GOP lawmaker says Santos charged his personal credit card without authorization

Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) says that newly expelled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) personally defrauded him and his mother by charging their credit cards without authorization.

“Late yesterday on the floor I alluded to a personal impact of Rep. Santos’s conduct,” Miller wrote in a last-minute email to colleagues before Santos’s expulsion vote Friday morning. “Earlier this year I learned that the Santos campaign had charged my personal credit card — and the personal credit card of my Mother — for contribution amounts that exceeded FEC limits.”

Miller said neither he nor his mother approved the charges or were aware of them, and they have spent “tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees” in the aftermath.

“I’ve seen a list of roughly 400 other people to whom the Santos campaign allegedly did this,” Miller wrote in the email obtained by The Hill. “I believe some other members of this conference might have had the same experience.”

The Ohio Republican said he was sharing his experience with others “because of the significance of the question before us.”

The House voted Friday to expel Santos, ending his turbulent time in Congress and making him the sixth lawmaker ever to be ousted from the House. He avoided two previous expulsion attempts despite facing federal indictment on 23 counts of wire fraud, identity theft and other campaign finance charges.

After the expulsion vote, Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) said he knows Santos personally “ripped off other members.”

“I think Max’s last-minute email to all the members determined the outcome for [Santos],” Joyce said Friday on CNN, adding, “They believed Max when it came personally from him.”

Santos was expelled in a 311-114-2 vote, with 105 Republicans joining almost all Democrats to remove the New York lawmaker after serving 11 months in office.

Miller called for Santos to resign in January after it was revealed he lied about his resume on the campaign trail.

The Ohio representative posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Thursday that the “evidence is overwhelming” and he was going to vote to expel Santos.