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      The Undoing of George Santos

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      Lying is one thing in politics. But lying and stealing for the sake of Ferragamo and Hermès?In the end, it may have been the luxury goods that brought down George Santos.Not the lies about going to Baruch College and being a volleyball star or working for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Not the claims of being Jewish and having grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust and a mother who died of cancer as result of 9/11. (Not true, it turned out.) Not the fibs about having founded an animal charity or owning substantial real estate assets. None of the falsehoods that have been exposed since Mr. Santos’s election last year. After all, he did survive two previous votes by his peers to expel him from Congress, one back in May, one earlier in November.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.At this point, the discussion around lies and politics is so familiar, it has become almost background noise.But taking $6,000 of his campaign contributions and spending it on personal shopping at Ferragamo? Dropping another couple thousand at Hermès? At Sephora? On Botox?Those revelations, documented in the House Ethics Committee report released Nov. 16, seemed simply too much. Despite the fact that Mr. Santos had announced that he would not seek re-election, despite the fact that he is still facing a 23-count federal indictment, Representative Michael Guest, the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, introduced a resolution the week before Thanksgiving calling for Mr. Santos’s expulsion from Congress. On Friday, the House voted in favor — 311 to 114, with two voting present — making Mr. Santos only the third representative since the Civil War to be ejected from that legislative body.George Santos Lost His Job. The Lies, Charges and Questions Remaining.George Santos, who was expelled from Congress, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.As Michael Blake, a professor of philosophy, public policy and governance at the University of Washington, wrote in The Conversation, Mr. Santos’s lies provoked “resentment and outrage, which suggests that they are somehow unlike the usual forms of deceptive practice undertaken during political campaigns.”It was in part the ties that had done it. The vanity. The unabashed display of greed contained in the silken self-indulgence of a luxury good.“Material objects are at the heart of this thing,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “They expose what is seen as a universal character flaw and make it concrete.”Mr. Santos appeared in his trademark prep school attire at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, N.Y., in May, when he pleaded not guilty to federal charges of wire fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhite collar crime is often abstract and confusing. Tax evasion is not sexy. (Nothing about taxes is sexy.) It may get prosecutors excited, but the general public finds it boring. To be sure, the House Ethics Committee report, all 55 pages of it, went far beyond the juicy details of designer goods (not to mention an OnlyFans expense), but it is those details that have been plastered across the headlines and stick in the imagination. They make the narrative of wrongdoing personal, because one thing almost everyone can relate to is luxury goods.These days they are everywhere: unboxed on TikTok with all the seductive allure of a striptease; dangling by celebrities on Instagram; glittering from store windows for the holidays. Lusted after and dismissed in equal measure for what they reveal about our own base desires and human weaknesses, they are representative of aspiration, achievement, elitism, wealth, indulgence, escapism, desire, envy, frivolity. Also the growing and extreme wealth gap and the traditions of royalty and dictators — the very people the settlers (not to mention the Puritans) came to America to oppose.There’s a reason even Richard Nixon boasted in a 1952 speech that his wife, Pat, didn’t “have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.”As Mr. Wilentz said, it has been, and still is, “unseemly to appear too rich in Washington.” (At least for anyone not named Trump. In this, as in so many things, the former president appears to be an exception to the rule.)In the myth of the country — the story America tells itself about itself — our elected officials, above all, are not supposed to care about the trappings of wealth; they are supposed to care about the health of the country. “The notion of elected officials being public servants may be a polite fiction, but it is a polite fiction we expect politicians to maintain,” Mr. Blake said.Even if, as David Axelrod, the former Democratic strategist and senior fellow at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, points out, speaking of the amount of money needed to run for office these days, “office holders and candidates spend an awful lot of time rubbing shoulders with people of celebrity and wealth and often grow a taste for those lifestyles — the material things; the private planes and lavish vacations.”Mr. Santos at the Capitol in November, just before his third expulsion resolution was introduced.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIndeed, Mr. Santos is simply the latest elected official whose filching of funds to finance a posh lifestyle brought them to an ignominious end.In 2014, for example, a former governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, was found guilty on federal bribery charges of accepting $175,000 worth of cash and gifts, including a Rolex watch and Louis Vuitton handbags and Oscar de la Renta gowns for his wife from the businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., and sentenced to two years in prison. (The Supreme Court later vacated the sentence.) During the trial, the products were entered as exhibits by the prosecution — glossy stains on the soul of the electorate.In 2018, Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on eight counts of bank fraud and tax crimes after a Justice Department investigation revealed that he had spent $1.3 million on clothes, mostly at the House of Bijan in Beverly Hills, including a $15,000 ostrich jacket that set the social media world alight with scorn. More recently, Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey was accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold bars and a Mercedes-Benz, among other bribes, in return for political favors.In each case, while the financial chicanery was bad, it was the details of the stuff — the objects themselves — that became the smoking gun, the indefensible revelation of moral weakness. And so it was with Mr. Santos.Even if, at one point, his appreciation of a good look may have made him seem more accessible — he reviewed NASA’s spacesuit and created a best- and worst-dressed list for the White House Correspondent’s dinner, both on X — it also proved his undoing. As the House Ethics Committee report read: “He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit.”And worse — for vanity, reeking of ostentation. That’s not just an alleged crime. It’s an affront to democracy.Audio produced by More

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      Democratic congressman says home vandalized by Gaza ceasefire protesters

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      A Democratic congressman says his home was vandalized on Thursday night by “people advocating for a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza”.Adam Smith, a US House member from Washington state, called the vandalism to his home in the city of Bellevue “sadly reflective of the coarsening of the political discourse in our country, and is completely unwarranted, unnecessary, and harmful to our political system”.Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee, has not joined calls from some in his party for a ceasefire and was part of a group that sent a letter to Joe Biden applauding the president’s support for Israel.The vandalism entailed spray-painting Smith’s garage, the Seattle Times reports.Smith said he and his staff have often met with groups across the political spectrum, including pro-Palestinian activists. And he said he was still willing to meet with those groups “in a productive and peaceful way”.“The extremism on both the left and right side of our political spectrum is a threat to a healthy, functioning democracy and has been condoned for far too long,” Smith said in a statement. “The simple truth is that extremism on both sides is degrading to our political system and must be rooted out for our democracy to be able to persist.”Pramila Jayapal, also a Democratic House member from Washington state, wrote on X that vandalizing someone’s home “crosses the line”.“As an activist before coming to Congress, as a member of Congress who’s been violently targeted at my home, I firmly believe everyone should be able to feel safe in their homes,” Jayapal said. “Let’s find smart, non-violent ways to air our differences & respect the boundaries of home & family.” More

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      Who will replace George Santos in New York swing district?

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      The expulsion of George Santos from Congress on Friday has ramifications beyond the New York Republican’s career prospects.The historic vote has sparked a scramble among Democrats and Republicans to elect a replacement for Santos, who was found by an ethics committee to have used campaign funds for purchases. A special election is likely to take place early next year.Given Santos’s troubles – the now former congressman also faces 23 federal charges including fraud and conspiracy – several candidates had already announced they would run for his seat in New York’s third congressional district.With New York legally required to hold a special election in less than 90 days, the race for Santos’s Long Island district, which voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and was represented by Democrats for 10 years before swinging Republican last year, has dramatically accelerated.There will be no primary in the special election. Instead local Democratic and Republican party leaders will choose the parties’ nominees to replace Santos in a finely balanced House of Representatives – Santos’s expulsion reduced Republicans’ advantage over Democrats in the House of Representatives eight seats: 221-213. Democrats are expected to announce their nominee on Tuesday, with Republicans also likely to reveal their candidate soon.The DemocratsTom Suozzi appears to be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He was elected to the third congressional district in 2017, but declined to run in 2022, instead announcing a run for governor of New York state. Born and raised in the area, Suozzi announced a bid to reclaim his seat in October.“You know me. I’ve never sat on the sidelines,” Suozzi said in his announcement. A centrist Democrat, he added that “more common sense and compassion” was required in politics, and “less chaos and senseless fighting”.Multiple reports have said Suozzi will be chosen to run, despite a sometimes bitter gubernatorial campaign. Suozzi, 61, repeatedly clashed with Kathy Hochul, the ultimate victor, which did not endear him to Democratic leaders, but his relatively high profile as a former congressman could help.Anna Kaplan, like Suozzi, had announced she was running to replace Santos before he was kicked out of Congress on Friday. Kaplan ran for the third congressional district in 2016 – an election Suozzi ultimately won – before being elected to the New York state senate in 2019.She lost a re-election bid in 2022 amid a Republican wave in Long Island that swept Santos into the House, and in May this year Kaplan said she would run against Santos.“For me, this congressional district is very, very personal. I left a country where I saw the rightwing extremists taking over and stripped women of their rights,” Kaplan, who was born in Iran and moved to the US as a 13-year-old, told City & State New York earlier this year.Robert Zimmerman, the Democratic nominee in 2022 who lost to Santos by seven points, hasn’t announced a run for the third congressional seat, but Axios reported he “could be tapped by party leaders”.Austin Cheng, an army veteran and healthcare CEO, would be a fresher face. The City reported that as of 30 September Cheng had raised the most cash of any of the Democratic candidates – but that might be irrelevant now that party leaders will choose the candidate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe RepublicansMazi Pilip is among a reported “10 to 15” candidates being considered by the local Republican party. A local politician in Nassau county, which makes up much of the third congressional district, she has relatively little political experience and has not declared her candidacy.Pilip was born in Ethiopia and moved to Israel when she was 13, going on to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. A vocal supporter of Israel, in November she joined with other local legislators in calling for the pro-Palestinian group Students for Justice In Palestine to be banned from university campuses and potentially prosecuted.Mike Sapraicone, a former New York police department detective, is “near the top” of the list being considered by Republicans, according to the New York Times. Sapraicone, who founded a security business after leaving the NYPD, announced his run for Santos’s seat in October.“I think running a business teaches you how to understand people and work together,” Sapraicone told Fox5 NY.Sapraicone’s background as a police officer, and his deep pockets – he has lent his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars – “could be helpful in a region where public safety has been a top electoral concern and TV ads are expensive”, the New York Times reported.Jack Martins, who won his seat in the New York state senate by defeating Anna Kaplan last year, is another potential nominee. A longtime fixture in New York Republican circles, he ran for Congress in 2016, losing to Suozzi.ABC7 New York reported that Martins, who described Santos as “a fraud” earlier this year, “​​seems hesitant to run, but may be pulled into a special election to hold the seat”. More

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      George Santos Is Gone. What Happens to His Seat in Congress?

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      The expulsion of George Santos from Congress on Friday swept away one major political headache for Republicans, but it immediately set the stage for another: The party will have to defend his vulnerable seat in a special election early next year.The race in New York is expected to be one of the most high-profile and expensive off-year House contests in decades. It has the potential to further shrink Republicans’ paper-thin majority and offer a preview of the broader battle for House control next November.With towering stakes, both parties have been preparing for the possibility for months, as Mr. Santos’s fabricated biography unraveled and federal criminal charges piled up. More than two dozen candidates have already expressed interest in running, and labor unions, super PACs and other groups have begun earmarking millions of dollars for TV ads.“It’s going to be like a presidential election for Congress,” said Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat who once led his party’s House campaign arm. “It becomes ground zero of American politics.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has 10 days to formally schedule the contest after Friday’s lopsided vote to remove Mr. Santos. But both parties expect the election to take place in mid-to-late February, just over a year after he first took the oath of office.Unlike in a normal election, party leaders in Washington and New York — not primary voters — will choose the Democratic and Republican nominees. They were moving quickly to winnow the field of potential candidates, and could announce their picks in a matter of days.George Santos Lost His Job. The Lies, Charges and Questions Remaining.George Santos, who was expelled from Congress, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.Democrats were expected to coalesce around Thomas R. Suozzi, a tested centrist who held the seat for six years before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a prolific fund-raiser and perhaps the best-known candidate either party could put forward. Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, is also running and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left.The Republican field appeared to be more fluid. Party leaders said they planned to interview roughly 15 candidates, though officials privy to the process said they were circling two top contenders, both relative newcomers: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Political analysts rate the district, stretching from the outskirts of New York City into the heart of Nassau County’s affluent suburbs on Long Island, as a tossup. President Biden won the district by eight points in 2020, but it has shifted rightward in three consecutive elections since, as voters fearful about crime and inflation have flocked to Republicans.Democratic strategists said they would continue to use the embarrassment of Mr. Santos to attack Republicans, blaming them for aiding the former congressman’s rise. But recapturing the seat may be more difficult than many Democrats once hoped.Local Republicans moved decisively to distance themselves from Mr. Santos last January, and the strategy has shown signs of working. When Long Island voters went to the polls for local contests last month, they delivered a Republican rout that left Democrats scrambling to figure out how to rehabilitate a tarnished political brand.“Anyone who thinks a special election on Long Island is a slam dunk for Democrats has been living under a rock for the last three years,” said Isaac Goldberg, a strategist who advised the losing Democratic campaign against Mr. Santos in 2022.“Politics is a pendulum,” he added. “Right now, it’s on one side, and it’s unclear when it’s going to swing back.”Republicans face their own challenges, though, particularly in an idiosyncratic contest likely to favor the party that can turn out more voters. Democratic voters in the district have spent months bemoaning their ties to Mr. Santos and are highly motivated to elect an alternative. It is unclear if Republican supporters will feel the same urgency their leaders do.“It’s been a frustrating year,” said Joseph Cairo, the G.O.P. party chairman in Nassau County. “I look at this as just the beginning to right a mistake, to move forward, to elect a Republican to serve the people the proper way, to elect somebody who is for real — not make believe.”The outcome promises to have far-reaching implications for the current Congress and the next.After Mr. Santos’s ouster, Republicans have a razor-thin majority. Thinning it further could hamper their short-term ambitions to pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and negotiate around a major military aid package for Israel.Whoever emerges as the winner in February would also likely become the front-runner for next fall’s elections and lend their party momentum as they prepare to fight over six crucial swing seats in New York alone, including a total of three on Long Island.Democrats believe Mr. Suozzi, who is currently working as a lobbyist, is best positioned to deliver. In his stints as a congressman and Nassau County executive, he took conservative stances on public safety and affordability that are popular among suburban voters. And his combative primary campaign for governor just last year may help him shake the anti-Democratic sentiment that has sunk other candidates.Jay Jacobs, the Democratic leader for the state and Nassau County, said he still intended to screen multiple candidates, including Ms. Kaplan, a more progressive former state senator who remains in the race, even as other candidates dropped out and coalesced behind Mr. Suozzi.Ms. Kaplan could get a boost from Ms. Hochul, who faced Mr. Suozzi in an ugly 2022 primary fight, during which he questioned her husband’s ethics and referred to her as an unqualified “interim governor.”The governor has pushed Mr. Jacobs and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, to reconsider whether Mr. Suozzi was their strongest candidate, particularly given his hesitancy to fully embrace abortion rights in the past, according to four people familiar with the conversations.But it is unclear if the governor would have the power to block Mr. Suozzi. Mr. Jeffries personally worked to lure the former congressman into the race earlier this fall, and Mr. Suozzi is close friends with Mr. Jacobs, who has told associates he is the likely pick.Republicans are proceeding more cautiously. They are wary of repeating their experience with Mr. Santos, who secured the party’s backing in 2020 and 2022 despite presenting them with a fraudulent résumé and other glaring fabrications that they failed to catch.This time, Republicans appear to only be considering candidates already known to party officials, and plan to engage a research firm to more formally vet potential nominees.Campaign strategists in Washington were said to favor Mr. Sapraicone, the former police detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, could afford to spend a portion of it in a campaign, but he would also enter a race with almost no name recognition or electoral experience.Local Republicans were pushing Ms. Pilip, a potentially mold-breaking rising star with a remarkable biography. She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, later served in the Israel Defense Forces and flipped a legislative seat in Nassau County in her 40s as a mother of seven.Other wild card candidates included Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker; and Jack Martins, a well-known state senator who has run for the seat before.Mr. Santos himself could theoretically run for the seat as an independent. But the task would be arduous and might jeopardize a more urgent priority: fighting charges that could put him in prison for up to 22 years. More

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      Republican George Santos expelled from Congress in bipartisan vote

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      The New York Republican, fabulist and accused fraudster George Santos has been expelled from Congress.The vote to expel Santos, the second since his election last year, required a two-thirds majority of those present. The final tally on Friday was 311-114, with two members recorded present and eight absent.Santos therefore becomes only the sixth member ever expelled from the US House. The first three fought for the Confederacy in the civil war. The other two were expelled after being convicted of crimes.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not been tried. A previous expulsion attempt, mounted by members of his own party, failed in part because senior Democrats voted no, citing the dangers of expelling members without convictions secured.But a damning report from the House ethics committee, detailing how Santos used campaign funds for purchases including travel, cosmetic treatment and luxury goods, changed the political equation.Democrats and Republicans introduced motions to force the expulsion vote this week. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, sought to persuade Santos to resign – an overture Santos rejected. In the event, Johnson and other senior Republicans voted not to expel. But nor did Johnson attempt to whip his party into line.A majority of Republicans, 112 of 222, voted not to expel. Five did not vote, 105 supporting the motion. Among the New York delegation, 22 members voted for expulsion. Three New York Republicans voted no: Santos himself, Claudia Tenney and Elise Stefanik, the House Republican conference chair.Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor, former US labor secretary and Guardian columnist, said: “George Santos may be gone from Congress, but a majority of Republicans voted against expelling him – including the entire House GOP leadership. The Republican party once again showed that it doesn’t really care about ethics or the law, only power.”Johnson took the gavel to announce the final vote tally. Santos, who stood through the vote with his coat round his shoulders, soon left the chamber.Sharon Eliza Nichols, communications director for Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic delegate for the District of Columbia, alluded to Cinderella when she said: “And just like that, without even a goodbye twirl, George Santos hopped in her carriage and departed.”But he has shown no sign of going quietly. On Thursday, railing against the looming vote, Santos attacked other members, introducing his own expulsion resolution against Jamaal Bowman (a New York Democrat who admitted pulling a fire alarm in a congressional office building, a misdemeanour) and calling Max Miller, a Republican from Ohio, an “accused … woman beater” in a clash on the House floor.Santos’s district must now hold a special election within 90 days. On Friday, the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, said she was “prepared to undertake the solemn responsibility of filling the vacancy in New York’s third district. The people of Long Island deserve nothing less.”Santos won the seat as part of a New York Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections last year, a key part of Democrats’ loss of control of the House.But as Santos’s résumé quickly unraveled under press scrutiny, alleged criminal behaviour, in Brazil and the US, was also brought to light.Amid a flood of increasingly bizarre stories, including about Santos’s past as a drag performer in Brazil and a claim to have been a volleyball star at a college he did not attend, Santos admitted embellishing his record but denied wrongdoing.Achieving notoriety, he made common cause with Republican extremists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a prominent Trump ally.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker from January until October, resisted taking action other than withdrawing committee assignments, in large part because the GOP controls the House by a slim margin and Santos backed McCarthy through 15 votes for speaker. In October, when the far right made McCarthy the first speaker ever ejected by his own party, Santos did not support the change.Democrats now hope to retake Santos’s seat, to reduce the Republican majority.In a statement on Friday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, said: “George Santos’s pattern of unethical and illegal conduct is shocking and continues to escalate. Expulsion from Congress was appropriate and overdue.“He should have resigned and saved Congress all this trouble. Now he’ll be remembered as only the third member of Congress since the civil war to be expelled.”Adav Noti, legal director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said the expulsion of Santos showed that “no one is above the law”, and “the power and potential of ethics enforcement”.“While it should not take violations as egregious as those committed by Santos for this system to work effectively … all Americans have the right to financial honesty from members of Congress, and to effective enforcement against any elected official who deprives the voters of that right.”So rapid was Santos’s rise to infamy, he attracted a biographer who worked fast to produce a book released this week, just three days before Santos was kicked out of Congress.On Friday, the author, Mark Chiusano, posted: “Definitely didn’t think I’d be writing a political obit[uary] for Santos … one year after he was elected, but here we are.” More

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      These Candidates Might Run to Replace George Santos

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      There were once no fewer than 20 candidates vying to challenge Representative George Santos in his re-election bid in Long Island and Queens. But if he is ousted, party leaders are expected to quickly winnow the field to just two who would face off in a special election early next year.New York State rules allow Democrats and Republicans to forgo messy primaries for special elections. The candidates will emerge instead from a mostly secretive backroom process led by the respective party chairmen in Queens and Nassau Counties.Here are the leading contenders.Democrats:Thomas R. Suozzi is widely seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. He held the seat before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a powerful fund-raiser, a committed centrist and perhaps the best-known candidate in either party. He is also close to leaders in New York and Washington who will pick the nominee, with the notable exception of Gov. Kathy Hochul, whom he tried to unseat.Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, has been a prolific fund-raiser and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. Ms. Kaplan, 58, fled Iran with her Jewish family as a teenager before entering politics. She flipped a State Senate seat to Democratic control in 2018, but lost it in the Republicans’ 2022 wave.Party officials might also consider Robert Zimmerman, a public relations executive who lost to Mr. Santos in 2022, and Austin Cheng, a health care executive who has never run for public office.Republicans:It is less clear whom Republicans might choose, but party officials said Mike Sapraicone was near the top of the list. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, is a former New York Police Department detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Both attributes could be helpful in a region where public safety has been a top electoral concern and TV ads are expensive.Mazi Pilip, a Nassau County legislator, has not declared her candidacy but is also said to be under consideration. Ms. Pilip is a rising star on Long Island with a remarkable biography: She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, served in the Israel Defense Forces and was elected to local office in New York in her 40s as a mother of seven. Like Mr. Sapraicone, she has relatively little political experience.Jack Martins would offer party leaders a more proven alternative. He has served two tours in the State Senate, has sharply criticized former President Donald J. Trump and knows how to connect with suburban voters. But Mr. Martins, 56, would have to give up a lucrative law partnership to serve in Congress, and has said little about his intentions.Other wild-card candidates include Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Jim Toes, a Manhasset financial services executive; and Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker who entered the race in April. More

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      House debates resolution to expel Republican George Santos – live updates

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      The House has started its resolution debate on expelling New York Republican representative George Santos.Santos has remained defiant and in denial of all charges against him, including wire fraud, arguing that his fellow lawmakers are “bullying” him out of the House.Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
      George Santos remained defiant ahead of the House expulsion vote. In a fiery press conference this morning on Capitol Hill, Santos accused the House ethics report which detailed “pervasive” fraud as “slanderous” and “littered in hyperbole, littered in opinion.”
      Anna Kaplan, a former Democratic New York state senator who is challenging George Santos for his House seat, has responded to the upcoming House expulsion vote surrounding Santos, saying: “If George Santos is expelled tomorrow, the special election will be right around the corner. I am battle tested, and I am ready to flip New York’s third congressional district blue. We’ve already raised over $1m. We’re just getting started.”
      New York Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman has released a statement in response to George Santos’s vows to introduce a privileged resolution to expel him today, saying: “No one in Congress, or anywhere in America, takes soon-to-be former congressman George Santos seriously, This is just another meaningless stunt in his long history of cons, antics and outright fraud.”
      A New York appellate court reinstated a gag order on Thursday that prohibited Donald Trump and his lawyers from publicly commenting on court staff in the former president’s civil fraud case. “Petitioners having moved to stay enforcement of the aforesaid gag order and supplemental limited gag order pending hearing and determination of the instant petition. Now, upon reading and filing the papers with respect to the motion, and due deliberation having been had thereon, it is ordered that the motion is denied,” the court stated.
      Donald Trump continues to attack the wife of the New York state judge Arthur Engoron, who imposed a gag order on Trump in the former president’s civil fraud case in New York. In a series of posts on Truth Social, Trump has accused Dawn Engoron of posting anti-Trump memes on X, formerly known as Twitter. Dawn has said that the X account is not run by her.
      Donald Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise has condemned the reinstatement of the gag order, telling CBS: “In a country where the first amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial.”
      The Joe Biden administration has announced new action to protect communities from lead exposure. In a statement released on Thursday, the White House revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a proposal to “strengthen its lead and cooper rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years, helping secure safe drinking water for communities across the country.”
      A vote on Santos’s fate will take place tomorrow.Republican leaders delayed the vote, saying that they have other business to get to today. Tomorrow’s vote will be the third time this year that the chamber has considered expelling Santos.The debate has concluded.In a final defense, Santos remained defiant. He did not offer much defense of himself, but said he would not resign.“If tomorrow, when this vote is on the floor, it is in the conscience of all of my colleagues that they believe this is a correct thing to do, so be it. Take the vote. I am at peace,” he said.“I do not believe that the Long Island crew is acting in bad faith, just exceedingly bad judgement,” said the Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz.“Since the beginning of this Congress, there’s only two ways you get expelled. You get convicted of a crime or you participated in a civil war. Neither of those apply to George Santos and so I rise, not to defend George Santos, whoever he is, but to defend the very precedent that my colleagues are willing to shatter,” he added.“I’ve heard your argument. I feel your passion. I understand your position but you’re about to go too far. Just calm down and step back,” said the Louisiana Republican representative Clay Higgins as he addressed the House.“This is what I advise my colleagues on both sides of the aisle … We’re talking about the removal of a member of Congress. Are the American people to believe the opinions of congressmen is a higher standard than the delivered vote of the American people? Is a report from a committee a higher standard than the two-year election cycle as established by our founding fathers and enshrined in our constitution? Calm down,” said Higgins.The floor has been yielded back to George Santos who is now saying: “We hear a lot about process, we hear a lot about findings … this process has been skewed, how this process is sloppy.”He added that this process “is contradictory to the core”.The findings of the committee were shocking,” said the Republican representative Michael Guest of Mississippi.“We know that the ethics committee authorized 37 subpoenas. They issued 43 requests for information. They interviewed 40 witnesses. They reviewed 172,000 pages of documents and they issued a 56-page investigation report,” he said.“The report … paints a picture of the fraud committed by Santos,” he continued, pulling up a large display of the language used in the report.“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the display read, quoting from the report.“He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contribution to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit,” it added.“I’m not trying to be arrogant or spiteful or disrespectful of the [ethics] committee but I’m curious to know, what is the schedule of the ethics committee?” said Santos, complaining that other findings launched by the ethics committee have taken years.“Why rush this? To deliver a predetermined outcome sought out by some members of our conference? Or some members of this body?” he added.“It is a predetermined necessity for some members in this body to engage in this smear campaign to destroy me. I will not stand by quietly,” he continued.“Every member expelled in history of this institution has been convicted of crimes or confederate turncoats guilty of treason. Neither of those apply to me but here we are,” said George Santos in his House remarks.“On what basis does this body feel that that precedent must be changed for me?” he said.“I have been convicted of no crimes, Mr Speaker. My loyalty to this country … is true and unquestionable,” he added.The House has started its resolution debate on expelling New York Republican representative George Santos.Santos has remained defiant and in denial of all charges against him, including wire fraud, arguing that his fellow lawmakers are “bullying” him out of the House.The Joe Biden administration has announced new action to protect communities from lead exposure.In a statement released on Thursday, the White House revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a proposal to “strengthen its lead and cooper rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years, helping secure safe drinking water for communities across the country.”
      The president’s bipartisan infrastructure law invests over $50bn for the largest upgrade to the nation’s water infrastructure in history, and today’s action builds on these historic levels of funding from president Biden’s Investing in America agenda, a key pillar of Bidenomics, to replace lead service lines across the nation,” the White House said.
      Joe Biden has once again reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to upholding protections surrounding reproductive healthcare.“Congress must codify the protections of Roe v Wade,” he tweeted on Thursday.Donald Trump’s lawyer Christopher Kise has condemned the reinstatement of the gag order, telling CBS:“In a country where the first amendment is sacrosanct, President Trump may not even comment on why he thinks he cannot get a fair trial.”Kise, who called today’s decision “a tragic day for the rule of law,” added: “Hard to imagine a more unfair process and hard to believe this is happening in America.” More

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      George Santos: a creature of Congress, Citizens United and limitless Republican hypocrisy | Sidney Blumenthal

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      It seems churlish for any member of the party of Donald Trump to single out George Santos for punishment as a liar, fraudster and fabulist. The 23 federal charges against the first-term member of Congress pale beside the Republican frontrunner’s 91 felony counts and civil suits over fraud and E Jean Carroll’s defamation claim, based on her allegation of rape. Republicans’ faux horror at the discovery of Santos’s extravagant spending of campaign funds on Botox, casino chips and OnlyFans porn belies their previous blithe tolerance of the red-dressed, gay-pride, Brazilian drag queen in their midst. Santos thrived as the symbol of the cultural contradictions of Republicanism. Did his sophisticated taste for accessories from Hermès and Ferragamo finally do him in with his anti-globalist colleagues?The facts of Santos’s false identity were pried apart gradually, beginning before he was even sworn in. Slowly, his crimes were revealed. Exposé after exposé – yet nothing happened. So long as Santos voted as a reliable Republican (100% Heritage Action rating), he was shielded from ritual rounds of queer bashing, much less expulsion. The narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives required every able-bodied member who could hold up an arm. Santos was straight as a party liner.Only when the stories of Santos’s lifetime of fraud became a rushing torrent did Kevin McCarthy, then speaker, refer the question to the ethics committee. There, it stayed bottled up. Republicans were always reluctant to excise Santos. His fate was entangled in the foul politics of the House.Only after McCarthy was deposed by an ultra-right cabal, and three prospective speakers chosen by a majority went down to defeat before Mike Johnson was elected, was an ethics report released and the expulsion of Santos brought up. It was a case of the first time as farce and the second, third and fourth times as farce, to be followed by the most comical farce of all.The day the Republican chair of the ethics committee introduced a motion to expel poor George, a leak from the forthcoming memoir of Liz Cheney – purged from her leadership post in the Republican conference in 2021, scourged for opposing Trump’s attempted overthrow of the US government, defeated in a vicious primary in 2022 – revealed that Santos was hardly among the most risible prevaricators in the House. McCarthy had explained to Cheney that he went on his humiliating visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago a mere three weeks after the January 6 insurrection out of pity, because he felt bad that Trump was “depressed”.“He’s not eating,” said McCarthy. This excuse from the supreme sycophant – “My Kevin,” Trump called him – was as likely as Trump not violating the constitution’s emoluments clause to enrich himself. The only plausible reason for Trump not eating would be because there was a double cheeseburger already lodged in his gullet.Then the Washington Post reported that several weeks after McCarthy’s fall, he had a troubling call with Trump, who informed him why he had been the not-so-hidden hand behind his ouster. McCarthy, Trump explained, had not expunged Trump’s two impeachments and endorsed him for 2024. McCarthy’s pilgrimage to Trump in early 2021, which made Trump’s revenge tour possible, had gained him no credit. As speaker, McCarthy had immense control over the spigot of Republican money and the influence that flows from it. If he had decided to ignore Trump’s threats and cut him off, Trump would have been severely disabled. But McCarthy revived the monster, so the monster in turn could strangle him. At long last, too late, McCarthy said to Trump: “Fuck you.”The newly installed speaker, Mike Johnson, declares himself divinely anointed. (Does that make Matt Gaetz the hand of God?) “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” he said, in his inaugural speech. Johnson extended his omniscience about the Lord’s blessing to every other member of the House. “He raised up each of you. All of us.” Presumably, the elect included Santos.When it came to a vote to expel Santos, Johnson recoiled. He had “real reservations”. He would not apply the whip. Members could “vote their conscience”. As for himself, he said he was “concerned about a precedent that may be set for that”. In 2022, Johnson sponsored the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act, that would ban teaching “concepts like masturbation, pornography, sexual acts, and gender transition”, and prohibit “federal grants to host and promote sexually oriented events like drag queen story hours and burlesque shows”. Now, he would allow members to consider forgiveness for the sinner’s financial crimes, in “good faith”.Johnson might well cite Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye not be judged.” His own financial disclosure forms since he was a state legislator in Louisiana and as a member of the House are extraordinarily sketchy. He claimed he did not have a bank account. But as a legislator he had a contract to bill the state $400,000 to defend a law he sponsored to restrict abortion clinic access. In 2015 his financial disclosure form showed he cleared tens of thousands from religious right organizations: Freedom Guard, a legal operation; Living Waters Publications, a Christian publishing house that offered “biblical evangelism training camps”; Louisiana Right to Life; Louisiana Freedom Forum; and the Providence Classical Academy ($5,000-$24,999), “part-time”.The House ethics committee report on Santos buried within it a document compiled by his own campaign before the election in 2022 that detailed many lies and frauds later exposed. He and his campaign, as well as the National Republican Congressional Committee, were apparently all cognizant of the fraud from the start. Exhibit six of the ethics committee report consists of the 141-page “George Santos Vulnerability Report”, a point-by-point description of fake college degrees, Ponzi schemes, fraudster firms, scams, multiple civil judgments for cheating creditors, evictions and incident after incident of questionable behavior.The “vulnerability report” also chronicled Santos’s evolving story of his grandparents, from Belgian migrants who “fled the devastation of world war II Europe” into “Holocaust refugees”. This was the first falsehood about his background disclosed by the media, by CNN a week after his election. His fabrication of his identity, down to hiding his real given name (“George Devolder”) was an act of brazen and clumsy thievery he got away with to get into office with the aid of complicit campaign handlers.Santos’s conception, in a larger sense, came with the demise of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), commonly known as McCain-Feingold. Trashing that law created a world of dark money campaign contributions where almost anything goes. Santos’s spree was a byproduct of the post-campaign finance reform era. If he had only consulted an attorney to show him where the few remaining fine lines were, he could have gratified much of his urge for grift and glitz while avoiding indictment.Santos’s godparents in this respect were the Kentucky Republican senator Mitch McConnell, who worked for decades to torpedo reform, and the conservative justices of the supreme court, whose ruling sank McCain-Feingold. McConnell sought to forge a political empire built on unregulated corporate cash. He grasped that the keys to his kingdom would be held by the courts. So, as Senate majority leader, he frustrated reform legislation and packed the courts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt took some doing but finally, in 2010, Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, struck down the crucial sections of the BCRA. Corporations now had the untrammeled right to spend as much as they wanted in campaigns and certain non-profit organizations did not have to disclose their donors. With a flourish of naive certainty, Kennedy stated: “Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.” The chief justice, John Roberts, echoed that view in his ruling in the 2022 case, SEC v Cruz, in which he decided that a candidate, here the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, could raise money after an election to pay campaign debts. With equally trusting innocence, Roberts wrote: “The government has not shown that [the law] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics.”The sluice gates of dark money opened. From the multibillion-dollar operation of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society to enact the conservative agenda through domination of the courts, the legal corruption trickled down. The gutting of the campaign finance law unleashed a frenzied atmosphere in which fraudsters like Santos could feel unrestrained. His wild ride was not directly related to the letter of the Citizens United decision, but to its reckless spirit.Then came Santos’s crash. Nobody offered more cogent analysis of his Republican colleagues’ sudden aversion to him than Santos himself.“I was, as we joke around a lot in my circles, we’re like, ‘Oh my God you were the ‘It Girl.’ Everybody wanted you.’ Until nobody wanted me.”He was stigmatized, as a sinner in a den of sinners. “Within the ranks of the United States Congress there’s felons galore,” he said. His casting out reminded him of a character from the Bible. “There’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds and all of a sudden George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress.” Reviled now as a prostitute, he has faith he will be canonized as a saint. Expulsion means never having to say you’re sorry.Expelling Santos cannot unwind that he was let into the House to witness what happened behind the scenes. His Republican colleagues, he said, are “more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re going to screw –and pretend like none of us know what’s going on”. He held a press conference to warn, “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 their future.”Perhaps George Santos has been divinely sent, a messenger to expose hypocrisy. God is not finished with him yet. We await the tell-all memoir and the Netflix series.
      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian columnist and author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More