Disgraced Rep. George Santos (R-NY) claimed Thursday that a looming vote to expel him from Congress is simply “bullying” on the part of his colleagues.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., ahead of an expected third attempt to kick him out of the House, Santos continued to insist that he will not resign. He also dismissed the latest effort to remove him as mere “theater”—apparently ignoring any legitimate misgivings that fellow lawmakers may have about the 23 federal charges against him, or the scathing conclusions of a recent House Ethics Committee report about him, or the jaw-dropping list of lies in which he has been caught in less than a single year in office.
“The reality of it is it’s all theater,” Santos told reporters in front of the U.S. Capitol. “It’s theater for the cameras, it’s theater for the microphones, it’s theater for the American people at the expense of the American people, because no real work’s getting done.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Santos said he expects the vote on his expulsion to take place Friday. He has admitted in recent days that he doesn’t believe it’s going to go in his favor.
If he’s right, he will become just the sixth lawmaker to be expelled from the House in American history. Santos said Thursday that he would also become the first to be kicked out in modern times without having been convicted of a crime, further claiming that his downfall could have repercussions for those who support it.
“If the House wants to start different precedent and expel me, that is going to be the undoing of a lot of members of this body because this will haunt them in the future where mere allegations are sufficient to have members removed from office when duly elected by their people,” he said.
Santos currently faces almost two dozen federal charges including identify theft, fraud, money laundering, and falsifying records. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts. On Nov. 16, the withering Ethics Committee report—which precipitated the latest effort to have him removed from the House—accused him of an astonishing breadth of wrongdoing, including allegations that he used campaign money to buy personal luxuries including Botox treatments, designer clothing, and OnlyFans content. It concluded that Santos had “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”
Santos slammed the report as “slanderous” and “littered in hyperbole” at the Thursday morning press conference but said he would not respond to its findings “line by line” until a later date. He also vowed to file ethics complaints against some of his congressional colleagues and attempt to force an expulsion vote against Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).
Bowman pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor last month after setting off a fire alarm in a House office building before a key vote. Santos said it was unfair that Bowman “gets a pass” while others had been imprisoned in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and that an expulsion vote on Bowman would be “consistency.”
“No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former Congressman George Santos seriously,” Bowman said in a statement. “This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics, and outright fraud.”
