- GOP Rep-elect George Santos admitted he fabricated much of his background before he was elected.
- On Tuesday, he removed his biography from his campaign website.
As he faced numerous questions over a series of apparent falsehoods in his resume last week, Republican Rep-elect George Santos said he had a "story to tell and it will be told next week."
On Monday, he began to do just that via a series of largely friendly interviews — and admitted that whole sections of his biography were fake.
And on Tuesday, he removed his campaign biography from his website.
The biography included the lie that he had graduated from Baruch College and that his grandparents had "fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine." The Forward found that his grandparents were born in Brazil.
In an interview with the New York Post on Monday, he came clean about lying about his employment and education history, as well as the fact that he isn't Jewish.
"I never claimed to be Jewish," he told The Post. "I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was 'Jew-ish.'"
And in an interview with City & State NY that was published Monday night, he blamed the New York Times for misrepresentations he had made about his employment history.
"I worked as a customer service agent for six, seven months of my life or so — eight, maybe, in some — at some point in 2011, 2012," he said. "The moment I put that on a resume, and I put it out there, elitists like the New York Times like to call blue-collar jobs like that 'odd jobs.' "
Santos was apparently referencing a story from the Times that noted that the congressman-elect worked at a Dish Network call center around the same time he purportedly worked on Wall Street.
"It's those expectations, and those negative connotations, from elitist organizations, such as the New York Times that lead people — like me," he said before abruptly changing course mid-sentence, saying he was "very comfortable in saying, I come from poverty, I come from a family of absolute nothing."
"The reality is, yes, I omitted, like, past employment history that was irrelevant to the role," he added.
During his interview with City & State NY, Santos also addressed his prior marriage to a woman; Santos is the first non-incumbent gay Republican ever elected to Congress.
He said he initiated a divorce after deciding to come out as gay.
"At least I had the courage to do it," he said. "So many people... live in denial for their entire life, or are frustrated, and then eventually become a trans woman in their 60s."