Lead impeachment supervisor for Donald Trump’s second House trial, January 6 committee member, most cancers survivor, and now—copy editor? Congressman Jamie Raskin added one other line to his prolonged resume on Friday in a tart response to embattled New York Representative George Santos, who had penned a poorly written letter thanking the Maryland Democrat for voting towards kicking him out of the House of Representatives.
Santos’s letter got here two days after most Republicans and 31 Democrats voted towards a decision led by 5 of Santos’s fellow first-term New York Republicans who’ve been anxious to distance themselves from their disgraced colleague. The 179-213 tally fell far beneath the two-thirds majority wanted to expel a House member.
“I am writing to express my gratitude to you for standing up to the principals of due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty,” Santos wrote. In copy edits handwritten on his copy of the letter and later reported by Politico, Raskin cheekily let Santos know that “principals” ought to have been “principles.”
“Dear Congressman Santos, I appreciate your note and only wish someone had proofread it first,” Raskin wrote. “Meantime, you should apologize to the people of New York for all of your lies and deceit. I know you must have thought you could get away with it all in the party of Trump, but the truth is resilient.” The Maryland consultant ended the letter with a “P.S.”: “It’s not shameful to resign.”
Santos at the moment faces 23 federal expenses, 10 of which got here in a superseding indictment filed in early October. He has pleaded not responsible to the entire expenses, which accuse him of mendacity about his wealth, illegally receiving unemployment advantages, and misusing marketing campaign contributions, amongst different unlawful acts. His trial is scheduled for September 2024, simply earlier than the election to resolve whether or not the GOP can maintain onto its razor-slim House majority.
A House Ethics Committee can be at the moment trying into Santos, and has reportedly already been in contact with 40 witnesses, examined greater than 170,000 pages of paperwork, and accepted 37 subpoenas. The committee is slated to announce its subsequent steps later this month.
Raskin, a constitutional legislation professor, has argued that Santos ought to have the possibility to undergo his legal trial and House ethics investigation. “I’m a Constitution guy,” he advised Axios of his vote to not expel. “If and when Santos is convicted of these serious criminal offenses or ethics charges, I will certainly vote to expel. Until then, it’s a very risky road to go down, and we have to stick by due process and the rule of law, as obvious as the eventual result seems.”
Wednesday’s decision, if handed, would have made Santos the sixth particular person ever to be expelled from the House in U.S. historical past, three of which have been kicked out in the course of the Civil War. The two current expulsions over the previous fifty years have been members convicted on legal expenses.
Santos stays defiant within the face of the assorted investigations into his marketing campaign of deceit. On Friday, he advised CNN’s Manu Raju that he was planning on operating once more for Congress in 2024, and insisted that his constituents in New York’s third congressional district didn’t vote for him final yr primarily based on the main points of his fabricated life. “Nobody knew my biography. Nobody opened my biography who voted for me in the campaign,” he mentioned. “Nobody elected me because I played volleyball or not. Nobody elected me because I graduated college or not. People elected me because I said I’d come here to fight the swamp, I’d come here to lower inflation, create more jobs, make life more affordable, and the commitment to America.”
Santos isn’t the one Republican whose statements of late may have used a proofread. In certainly one of his first fundraising emails since taking the highest House job, newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to “refuse to put people over progress,” sparking jokes from his Democratic counterparts. “House Democrats will continue to put people over politics,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries mentioned Friday on X, previously Twitter. “Why is that an issue for our Republican colleagues?”