Republican Jewish Coalition BANS George Santos from events for ‘deceiving’ the group

The Republican Jewish Coalition banned Congressman-elect George Santos for fabricating both his employment history and his Jewish origin.

Executive director Matt Brooks said he felt Santos had “misled” the organization and “misrepresented” his Jewish heritage.

He misled us and misrepresented his heritage. In public comments and to us personally, he previously claimed to be Jewish,” Brooks said in a statement. He has started his term in Congress on the very wrong note. He will not be welcome at any future RJC events.’

Santos, who won a seat in the Long Island House of Representatives for the Republican Party and is the first openly gay Republican congressman elected, recently admitted that he fabricated parts of his resume and background.

On his campaign website, Santos stated that his mother was Jewish and that his Jewish maternal grandparents escaped the Holocaust and moved to Brazil. But genealogical records show that his maternal grandparents were Brazilian-born Catholics.

That bio has now been removed.

Santos says he is “clearly Catholic,” rephrasing his story as one his grandmother told about being Jewish before converting to Catholicism.

“I never claimed to be a Jew,” Santos told the New York Post. ‘I am catholic. Since I learned that my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said that I was ‘Jewish’.

The Republican Jewish Coalition has hosted Santos at previous events, as a speaker at a conference and at a Hanukkah celebration this month.

At the RJC Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas on November 19, Santos told a crowd ‘there will now be three’ Jewish Republican members of Congress with his choice.

The Forward reported that in material distributed to Jewish leaders he identified himself as a “proud American Jew.”

In an interview with City and State NY he questioned why anyone would reject his claims of Jewish heritage in a time of rising anti-Semitism.

“It just seems so strange to me that people would be quick to disinherit me from being a Jew, or even allow me to care about Israel and Judaism, at a time, in an era, where anti-Semitism is on the rise.” he said. “There’s someone here who really cares about the Jews, cares about Israel, and someone willing to fight for them, and we’ve got people pushing me away.”

The congressman-elect said in interviews with the New York Post and a local radio interview that he lied about working at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as well as attending New York University and CUNY Baruch College, describing it as “adorning the resume”.

Instead of working on Wall Street in his pre-political career, he actually worked in a call center making $15 an hour, on a quiet industrial avenue in Queens, New York.

He also acknowledged that he never graduated from any university, despite previously claiming to have a Baruch degree in 2010.

‘I did not graduate from any institution of higher education. I am embarrassed and sorry for embellishing my resume. I recognize that… We do stupid things in life,’ he said.

The ‘openly gay’ Santos, who was revealed to have been married to a woman until 2020, currently lives on Long Island.

Santos was married to a woman named Uadla between 2012 and 2019, but now he insists he is happily married once again, to a man.

He came clean on Monday after lying throughout the election campaign.

I am not a criminal. Neither here, nor abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I committed any crime,’ Santos said in an interview with WABC radio.

‘To cut to the chase, I’m not a fraud. I’m not some criminal who ripped off the whole country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I’ve been here a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They have made business deals with me,” he added.

‘I’m not going to make excuses for this, but a lot of people exaggerate on their resumes or skew them a bit. … I’m not saying I’m not guilty of that,” he said.

“I want to make sure that if I let someone down by embellishing the resume, I’m sorry.”

Despite the blatant deception, Santos told the Post that he has no intention of stepping down and still intends to take office in the new year.

“I’m not a criminal,” Santos said. ‘This [controversy] it will not prevent me from having a good legislative success. I will be effective I’ll be fine.’

Santos appeared to dismiss any concern that his lies could affect his credibility.

“I campaigned by talking about people’s concerns, not my resume,” Santos told The Post.

‘I intend to keep the promises I made during the campaign: fight crime, fight to reduce inflation, improve education. The people elected me to fight for them,’ he said.

“I came to DC to bring results on those issues and that’s what I’m going to do.”

The questions first arose after a New York Times report laid out a series of allegations, including accusations that he lied about his family’s history.

Instead of working on Wall Street, Santos worked at a DISH Satellite call center from October 2011 to July 2012 at a basic job in the College Point section of Queens, living with roommates while struggling to pay his bills.

Explaining the discrepancy, Santos simply said that he “never worked directly” for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and that he used “bad choice of words.” But in an attempt to justify his lie, he said that the company he worked for, Link Bridge, did business with both Goldman and Citi.

Santos said he made ‘capital presentations’ between clients and investors in both firms.

Santos’ web of lies began to unravel last week when questions were raised about his resume and he became something of a “running joke” within Republican circles.

‘As far as questions about George in general, that was always something that came up whenever we talked about this race. It was a running joke at one point. This is his second time running and we assumed the voters would solve these problems,” said a senior GOP leadership aide who remained anonymous.

Last week, Nassau County Republican Committee Chairman Joseph Cairo demanded that Santos explain himself.

‘While I have indicated that the congressman-elect deserves a reasonable amount of time to respond to the media, the voters deserve a candid explanation from Mr. Santos. I will be listening carefully and want to hear meaningful comments from George Santos.

Santos defeated Robert Zimmerman, an openly gay left-wing operative, for outgoing Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi’s seat in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.

Just before Christmas, Santos promised they would get responses by tweeting: ‘To the people of #NY03 I have my story to tell and it will be told next week. I want to assure everyone that I will answer your questions and remain committed to delivering the results I campaigned for; Public Safety, Inflation, Education and more.’

While Santos worked at the call center, his roommate at the time, Gregory Morey-Parker, told the Times that Santos told outlandish stories about his family owning property on Nantucket while his mother worked as a housekeeper.

Another former friend, Peter Hamilton, said he met Santos in 2014 and lent him money so the Republican could move into a house with his boyfriend.

When that loan went unpaid, Hamilton took Santos to small claims court, where a judge ordered the Queens native to pay $5,000 plus interest.

That same year, a landlord in Queens took Santos, her sister, and her mother to court for three months of unpaid rent, resulting in the trio’s eviction.

Hamilton told the Times: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t run before the actual election. At this point, it’s like he’s letting the public down.

The New York Attorney General’s office, Letitia James, has said they are “investigating” Santos’s finances.

The attorney general’s office did not specify whether the New York Times story triggered the review, nor did it say whether a full investigation was being launched.