Rep. George Santos (R-NY) will reportedly be indicted on Wednesday in federal court in New York.
The federal charges come after Santos has faced a staggering number of scandals in his short political career. In November, the freshman Republican from Long Island won a swing district and, before he was sworn in in January, was exposed as a serial liar and fraudster. What started off as a series of revelations about how Santos had faked his entire resume, including fabricating his work history and education, turned into a barrage of allegations of fraud, ranging from campaign finance violations to writing bad checks to Amish dog breeders. Seemingly every day for weeks, there was a new revelation about his resume or his past and they all were outlandish. As soon as one could grasp that Santos had falsely claimed to be the Jewish descendant of refugees from the Holocaust and then insisted that he only said he was “Jew-ish,” Santos was implicated in a 2017 scheme to skim debit card information from ATMs in Seattle.
The constant drip of scandal, along with the Mad Libs nature of what was alleged, turned Santos into an overnight national celebrity. Television crews staked out his office and he was a staple of late night monologues. It was an unprecedented rise to fame for an unknown freshmen member of Congress. It also was an unprecedented headache for his colleagues, and Santos faced calls to resign before he had been formally sworn in to office. Within weeks of him arriving on Capitol Hill, members from both parties were texting each other memes making fun of him.
In the short term, Santos’s indictment won’t change a thing. Traditionally, members of Congress give up committee assignments after being criminally charged. However, Santos already gave up his committee positions in January after a meeting with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
McCarthy indicated that the status quo would remain while speaking to reporters on Tuesday. “We’ll just follow the…
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