WESTBURY, N.Y. (TIP): Dozens of Republican officials in New York State, including four recently elected congressmen, urged Representative George Santos, on Wednesday, January 11, to resign in a fracturing of local party support for Mr. Santos. Their call represented a sharp break from congressional Republican leaders, who insisted they would not push the embattled congressman to resign. Even as Mr. Santos’s former allies in New York insisted that his fabrications on the campaign trail had significantly violated the public trust, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that he not only would resist calls to push Mr. Santos out, but that he planned to seat him on a congressional committee.

“The voters elected him to serve,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters in Washington, adding that Mr. Santos “has to answer to the voters and the voters can make another decision in two years.”

Mr. Santos, who was elected to represent New York’s Third Congressional District, a consequential swing district in Queens and Long Island, emphatically resisted calls to leave office, saying on Twitter that he remained committed to serving the people of his district.

The Nassau County party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said that Mr. Santos, a first-term Republican, had lost the support of Republicans in his district, saying that Mr. Santos’s campaign was one of “deceit, lies, fabrication.”

“He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople,” Mr. Cairo said at the news conference. “Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I am calling for his immediate resignation.”

(Source: agencies)