Congressman-Elect George Santos Facing Calls to ‘Step Aside’ after Admitting to Lies

New York congressman-elect George Santos is facing calls to step aside after he admitted on Monday to having fabricated key aspects of his education and work experience while on the campaign trail.

However, the 34-year-old Republican told the New York Post that despite the controversy, he has no intention of relinquishing the seat he won in November to represent Long Island.

“I am not a criminal,” Santos told the Post on Monday. “This [controversy] will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.” The Post reported that senior House Republicans were “apparently aware” of the embellishments to Santos’s resume, and it became something of a “running joke,” according to “multiple insiders close to House GOP leadership.”

Santos’s admission came after the New York Times reported on December 19 that his resume “may be largely fiction.” While Santos sold himself as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor,” who had been employed by both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the companies told the Times that they had no record of his ever working there. Santos said he had graduated in 2010 from Baruch College in New York City, but the school told reporters it could find no record of anyone with Santos’s name and date of birth graduating that year.

Santos also claimed to have headed an animal-rescue charity, though the Internal Revenue Service has no record of it. Times reporters found no evidence to back up claims that he had a family-owned real-estate portfolio of 13 properties. Instead, they found that Santos had faced eviction lawsuits from his landlords in 2015 and 2017. And the woman who answered the door at the address where Santos is registered to vote told reporters she was not familiar with him.

Santos’s lawyer, Joe Murray, told the Times that it was “no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.” But Santos admitted on Monday to having told at least a few lies.

“My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry,” he told the Post, adding that he was embarrassed about it. “We do stupid things in life.”

Santos admitted he had never graduated from Baruch College or “any institution of higher learning.” He conceded that he had “never worked directly” for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, saying instead that he worked as vice president of a company called Link Bridge where he helped to make “capital introductions” between clients and investors.

He told the Post that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs were “limited partnerships” that his company dealt with, and claiming that he worked directly for them was a “poor choice of words.”

Born in Queens to parents who had emigrated from Brazil, Santos had claimed that he was the descendant of migrants who fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine and Belgium during World War II. He had claimed that his mother was Jewish, and that he identified as a nonobservant Jew. Santos said on Monday that “I never claimed to be Jewish,” and that he is Catholic. “Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

On Tuesday, the New York Daily News editorial board called for Santos to step aside before taking the oath of office on January 3, writing that he “bamboozled the voters,” and after “all the lies” there’s no reason to believe the oath “will be worth anything.”

“After all, the trust of his constituents meant nothing to him,” the paper wrote, adding that “if Santos has any shred of decency, he’ll step aside now that his con has been exposed, even if some of his voters are standing behind him. We’re not holding our breath.”

Some House Democrats have also called on Santos to resign. Representative Joaquin Castro (D., Texas) said in a tweet that Santos’s lies go beyond fudging a resume to “total fabrication.”

Representative Ted Lieu, (D., Calif.), the incoming vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, tweeted that Santos “should resign. If he does not, then @GOPLeader should call for a vote to expel @Santos4Congress.”