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      G.O.P. Leaders Stand by Santos as New York Republicans Call on Him to Resign

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      Republican congressional leaders badly need the newly elected representative’s vote, but local officials and lawmakers are eager to distance themselves from his scandal.WASHINGTON — New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of Representative George Santos, the newly elected congressman from Long Island who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé and is under multiple local and federal investigations into his yearslong pattern of political deception.House Republican leaders, not so much.Amid mounting calls for his resignation from Republican members of Congress from New York and state party officials, Mr. Santos still has the backing of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other House Republican leaders.In a news conference at the Capitol on Thursday, Mr. McCarthy made it clear that he had no intention of barring Mr. Santos from congressional committees or otherwise penalizing him for winning election under false pretenses.“The voters of his district have elected him,” Mr. McCarthy said. “He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference.”Mr. McCarthy downplayed the likelihood that allowing Mr. Santos to serve might put national security at risk, even though members of Congress routinely receive classified briefings from top military and other government officials.“I don’t see any way that he’s going to have top secret” information, Mr. McCarthy said Thursday at his first news conference since winning the speaker’s gavel, adding, “He’s got a long way to go to earn trust.”He added that Mr. Santos would face the House Ethics Committee, which considers allegations of misconduct by members.“If anything is found to be wrong, he will be held accountable exactly as anybody else in this body would be,” Mr. McCarthy said.The disconnect between the reaction from Nassau County Republicans and those in Washington reflects the differing political realities for both groups. In Congress, Republicans, who hold a paper-thin majority in the House, do not feel directly culpable for Mr. Santos’s misdeeds and have much more on the line if they lose his seat. Mr. McCarthy can’t spare a single vote in the House — least of all one who was a reliable supporter during the 15 rounds it took for him to secure the speakership.In the 2020 presidential election, President Biden won Mr. Santos’s district by 8.2 points. If he were to resign from Congress, prompting a special election for the seat, there is no guarantee that Republicans would be able to win it again.More on the George Santos ControversyBehind the Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how he was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Going to Washington: Despite being under scrutiny for lies about his background, George Santos brings his saga to Capitol Hill, where he will face significant pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.Embellished Résumés: While other politicians have also misled the public about their past, few have done so in as wide-ranging a manner as Mr. Santos.The New York Republicans who have repudiated Mr. Santos, by contrast, fear suffering by association with a man whose scandals threaten to tarnish what was a resurgent year for the party throughout the state. Five of the six representatives who have called on Mr. Santos to step down won seats in competitive districts where they are expected to face fierce challenges from Democrats in 2024.Other local Republicans have suggested that newly installed leaders in Washington are more concerned with their own short-term survival than the potential long-term consequences of backing Mr. Santos.“We have to think about our brand as a party,” said Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive. “Are we a party that’s behind people of good character and integrity who are transparent? Or are we a party that, for cynical reasons, we are going to allow this to continue?”With Mr. McCarthy consumed by his own political future last week as he struggled for five days to secure the votes he needed to become speaker, the confounding issue of what was to be done with Mr. Santos was left up in the air.Speaker Kevin McCarthy can’t afford to lose a seat in the House, where his party holds a sliver of a majority.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBut now that the speakership has been settled, Republicans are split on how to punish a member who is under active investigation by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns, as well as fraud charges from Brazilian law enforcement officials.Representatives Anthony D’Esposito, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams, all newly elected from New York, have called for Mr. Santos’s resignation on Wednesday. Of those, only Mr. Langworthy, who serves as the state party chair, is in a safely Republican district. The Nassau County G.O.P. chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., has also called for Mr. Santos to step down.On Thursday, two more Republican freshmen from New York, Representatives Mike Lawler and Marc Molinaro, said that they, too, believed Mr. Santos should resign.Mr. Lawler said in a statement that his fellow newcomer had “lost the confidence and support of his party, his constituents and his colleagues,” adding that Mr. Santos could not fulfill his duties as a member of Congress.At the news conference on Wednesday where a host of local Republican elected officials demanded Mr. Santos’s resignation, Mr. Cairo said he had not spoken with Mr. McCarthy.But, he added, he hoped that House Republican leaders “would support us.”Instead, they have taken a hands-off stance. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 Republican who endorsed Mr. Santos during his campaign, notably sided with her fellow party leaders rather than her state’s congressional delegation, defending her new colleague.“It will play itself out,” Ms. Stefanik told CNN. “He’s a duly elected member of Congress. There have been members of Congress on the Democrat side who have faced investigations before.”Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana and majority leader, brushed off questions about Mr. Santos, declaring it a matter that would be settled “internally.”Mr. Santos may be benefiting from the fact that his district is not further to the right. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill speculated privately that leaders might have made a different political calculation if Mr. Santos represented a district that former President Donald J. Trump had won by double digits in the presidential race.Mr. D’Esposito on Thursday tried to play down any tension within the fractured conference.“We are unified,” Mr. D’Esposito said. He and other local officials, he said, had felt that “we need to make our position known based on the fact that we have constituents that we represent there who are personally offended by the lies that George Santos has told or made.” But he said he had faith that Mr. McCarthy would make sure Mr. Santos was properly held “accountable.”Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County G.O.P. chair, called for Mr. Santos’s resignation. The New York Republicans who have repudiated Mr. Santos fear being tarnished by his scandal.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesWhat may unify them is a political gene for self-protection.“They may be bailing on Santos faster because it’s a better topic for them than why the vetters didn’t vet him,” said Stu Loeser, a former press secretary to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, referring to party operatives’ failure to dig into any of Mr. Santos’s claims that turned out to be brazenly fabricated, choosing instead to blindly back his candidacy.At the news conference in New York, Mr. Cairo was quick to dub Mr. Santos an outsider, saying he was not representative of Long Island Republicans because he initially came from neighboring Queens. (His district does encompass part of Queens.)“I think George Santos is an exception to the rule,” Mr. Cairo said, adding that he hoped Nassau County voters would make judgments in future elections based on the issues and not “one individual who, unfortunately, was not truthful and ran on Long Island.”Mr. Santos, for now, is defying calls to resign and portraying himself as a partisan warrior. In an interview on the podcast “Bannon’s War Room” with Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida on Thursday, Mr. Santos said he was in Washington to “serve the people” and that he planned to continue doing so.“I was elected by 142,000 people,” Mr. Santos said. He said we would “find out in two years” if those voters didn’t want him.Mr. Santos also said confidently that he had outperformed the politicians calling for his resignation, saying “I beat them by double their margins in the victory.”Though he did outperform Mr. Lawler significantly, he fell far short of Mr. Langworthy’s 30-point win. Mr. LaLota won his race with a double-digit margin. Mr. Santos won his race by 7.6 points.Mr. Santos, who initially appeared out of his depth when he arrived in Washington last week, sitting alone in the House chamber and dodging the media as he got lost in the basement corridors of the Capitol complex, has quickly learned his way around Congress.By the end of the week, he was sitting on the House floor next to the center of the action, alongside Mr. Gaetz and at another point laughing with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia.On Thursday, he portrayed himself as a fighter.“I just pray for all of you,” he said, “when they come for you, that you have the strength I have.”Michael Gold More

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      George Santos Goes to Washington as His Life of Fantasy Comes Into Focus

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      Mr. Santos, under scrutiny for lies about his background, is set to be sworn into Congress on Tuesday even as records, colleagues and friends divulge more about his past.In two years, George Santos went from being a little-known also-ran to a beacon of the Republican Party’s unexpected resurgence in a deep-blue state. But a swirling cloud of suspicion surrounds Mr. Santos, just as he is poised to take the floor of the House of Representatives on Tuesday, to swear to serve Constitution and country.Mr. Santos has admitted that he fabricated key parts of his educational and professional history, after a New York Times investigation uncovered discrepancies in his résumé and questions about his financial dealings. Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether he committed crimes involving his finances or misleading statements. Now, new reporting shows that his falsehoods began years before he entered politics.Mr. Santos would join Congress facing significant pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.Mr. Santos has been hard to reach. He has not answered telephone calls, text messages or emails asking him to respond to The Times’s reporting. Earlier this week, Mr. Santos’s lawyer responded to an email asking about his campaign’s unusual spending, saying it was “ludicrous” to suggest the funds had been spent irresponsibly. Mr. Santos did not answer an email sent to him and his lawyer on Friday asking for comments about new reporting on the discrepancies in his past.Members of his own party have called for more detailed explanations of his behavior, and Nick LaLota, also a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has called for a House ethics investigation.Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the incoming Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News on Thursday night that he was “pretty confident” that the House Ethics Committee would open an investigation into Mr. Santos. He added, “What Santos has done is a disgrace. He’s lied to the voters.”New York Democrats also made it clear they want to subject Mr. Santos to deeper scrutiny. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming Democratic leader, has said Mr. Santos is “unfit to serve.” Representative Ritchie Torres said he planned to introduce the Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker Act — the SANTOS Act — that would require House candidates to provide details of their backgrounds under oath.The lawmaker who may have the most significant role in his future in the House, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has been silent when asked about The Times’s reporting and Mr. Santos’s interviews supporting it.It remains unclear how the controversy might affect Mr. Santos’s debut in Congress, including his committee assignments. Mr. Santos told NY1 last month that he hoped to serve on the House Financial Services or Foreign Affairs committees, based on his “14-year background in capital markets” and a “multicultural background.” He has since admitted to misrepresenting his work in financial services, while aspects of his heritage have been called into question.New reporting by The Times brings a clearer picture of his earlier life into view, including information about the gaps in his personal history, along with discrepancies in how he described his mother’s life.Mr. Santos has said that he grew up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Until Wednesday, Mr. Santos’s campaign biography said that his mother, Fatima Devolder, worked her way up to become “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He has also said that she was in the South Tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that she died “a few years later.”In fact, Ms. Devolder died in 2016, and a Brazilian community newspaper at the time described her as a cook. Mr. Santos’s friends and former roommates recalled her as a hardworking, friendly woman who spoke only Portuguese and made her living cleaning homes and selling food. None of those interviewed by The Times could recall any instance of her working in finance, and several chalked the story up to Mr. Santos’s tendency for mythmaking.His apparent fabrications about his own life begin with his claims about his high school. He said he attended Horace Mann School, a prestigious private institution in the Bronx, and said he dropped out in 2006 before graduating and earning an equivalency diploma. A spokesman for Horace Mann said that the school had no record of his attending at all.By 2008, court records show, Mr. Santos and his mother were living in Brazil, just outside Rio de Janeiro in the city of Niterói. Just a month before his 20th birthday, Mr. Santos entered a small clothing store and spent nearly $700 in 2008 dollars using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show.Mr. Santos has denied that he committed crimes in the United States or abroad. But the Brazilian record shows that he admitted the fraud to both the police and the shopkeeper.“I know I screwed up, but I want to pay,” he wrote in a message to the store’s owner on Orkut, a popular social media website in Brazil, in August 2009. “It was always my intention to pay, but I messed up.”In November 2010, Mr. Santos and his mother appeared before the police, where they both admitted that he was responsible. On Sept. 13, 2011, a Brazilian judge ordered Mr. Santos to respond to the case. Three months later, a court official tried to subpoena him, but he could not be found.By that time, he was back in New York, working at a Dish Network call center in College Point, Queens, company records show.Interviews with half a dozen former friends and colleagues, several of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified to avoid being dragged into Mr. Santos’s controversies, suggest that he was reinventing himself when he moved back to New York, and that he would continue to do so in the years to come. They portray Mr. Santos as a striver, whose tendency toward embellishment and one-upsmanship left them with doubts about his many claimed accomplishments.He told some that he had been a journalist at a famous news organization in Brazil, but none could find his name on its website. He said that he was taking classes at Baruch College, but none of his friends remembered him studying. He bragged of Wall Street glory but often seemed to be short on cash, at times borrowing from friends whom he didn’t always repay. When he joined a travel technology company called MetGlobal, Mr. Santos portrayed himself as a man with family money. But two former co-workers said that the pay was modest and the work didn’t square with Mr. Santos’s depiction of himself as a financier passing time after bad bets left him on the outs on Wall Street.Not everything in Mr. Santos’s stated biography was a lie. A LinkBridge document supports his claim that he was a vice president. Several former colleagues confirmed he worked for MetGlobal, for a subsidiary called HotelsPro. And records examined by The Times appeared to corroborate his claim that he received his high school equivalency degree in New York in 2006.In 2016, Mr. Santos left for Florida, public records show, around the time that HotelsPro was opening an office in Orlando. Mr. Santos told Newsday in 2019 that he went there briefly for work. He received a Florida driver’s license and was registered to vote there in the 2016 election.Those who knew him recalled that Mr. Santos had long been a follower of Republican politics, and that he railed against Hillary Clinton and Bill de Blasio, who was then the mayor of New York.One who was close to Mr. Santos was Pedro Vilarva. Mr. Vilarva met Mr. Santos in 2014, when he was 18 and Mr. Santos was 26. Mr. Vilarva found him charming and sweet. They dated for a few months before Mr. Santos suggested they move in together. Mr. Vilarva said he felt on top of the world — even if he said he did find himself footing many of the bills.“He used to say he would get money from Citigroup, he was an investor,” Mr. Vilarva recalled. “One day it’s one thing, one day it’s another thing. He never ever actually went to work,” he said.Things began to unravel between the two men in early 2015, Mr. Vilarva said, after Mr. Santos surprised him with tickets to Hawaii that turned out not to exist. Around the same time, he said he discovered that his cellphone was missing, and believed Mr. Santos had pawned it.The betrayal prompted him to plug Mr. Santos’s name into a search engine, where he found that Mr. Santos was wanted by Brazilian police.“I woke up in the morning, and I packed my stuff all in trash bags, and I called my father and I left,” he said.Looking back, Mr. Vilarva said, he was young and gullible: He wanted to believe Mr. Santos’s many stories and believe in the life that they shared. Today he is worried about the impact Mr. Santos might have as an elected official.“I would be scared to have someone like that in charge — having so much power in his hands,” he said.André Spigariol More

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      How George Santos’s Campaign Spent Its Funds: Rent, Flights and Hotels

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      Representative-elect George Santos, under scrutiny after fabricating much of his résumé, also spent campaign funds on $40,000 worth of air travel.The company was called Cleaner 123, and over the course of four months, it received nearly $11,000 from the campaign of George Santos, the representative-elect from New York who appears to have invented whole swaths of his life story.The expenditures were listed as “apartment rental for staff” on Mr. Santos’s campaign disclosure forms and gave the address of a modest suburban house on Long Island. But one neighbor said Mr. Santos himself had been living there for months, and two others said that they had seen Mr. Santos and his husband coming and going, a possible violation of the rule prohibiting the use of campaign funds for personal expenses.The payments to Cleaner 123 were among a litany of unusual disbursements documented in Mr. Santos’s campaign filings that experts say could warrant further scrutiny. There are also dozens of expenses pegged at $199.99 — one cent below the threshold at which federal law requires receipts.The travel expenses include more than $40,000 for air travel, a number so exorbitant that it resembles the campaign filings of party leaders in Congress, as opposed to a newly elected congressman who is still introducing himself to local voters.It is not known if the spending was in fact illegal, or merely unusual. Federal and local prosecutors said this week that they would begin inquiries into Mr. Santos’s finances and background.Mr. Santos, a Republican, was elected in the Third Congressional District, a consequential swing district in Queens and Long Island, after a failed bid for the same seat in 2020. He has come under intense scrutiny after a New York Times investigation revealed that he misrepresented details of his education, work history and property ownership, along with a previously undisclosed criminal charge in Brazil.The story also raised questions about Mr. Santos’s financial circumstances, which disclosures show have improved drastically since 2020, when he reported earning just $55,000 a year.Mr. Santos has declined to be interviewed by The Times. But in the 10 days since The Times’s story was published, he has admitted to a stunning string of falsehoods. Earlier this week, he told The New York Post that he denied any criminal conduct, saying: “My sins here are embellishing my résumé.”Late Thursday, Joe Murray, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, said in a statement that there had been some money spent “unwisely” by a firm that had been fired by the campaign more than a year earlier, but he said that all expenditures were legal. The payments to Cleaner 123 were for legitimate expenses on behalf of staffers relocating to the district, he said, as were hotels booked to lodge staff members and people assisting the campaign.“Campaign expenditures for staff members including travel, lodging, and meals are normal expenses of any competent campaign. The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any irresponsible spending of campaign funds is just ludicrous,” Mr. Murray said.The representative-elect is set to be sworn into Congress on Jan. 3, when Republicans begin a new term with a slim four-seat majority in the House. While local Republican leaders have condemned Mr. Santos’s dissembling, those in Washington have been largely silent.Robert Zimmerman, a Democrat who lost a congressional election to Mr. Santos this fall, spoke at a rally on Thursday, in which people criticized Mr. Santos over reports that he lied about his background. Dave Sanders for The New York TimesQuestions arose about Mr. Santos’s residence when a reporter attempted to reach him at the Whitestone, Queens, address listed on his voter registration. Mr. Santos’s former landlord there said that he had moved out in August.Mr. Santos told The Post that he was living in Huntington, on Long Island, at his sister’s home. But court documents, as well as interviews with neighbors and a doorman, show that she resides in Elmhurst, Queens.Campaign disclosures, however, show that Mr. Santos paid Cleaner 123, which lists the house in Huntington as its address, nearly $11,000 in rent and a deposit. When reached by phone, a representative from Cleaner 123 confirmed that it was a cleaning company, but hung up before answering why it had received rent payments from Mr. Santos.Many questions remain about Mr. Santos’s campaign expenditures: It is not clear which expenditures were made on behalf of staff, versus for the candidate himself. The Federal Election Commission regulations say that campaigns are not allowed to pay personal living expenses for their candidates, including rent or utilities. Several campaign finance experts said that paying rent for staff was unusual and could be a violation, though they said that the F.E.C. rarely took action in such cases.Mr. Santos’s campaign filings show other irregularities as well: He had listed a flood of expenses under $200 — more than 800 items in total — a number that far exceeded those of candidates for similar office. More than 30 of those payments came in just below the limit at $199.99, expenses listed for office supplies, restaurants and Ubers, among other things. While F.E.C. rules urge candidates to try to save receipts for purchases below $200, they are required to keep them for all expenditures above that threshold.Paul S. Ryan, an election law expert, said that the expenditures could be an effort to hide illegal use of campaign funds, given the leeway with reporting receipts below $200. If so, he said, Mr. Santos’s attempt to hide the pattern could put him in further legal trouble, adding: “I consider deployment of this tactic strong evidence that the violation of law was knowing and willful — and therefore meeting the requirement for criminal prosecution.”Unusually for a candidate who was relatively new to politics, Mr. Santos also appears to have used his campaign accounts to fund trips across the country, along with local hotel stays, according to a review of his campaign expenditures by The Times.Over the course of his campaign, Mr. Santos spent $30,000 on hotels, $40,000 on airfare and $14,000 on car services — and campaign records suggest he also retained a campaign vehicle.The spending was funded by a campaign war chest of more than $3 million amassed by four fund-raising committees during the 2022 campaign cycle. The money came from small-dollar donors, longtime Republican contributors on Long Island and elsewhere and the campaign committees of other Republican candidates. The biggest givers lavished Mr. Santos with the maximum allowable amounts, in some cases directly, in others via a Republican super PAC or the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.A hefty chunk of the total came in the form of a $700,000 loan from Mr. Santos himself.The source of Mr. Santos’s wealth has been surrounded by some mystery: He has said on financial disclosure statements that his company, the Devolder Organization, is worth more than a million dollars; the statements also show that he earned millions between salary and dividends over the past two years. But the disclosures do not name any of the clients who helped Mr. Santos earn such a fortune — an omission that could pose legal problems for Mr. Santos, campaign finance experts say.Two former aides, who requested to remain anonymous because they didn’t want to be publicly associated with Mr. Santos, described growing concern during the campaign that the candidate was too focused on spending money frivolously and not focused enough on the nuts and bolts of winning the election.One consultant described the spending as a part of a persona Mr. Santos sought to build: as a man whose success had let him trade his humble beginnings for a life of high-end travel and fine dining.Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said the spending was atypical. “Usually a congressional candidate tries spending as little as possible for their own accommodations and travel, because they need that money for campaign purposes,” he said. “George Santos appears to be just living a lavish lifestyle for himself.”By way of comparison, Nick LaLota, the Republican representative-elect from the First Congressional District, in Long Island’s Suffolk County, spent roughly $900 on hotel stays, $3,000 on airfare and $900 on taxi services, according to his campaign filings. Sean Patrick Maloney, the outgoing head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who lost to a Republican in the Hudson Valley, spent just $8,000 on air travel, according to his filings.The $30,000 Mr. Santos’s campaign spent on hotels and Airbnb expenditures included stays in Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, Florida, California, Kansas, Michigan, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and in New York itself. Records indicate his campaign favored the Hyatt and Hilton hotel brands, expensing stays at Virginia’s Hilton Alexandria Old Town, Florida’s Hilton Melbourne, the Hilton West Palm Beach, the Hyatt Regency Orlando and the Hyatt Place West Palm Beach.In New York, his campaign booked hotel stays at the SoHo Grand in Manhattan and the Garden City Hotel and the Inn at Great Neck, both on Long Island.Mr. Santos’s campaign also paid for dozens of meals, including at high-end restaurants such as the Breakers in Palm Beach and the Capital Grille steakhouse in New York. He spent roughly $14,000 at an upscale Italian restaurant called Il Bacco, in the Little Neck neighborhood of Queens.The restaurant’s owner, Joe Oppedisano, who donated $6,500 to Mr. Santos’s campaign and related PACs and whose 2020 survival in a plane crash made tabloid headlines, was unavailable for comment, according to the woman who answered the phone at the restaurant on Thursday afternoon.Nate Schweber More

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      What Can the House Do to Address George Santos’s Falsehoods?

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      The representative-elect’s long list of fabrications has raised questions about whether he will even be allowed to take his seat next week. But House Republicans have shown little appetite for punishing him.On the campaign trail, Representative-elect George Santos, a Republican who ultimately flipped a Democratic seat in New York, misled voters about his work and educational history, his family’s heritage, his past philanthropic efforts and his business dealings.His litany of fabrications has raised questions as to whether Mr. Santos, who was elected last month to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, will be allowed to take his seat next week when Congress convenes or thrown out once he is sworn in.But House Republican leaders, who have so far remained silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, are unlikely to punish him in any significant way. Even if they could force him out of Congress, it would prompt a special election in a swing seat, setting up a potential blow to the party’s already precarious majority.And Mr. Santos has pledged to vote for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, for speaker next week as Mr. McCarthy faces a rebellion on the right and needs every vote he can get.Here are some of the options for addressing Mr. Santos’s falsehoods.Could the House refuse to seat him?The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that a person who met the constitutional requirements for office in the House of Representatives could not be refused a seat once elected. In that case, Powell v. McCormack, the court suggested that a permissible remedy for the House, should it try to exclude one of its duly elected members, would be a vote to expel the lawmaker once he or she was seated.House leaders could, in theory, band together to try to defy that precedent and force Mr. Santos to challenge the move in court. But Republicans have no appetite to do so.Could he be expelled?In theory, yes. Practically, probably not.Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states that “Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”While the Constitution grants the House broad authority to cast out one of its own, there has long been internal debate over whether lawmakers can be expelled for behavior from before they took office.Some Republicans, for example, argued that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, should not have been stripped of her committees for her social media posts from before she was elected. In the posts, she endorsed executing top Democrats, suggested that a number of school shootings were secretly perpetrated by government actors, and repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.But House Republican leaders are unlikely to want to expel Mr. Santos in the first place.Only 20 members of Congress have been expelled from either chamber: five from the House and 15 from the Senate, according to the Congressional Research Service. Seventeen of those expulsions were related to disloyalty to the United States during the Civil War era, occurring only after the secession of the Confederate states.The others — including the most recent instance, the expulsion in 2002 of Representative James A. Traficant Jr., Democrat of Ohio — occurred after representatives were convicted on public corruption charges.Could he be removed from office in some other way?Mr. Santos could choose to resign if he faces pressure from party leadership to do so, or if he is placed under an ethics investigation and no longer wishes to bear the costs of legal representation and stress that come with those proceedings.There is no mechanism for voters to recall a member of the House of Representatives.What punishments could the House dole out?The House Ethics Committee, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers who have historically shied from punishing their colleagues, has not commented on Mr. Santos’s case and is in a state of limbo until a new Congress is seated on Jan. 3. Its investigations are known to drag on for months or even years and seldom result in significant punishment.Should House Republican leadership want to mete out some sort of punishment, they could move to censure him, a mostly symbolic gesture that requires a simple majority vote and sometimes is accompanied by a fine. After a lawmaker is censured, he or she must stand in the well of the House while a rebuke is read.House Republican leaders could also choose not to seat Mr. Santos on any committees or to relegate him to backwater committees. More

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      George Santos’s Early Life: Odd Jobs, Bad Debts and Lawsuits

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      Representative-elect George Santos, who is under scrutiny over potentially misrepresenting key parts of his campaign biography, had other undisclosed troubles in his early career.The polite young customer service agent at the Dish Network call center in Queens could speak English and Portuguese, so when Brazilian immigrants had trouble with their billing or their satellite dish, their calls would be routed his way.It was around 2012, and the man was George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who, more than a decade later, would win a crucial election to Congress.But on the campaign trail, Mr. Santos told a different story about his life: that around the same time that Dish Network records show he was working there, he was rising through the ranks at Citigroup in the first step of an extensive and lucrative Wall Street career that also included a stint at Goldman Sachs.Neither Citigroup nor Goldman Sachs could locate any record of Mr. Santos’s employment, The New York Times reported on Monday. The Times’s findings — which include a criminal charge in Brazil and potential omissions or misrepresentations in his financial disclosure — raise questions about the life and dealings of the new Republican congressman.Mr. Santos has declined to directly address The Times’s reporting or provide a detailed résumé that could help verify his past jobs, calling the effort an attempt to “smear his good name.”On Thursday, with many Democrats and even some Republicans calling for answers, Mr. Santos said on Twitter, “I have my story to tell and it will be told next week.” He promised his constituents he would “address your questions.” (His lawyer later declined to answer a list of questions from The Times.)But interviews with former friends and co-workers, and additional records reviewed by The Times, offer a fuller picture of Mr. Santos’s life, with new details that were not disclosed on his campaign biography.Former friends recalled an ambitious young man with fine taste, whose lavish descriptions of real estate owned in Brazil, Nantucket and New York seemed vastly disconnected from the rented apartments in Queens he lived in, including one he shared with his sister and his mother, who was employed as a domestic worker.John Rijo, who said he had worked at the Dish Network center in College Point for roughly a decade, said that Mr. Santos had taken calls in English and Portuguese. Mr. Santos worked there from October 2011 to July 2012, doing “customer care work,” according to the company.The agents’ hourly pay, Mr. Rijo said, was at most, he thought, $15 an hour, with an extra dollar or two for foreign language expertise. Mr. Santos’s employment at Dish was also reported by the local news site Patch.What to Know About George SantosThe Republican congressman-elect from New York has been the subject of intense scrutiny since The Times raised questions about his background.A Résumé With Big Holes: George Santos says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.Reactions: In the aftermath of the Times report, Democratic House leaders stopped short of calling for Mr. Santos to resign, while House Republicans and state party leaders were largely silent.Lies About His Jewish Heritage?: The Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York City, reported that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry.At the same time, friends recall, Mr. Santos was living modestly in Queens, occasionally taking on extra roommates to make rent. Gregory Morey-Parker was one of those roommates, briefly. From early on, he said, there were incongruities between the way that Mr. Santos talked about himself and the life he led. Mr. Santos bragged about family wealth and business success — even a home on Nantucket — which Mr. Morey-Parker said had seemed at odds with the ordinary life the family led.“You’re sitting here bragging about all this money you’re making,” Mr. Morey-Parker said. “Then why is your mother a housekeeper?”Peter Hamilton met Mr. Santos near the start of 2014, he said. He recalled how Mr. Santos, who claimed to be an N.Y.U. graduate, had not recognized the name of the business school he said he had attended. Nonetheless, Mr. Hamilton found him charismatic and intelligent. “He seems to know what to say, and how to say it to people,” Mr. Hamilton recalled in an interview.He did not hesitate when Mr. Santos said that he needed to borrow several thousand dollars to move in with his boyfriend, and lent him the money in September 2014, court documents show. Not long afterward, Mr. Hamilton said, Mr. Santos stopped responding to his texts and calls.Mr. Hamilton filed a case in small claims court in Queens to seek repayment in 2015. In October of that year, Mr. Santos responded, saying that the money had been repaid and that it was not a loan but a favor. A judge agreed with Mr. Hamilton, however, and issued a judgment of $5,000 plus interest. In an interview, Mr. Hamilton said that while he would love to be repaid, he was past worrying over old debts. “I have regrets that I didn’t come forward before the actual election,” he said, adding later, “At this point, it’s like, he’s defrauding the public.”Mr. Santos built his political campaign in part on the notion that he wanted to parlay a successful career on Wall Street into public service. Jackie Molloy/BloombergCourt records show that Mr. Santos’s financial struggles extended beyond debts to friends. The same year that he was in court with Mr. Hamilton, a landlord in Queens filed an eviction case against him, saying he owed her $2,250 in rent.Less than two years later, he faced another eviction lawsuit in a different apartment, when a landlord in the Sunnyside neighborhood in Queens said Mr. Santos owed months of rent and a fee for a bounced check. He was ultimately ordered to pay more than $12,000.The next year, in December 2018, Discover Bank won a default judgment against Mr. Santos for $1,927.45 in credit card debt, court records show. His last payment had been made in February of that year, for just $34.In 2019, as Mr. Santos was preparing to start his first campaign for Congress, court records show that he was back in court in Queens for another matter: a divorce case.City clerk records obtained by the nonprofit group Reclaim the Records show that Mr. Santos was married in 2012 in Manhattan. His former wife filed for divorce in June 2019, which Mr. Santos did not contest.The circumstances of their marriage are unclear: Divorce cases are sealed, and attempts to reach Mr. Santos’s ex-wife in New Jersey were unsuccessful. But the divorce was concluded that fall, court records show. In November, Mr. Santos declared his candidacy in New York’s Third Congressional District in northeast Queens and northern Long Island.Early during that first campaign, Mr. Santos listed his address as an apartment in the Elmhurst section of Queens. That residence, which was outside the district he was running to represent, appeared on an official candidate list compiled by New York City’s Board of Elections in 2020 and on federal campaign finance documents.Mr. Santos later moved to a rowhouse in the Whitestone neighborhood where he is currently registered to vote, but no longer lives.The house’s owner, Nancy Pothos, said that Mr. Santos and his husband had moved there in July 2020. The couple rented the two-bedroom, two-floor apartment for $2,600 a month, she said, while Ms. Pothos lived below.Mr. Santos, right, campaigning in Glen Cove, N.Y., in November.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThe apartment drew attention after Mr. Santos claimed it had been vandalized in January 2021, after he and his husband returned from a New Year’s Eve gala in Florida at former President Donald J. Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. Instagram photos that Mr. Santos posted of himself at the event were linked to a Times article about guests’ forgoing masks despite coronavirus-related restrictions.Mr. Santos asserted on Twitter that stones and eggs had been thrown at his house and that he had spent four and a half hours filing reports with the police and insurance companies.Ms. Pothos, 72, said that she did not recall any such incident. The New York Police Department, when asked if it had reports of violence, vandalism or disputes at the Whitestone address for early that January, said it had a report of an incident there in October 2021. It did not respond when asked to clarify if that was the only reported incident at the address that year.Mr. Santos told Newsday in March 2022 that he had left the Whitestone home, purportedly because of the vandalism, though he refused to share a new address. But Ms. Pothos said that Mr. Santos had not moved out until August and asserted that she had to spend $17,000 to repair severe damage left behind.Where Mr. Santos currently lives remains unclear, in part because he has offered conflicting accounts. In October, he suggested on Twitter that he still lived in Ms. Pothos’s apartment, citing a robbery “two blocks away from my home in Whitestone.”Mr. Santos had also told Newsday that he would eventually move to Oyster Bay, N.Y. Instead, he appears to have settled in a house in Huntington, a town just outside his district’s boundaries. (Members of Congress are only required to live in the state they represent, not the district.)On Wednesday, three neighbors said that they had seen Mr. Santos or his husband at the house in Huntington, in a hilly neighborhood full of attractive, middle-class houses, some of which have been turned into rentals. One man who lived across the street said that Mr. Santos had moved in some time in August.Neither Mr. Santos nor his husband is listed on property records for the home, and the house’s owner did not respond to a phone call or social media messages seeking more information.Reporting was contributed by More

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      George Santos Breaks Silence: ‘I Have My Story to Tell.’ (Next Week.)

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      Mr. Santos, the congressman-elect from New York, has yet to address numerous inconsistencies raised by The New York Times about his background.Representative-elect George Santos broke his silence on Thursday, vowing that he would come forward next week to address questions surrounding his background.Mr. Santos has been the subject of intense scrutiny following the publication of a New York Times report that raised questions about whether he misrepresented key parts of his background and finances, and filed incomplete or inaccurate congressional disclosures.“I have my story to tell and it will be told next week,” Mr. Santos, a Republican, said on Twitter.Mr. Santos, 34, has refused to answer any questions from The Times about his past and finances, and has only pointed to a statement released by his lawyer that accused the Times of attempting to smear him. In the report published on Monday, The Times found that key pillars of Mr. Santos’s résumé — including his education, ties to Wall Street firms and charitable endeavors that formed the basis of his pitch to voters — could not be substantiated. Instead, The Times found a string of debts and legal trouble, including an unresolved criminal matter in Brazil, that raise questions about the congressman’s rise to power and wealth.Mr. Santos has faced numerous calls to address The Times’s reporting. In his statement on Twitter, he said, “I want to assure everyone that I will address your questions and that I remain committed to deliver the results I campaigned on; Public safety, Inflation, Education & more. Happy Holidays to all!”Mr. Santos’s brief statement on Twitter came a day after the incoming House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, suggested that Mr. Santos appeared “to be in the witness protection program” after he spent the week avoiding the press.“No one can find him,” Mr. Jeffries, a Democrat, said at a news conference. “He’s hiding out from legitimate questions that his constituents are asking about his education, about his so-called charity, about his work experience, about his criminal entanglement in Brazil, about every aspect, it appears, of his life.”On Wednesday, The Forward, a Jewish publication, reported that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents fled persecution around World War II.The House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, did not answer questions about Mr. Santos on Thursday afternoon before walking onto the House floor, according to several accounts on Twitter from Washington reporters.Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Joe Murray, told The Times earlier on Thursday that he did “not anticipate any response” to further inquiries, though he acknowledged that would be subject to change.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said that her office was “looking into some of the things that were raised” by The Times’s report.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      George Santos Dodges Questions as Democrats Label Him ‘Unfit to Serve’

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      Democratic House leaders stopped short of calling for the resignation of Mr. Santos, a Republican, who may have misrepresented himself in his résumé.Representative-elect George Santos on Monday faced a barrage of questions, as well as an uncertain future, after an article in The New York Times revealed that he may have misrepresented key parts of his résumé on the campaign trail.The Times’s report found that Mr. Santos, a Republican whose victory in Long Island and northeast Queens last month helped his party clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, may have misled voters about his college graduation and his purported career on Wall Street and omitted details about his business from financial disclosures forms.House Republicans and state party leaders were largely silent on Monday. But Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman, said in a statement that The Times’s reporting raised “serious” issues that he believed Mr. Santos should address.“Every person deserves an opportunity to ‘clear’ his/her name in the face of accusations,” Mr. Cairo said. “I am committed to this principle, and I look forward to the congressman-elect’s responses to the news reports.”Mr. Santos, 34, has declined numerous requests to be interviewed. On Monday evening, he used Twitter to recirculate a short statement that his lawyer, Joseph Murray, had released on Friday, with one small addition. On Monday, Mr. Murray characterized the Times article as a “shotgun blast of attacks,” but did not provide specific criticisms of what he had called The Times’s “defamatory allegations.”The statement was Mr. Santos’s first public acknowledgment of the questions surrounding his background since Sunday night, when — hours after he had been notified of The Times’s plans to publish its findings — Mr. Santos said on Twitter that he enthusiastically backed Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be the next House speaker.Mr. McCarthy has been working to quell an effort by hard-right lawmakers to threaten his bid to become speaker when Republicans take control of the House. He has not addressed Mr. Santos’s remarks or The Times’s reporting. A spokesman did not respond to emails and phone calls asking for an interview.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A Looming Clash: Congressional leaders have all but abandoned the idea of acting to raise the debt ceiling before Democrats lose control of the House, punting the issue to a new Congress.Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat of California, questioned on Twitter whether Mr. McCarthy might “strike a corrupt bargain” with Mr. Santos, suggesting that Mr. McCarthy would refrain from taking action against Mr. Santos in exchange for his vote as House speaker.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who will be the House Democrats’ leader when the next Congress begins in January, said in a statement that Mr. Santos was “woefully unqualified” and “clearly unfit to serve.”But Mr. Jeffries, whose caucus is days away from falling out of power, stopped short of calling for action on the part of Republican leaders, even as some state Democrats pushed for further investigation.Susan Lerner, the executive director of the government reform group Common Cause, called on Mr. Santos to step down and urged the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics and federal prosecutors to investigate.With a razor-thin majority, Republicans have few reasons for challenging or investigating Mr. Santos, and many for defending him. If Mr. Santos were to resign, there is no guarantee that a Republican would win a special election to fill his seat.Mr. Santos, who ran unopposed in his primary this year, was already expected to face a challenging re-election in 2024 in a largely suburban district that, until this year, had recently favored Democrats.Over the course of his campaigns, Mr. Santos claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before working at Citigroup and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. But officials at Baruch said they could find no record of his having graduated that year, and representatives from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs could not locate records of his employment.Experts in ethics noted that Mr. Santos’s campaign disclosures revealed little about the source of his fortune, in particular failing to name any client who paid more than $5,000 to his company, the Devolder Organization. Such an omission could be problematic if it were to become clear that he had intentionally avoided disclosing his clientele.Mr. Santos’s candidate disclosures show that he paid himself $750,000 annually, and earned dividends of more than $1 million while running for Congress.There are several avenues by which an ethics investigation could take place within the House of Representatives, but none would be likely to affect Mr. Santos’s ability to assume office in January.Any process would require bipartisan cooperation and would be likely to be lengthy. There is also the question of whether the House would claim jurisdiction over behavior that took place before the subject assumed office, though some recent actions suggest that they might be inclined to take a more expansive approach, if the behavior was campaign-related.Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chair, said that Mr. McCarthy should delay seating Mr. Santos pending an investigation. The state party has been under siege since Democrats underperformed in November, particularly on Long Island, and faced new criticism on Monday over its failure to identify or effectively publicize the inconsistencies in Mr. Santos’s résumé before Election Day.Mr. Jacobs acknowledged that the revelations would have had more impact during the campaign. “The opposition research wasn’t as complete as the Times investigation,” he said, but said that attention would be more appropriately directed at Mr. Santos rather than the party.Several of Mr. Santos’s future constituents said they were shocked and disappointed at the disclosures of his apparent misrepresentations.Andres Thaodopoulos, 36, the owner of a Greek restaurant in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, said that he did not vote in November, but that he had welcomed Mr. Santos’s promises to fight crime and cut taxes.“I feel disappointed because the people trust our lives to these leaders,” he said.On Monday night, after Mr. Santos posted his lawyer’s statement, Mr. Swalwell criticized it for insufficiently addressing the questions raised by The Times’s story, including a criminal case for check fraud in Brazil that officials there said remained unresolved.Of the 132 words in the statement, Mr. Swalwell said, “not one addresses the mountain of evidence that you’re a wanted international criminal who lied about graduating college and where you worked.”Others pointed to another seeming inaccuracy. In the last sentence of his statement, Mr. Santos’s lawyer closed with a quote he attributed to Winston Churchill: “You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”According to the fact-checking website PolitiFact, the words probably were not said by Churchill. PolitiFact instead attributed the original sentiment to the French writer Victor Hugo.Nate Schweber More