GOP congressman calls George Santos a “crook” for allegedly stealing from him & his mother

Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) had a heated exchange with Rep. George Santos (R-NY) yesterday as the House debated the Santos’s expulsion, where Miller called Santos “a crook” and said that he was a victim of Santos’s alleged thievery.

Miller voted in favor of the resolution to expel Santos, which passed in a 311-114 vote earlier today. While explaining on the House floor why Santos should be expelled, Miller said, “I myself have been a victim of George Santos and, as well as other members of Congress in terms of defrauding through public donations. I received an ethics complaint from the FEC, which I had to spend tens of thousands to defend myself.”

Related:

George Santos still claims mother died due to 9/11 attacks despite not being in country

Her immigration documents say she was a home aide in Brazil during the attacks. He says she was a financial tycoon in NYC.

“You, sir, are a crook!” Miller said, pointing at Santos.

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Santos tried to have Miller’s words stricken from the record, but that didn’t work. So Santos shot back at Miller with an accusation made by an ex-girlfriend.

“Hypocrisy, as I mentioned,” Santos said. “My colleague wants to come up here, call me a crook. Same colleague, who’s accused of being a woman-beater. Are we really going to ignore the facts that we all have pasts and we all have the media coming out against us on a daily basis?”

Miller sent a letter to colleagues earlier this year detailing his accusations against Santos. Miller wrote that Santos “had charged my personal credit card — and the personal card of my Mother — for contribution amounts that exceeded FEC limits. Neither my Mother nor I approved these charges or were aware of them.”

He said that the illegal contributions resulted in legal trouble for him and his mother that he had to spend “15 or 20,000 dollars” in legal fees to deal with. He also said that he believed that 400 other people were similarly overcharged by Santos.

Miller, who is Jewish, also brought up Santos’s past claims to be Jewish. Santos is Catholic, but he has described himself as a “proud American Jew” in the past when speaking to Jewish donors. His former roommate said that Santos used the name “Anthony Zebrosky” to pretend to be Jewish while fundraising for his charity, which is not registered, and he has been accused of using it to enrich himself.

“I’m Jewish, my family’s Jewish and they were donors and they like to give money to people who are Jewish, who are Republicans, because that’s who we are,” Miller said.

“It is not okay to fabricate or lie for political gain,” Miller said in January. “This is especially true when the lie seeks benefit from the murder of millions of Jewish people. I do not believe George Santos can effectively serve and should resign.”

Santos has said that he didn’t mean to say that he’s Jewish but that he’s “Jew-ish,” a reference to some members of his family being Jewish.

Santos’s accusation of Miller being a “woman-beater” comes from when Miller was a Trump adminsitration staffer. His ex-girlfriend and fellow Trump staffer, Stephanie Grisham, accused him of physically abusing her in her book, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House. Grisham doesn’t describe the abuse with detail but told CNN’s Jake Tapper that there was “abuse in every way there.” She also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the allegedly abusive relationship, where she said that she told Donald and Melania Trump about the abuse but they did nothing.

Miller, 32, sued Grisham, 45, for defamation. He later voluntarily dismissed his lawsuit before it could get to trial.