George Santos Missing Wedding Ring as He Arrives at Congress

U.S. Rep.-elect George Santos was not wearing a wedding ring when he showed up to be sworn in to Congress Tuesday, the New York Post is reporting.

Santos, a gay Republican, has been caught in and admitted to multiple lies since defeating Robert Zimmerman, a gay Democrat, in the race to represent New York's Third Congressional District, located on the north shore of Long Island. The race was unusual in featuring two out candidates.

Santos has said he has been out as gay for a decade, but he was married to a woman until 2019. He has not been seen with his husband since his lies were exposed last month, and his husband did not accompany him to the swearing-in, as congressional spouses usually do.

Among the falsehoods on Santos's resume, as detailed in a New York Times investigative piece: He claimed to have worked at two major Wall Street firms, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but they had no record of his employment there. He said he had graduated from Baruch College in 2010, but college officials could find no evidence of that. The Internal Revenue Service could find no registration for his charitable organization, Friends of Pets United.

He also said he runs an investment management company, the Devolder Organization, but there is little public information about it, and he has listed no clients. He has claimed his grandparents were refugees from the Holocaust -- they were not -- and implied that he's Jewish, which he isn't. He attributed his mother's 2016 death from cancer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but without evidence linking the events. He said he had four employees who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, but there is no record of any of the victims working for him.

Authorities in Brazil, where he lived for a time, recently reopened a check fraud case against him. He is under investigation by authorities from the federal government and New York's Nassau County as well.

Santos declined to answer reporters' questions as he entered a U.S. House office building Tuesday. His only statement was that he would vote for U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California as speaker; the voting was still going on at mid-afternoon, with some representatives supporting Jim Jordan of Ohio instead.

There have been numerous calls for Santos to resign, among them gay U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York. "It diminishes Congress to have him as part of the institution," Torres told the Post. "I would certainly vote to expel him because his conduct is unbecoming of a congressman."