If you happen to have seen a blurred image of 8th District U.S. Representative David Kustoff in the background of a picture frequently featured in the coverage of the GOP’s mystery Long Island Congressman-elect George Santos, so has Kustoff, who notes that his first sight of the picture was via an issue of The New York Times.
Reached over the holidays, Kustoff identified the picture as one taken at a post-election event held in Las Vegas last month by the Republican Jewish Coalition. At the meeting, which was attended by presumed Speaker-to-be Kevin McCarthy, Kustoff and Santos, along with Rep.-elect Max Miller of Ohio, were extolled by McCarthy and others as a corps of Jewish members-to-be in the coming Congress.
That trio may turn out to be a duo, of course, as Santos’ Jewishness, as well as virtually every other fact of his public identification, has been since revealed to have been a fabrication on the Republican’s part.
Santos’ purported religion, as well as his claimed employment in the financial industry, his education, and his family background, along with much else, have been exposed as spurious in voluminous news coverage, and the lingering question has been what will become of Santos’ hopes of serving in Congress: Will he be seated, will he be expelled, or just what?
Conspicuously silent on the issue has been the aforementioned McCarthy, who is still trying to arrange for a guaranteed vote of 218 Representatives for himself as Speaker of the House on January 3rd, when Congress reconvenes.
Kustoff was clearly hesitant to comment on the disposition of Santos’ case, venturing only, “Nothing will happen until after the Speakership vote.”
That presupposes, of course, that the New Yorker will be seated. Kustoff declined to say anything else about the case and about Santos’ chance of continuing in Congress, though he indicated he might comment further later on.
The Memphis area’s other Jewish congressman, Democrat Steve Cohen of the 9th District, has been less restrained. He authored a well-noticed tweet on the subject: “This guy makes Herschel Walker look like George (I can’t tell a lie) Washington./ Jew-ish? That’s some chutzpah!”” Cohen suggested in another tweet that the $700,000 that Santos claimed to have lent his recent campaign was unlikely to have been his own money and could lead to serious legal trouble for the would-be legislator.
Elaborating further this week, Cohen suggested Santos was obviously “mentally ill,” and foresaw his likely indictment in fairly short order.