Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., survived two attempts to expel him from Congress before he was hit with a shocking report by the House Ethics Committee earlier this month.
Now, Santos doesn’t expect to survive a third round… but he’s putting up a fight on the way out.
“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” Santos reportedly said Friday in a Twitter livestream hosted by conservative pundit Monica Matthews. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”
In the defiant speech, Santos insisted he was “not going anywhere.”
“I’m not leaving,” Santos said. “Come hell or high water, it’s done when I say it’s done.”
The streamed footage is no longer accessible on Twitter, but clips of it have been obtained by national media.
The comments came one week after the Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Michael Guest, introduced a resolution to expel Santos once the body returns from Thanksgiving break.
While Santos has survived two expulsion votes, many of his colleagues who formerly opposed the effort now say they support it, citing the findings of the committee’s monthslong investigation into a wide range of alleged misconduct by Santos.
The report found Santos used campaign funds for personal purposes, such as purchases at luxury retailers and adult content websites, then caused the campaign to file false or incomplete reports.
“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” investigators wrote. They noted that he did not cooperate with the report and repeatedly “evaded” straightforward requests for information.
Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 charges. However, given the pending case, he declined to address the specific allegations in the Ethics Committee report. Instead, he simply called the report “slanderous.”
“It was designed to smear me,” Santos said. “It was designed to force me out of my seat.”
He urged the Ethics Committee to focus instead on the “felons galore” in Congress.
“They all act like they’re in ivory towers with white pointy hats and they’re untouchable,” Santos said. He added, “There’s people with all sorts of sheisty backgrounds. And all of a sudden, George Santos is the Mary Magdalene of United States Congress.”
His decision not to seek reelection, he said, was not because of external pressure, but due to his frustration with the “sheer arrogance” of his colleagues.
“These people need to understand it’s done when I say it’s done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it to be done,” he added. “That’s kind of where we are there.”
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., joined the space to press Santos. Garcia asked, “Why not just do the right thing and resign?”
Santos said he hasn’t been found guilty of anything.
“I don’t care. You want to expel me, I’ll wear it like a badge of honor. I’ll be the sixth expelled member of Congress in the history of Congress. And guess what? I’ll be the only one expelled without a conviction,” Santos alleged. “He thought that he was going to bully me out of Congress… I want to see them set this precedent… Because this precedent sets a new era of due process, which means you are guilty until proven innocent, we will take your accusations and use it to smear, to mangle, to destroy you and remove you from society. That is what they are doing with this.”
Garcia repeated, “George, we’re going to expel you.”
But Santos dug in his heels.
“And that’s fine,” Santos said. “You’re saying it like I’m scared of it, Robert. I’m not scared of it… I resign, I admit everything that’s in that report, which most of it is some of the craziest s**t I’ve ever read in my life.”
In order for Santos to be expelled, two thirds of all representatives would need to vote for the expulsion.
Only five representatives have ever been expelled. Three of them were expelled for supporting the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the remaining two were convicted of bribery. All five were Democrats.
— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) November 25, 2023
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contribtued to this article.