could be a crucial bit of leverage in potential negotiations with prosecutors, Heye noted; resigning his seat, in that scenario, could help him avoid other penalties, including prison time.

    As his struggle just to get the speakership demonstrated, McCarthy doesn’t exactly have an ironclad grip on his conference. The Republicans from Nassau County seem to realize that the new speaker has limited sway over Santos. But McCarthy’s decision to protect and even validate Santos’s standing inside Congress is at odds with a party clinging both to its House majority and to its precarious stronghold on Long Island. “I’ve dealt with people with all sorts of issues,” Blakeman told me,” and enabling them is not a good thing.”

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    Russell Berman

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