But every situation has its breaking point. And Santos, thanks to his many lies about his background (which may include potential crimes), is certainly going to test just how long McCarthy and his party can shrug the situation off.
The latest shoe to drop came Wednesday, with prominent members of the Nassau County Republican Party holding a news conference calling on Santos to resign.
Local GOP officials had spoken up in criticism of Santos before, but that call was perhaps their most forceful response to date. Nassau County makes up the lion’s share of Santos’s district, accounting for 84 percent of Santos’s votes and 82 percent of votes overall in his 2022 race. (Santos tweeted defiantly that he would not resign.)
And their call was soon joined by Rep. Nicholas A. Langworthy (R-N.Y.), the chairman of the New York GOP: “It’s clear that he cannot be an effective representative and it would be in the best interest of the taxpayers to have new leadership.”
Thus far the reaction from the likes of McCarthy and the national GOP has been much more muted.
“In America today, you’re innocent until proven guilty, so just because somebody doesn’t like the press you have, it’s not me that can oversay what the voters say,” McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday. “The voters are the power. The voters made a decision, and he has a right to serve. If there is something that rises to the occasion that he did something wrong, then we’ll deal with that at that time.”
Though on Wednesday he did say Santos shouldn’t be seated on high-profile House committees, that’s a rather meager call, compared to the one from Santos’s home-county party. The latter certainly ramps up the pressure for the national GOP to address the situation; if nothing else, it provides a pretty striking contrast to the party’s broader inaction.
As for what happens next (if anything), and what the GOP might deem “something that rises to the occasion?”
It seems unlikely that Santos will resign any time soon; holding a critical seat for the GOP gives him quite a bit of leverage. But it’s also possible that he succumbs to the unflagging pressure and the growing parade of embarrassing revelations, and decides being so intensely and constantly in the public eye isn’t for him.
(The latest revelation: Nassau County officials say he told them in a vetting interview that he was a volleyball “star” at Baruch College, the school he claimed to attend but which has no record of him graduating.)
The next question is whether House GOP leaders feel compelled to actually push him out. Even shy of an expulsion vote, they could try to force him out in other ways (say, by calling on him to resign). But again, there’s plenty of reason for them to resist taking that step, pragmatically if not morally, until they decide the situation is untenable. If it does, the GOP could be faced with a decision of whether to cut bait.
Certainly, it seems likely we’ll continue to learn more about how Santos has lied or otherwise misrepresented himself. And it goes beyond his heritage or where he went to school; it’s also his attempts to tie himself to tragedies like the Holocaust, 9/11 and the Pulse nightclub massacre, each of which have come under scrutiny. It’s one thing to inflate your resume; it’s quite another to exploit some of the worst atrocities in history for personal gain. Republican leaders have to wonder what they’ll be forced to account for next and how much time they want to spend defending or legitimizing this man.
(Yes, they stomached plenty of lies and falsehoods from Donald Trump — numbering in the tens of thousands, in fact — but denouncing a president and the head of your party is different from doing so for one of 435 members of Congress.)
The most likely breaking point, though, might be if Santos’s offenses cross into proven illegality. And Santos has multiple problems on that front.
Brazilian authorities have reopened their 2008 investigation into Santos for check fraud; he reportedly confessed, but the investigation was suspended when the authorities couldn’t locate him. Santos now must decide whether to defend himself or potentially risk being convicted in absentia. (He has maintained that “I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.” Brazilian authorities seem to disagree.)
A conviction would leave Republicans to account for having a newly convicted congressman in their midst. That wouldn’t legally disqualify him from serving, but such situations almost always lead to resignations or, failing that, expulsion (the most recent example of the latter being Ohio Rep. Jim Traficant in 2002).
Perhaps Santos’s most significant legal liability domestically, though, is in how he funded his campaign. The Campaign Legal Center watchdog last week filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission suggesting there was compelling proof that Santos broke campaign finance law. Among the dubious details:
- A suspiciously high number of Santos’s campaign expenditures were listed under amounts that narrowly avoided disclosure requirements for expenses of at least $200 — “an astounding 40 disbursements between $199 and $200, including 37 disbursements of exactly $199.99,” noted the Campaign Legal Center.
- He reported loaning his 2022 campaign $700,000 despite having reported only $55,000 in income during his previous, unsuccessful run for Congress.
- Santos has claimed extensive, newfound personal wealth in the million of dollars, despite little evidence that his business, the Devolder Organization, was truly successful.
The Campaign Legal Center says the latter two point to what appears to be a straw-donor scheme — that is, “unknown individuals or corporations may have illegally funneled money” to Santos personally so that he could use more of their money on his campaign.
Embattled cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was recently charged with running a straw-donor scheme, and conservative provocateur Dinish D’Souza pleaded guilty to such a scheme in 2014. D’Souza directed two people to donate $10,000 to a candidate to whom he had already given the maximum — a far-smaller sum of money than is involved with Santos — and was sentenced to five years of probation. (Donald Trump later pardoned him.)
Beyond those two probes, the Republican Nassau County district attorney has said she will investigate Santos as well and that, “if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”
There’s little question that there’s something very fishy in Santos’s finances. Republicans need to ask themselves whether they want to stick around and find out just how fishy it is. They’ll do just about everything they can to try waiting out the controversy, and they’ll feel that’s a defensible position. But clearly not everyone in the party feels that way.
