Rep. Elise Stefanik endorsed Rep. George Santos in the Tweet above, posted last year on Aug. 11, after reports indicate red flags about his apparent falsehoods were brought before her associates and senior political advisor.

WASHINGTON — Rep. Elise Stefanik has been asked by her New York congressional peers to cooperate with a House Ethics Committee probe into whether Rep. George Santos committed a crime among the many lies he told to get elected.

On Sunday, Reps. Daniel Goldman, D-Brooklyn, and Ritchie Torres, D-Bronx, wrote a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Stefanik and Republican fundraiser Daniel Conston, asking them to disclose any knowledge they may have had of Santos’s lies before the November election.

“It is one thing for a candidate such as Mr. Santos to induce voters to support him based on a web of lies,” the two wrote. “But it is altogether something else if the top levels of Republican leadership knew about Mr. Santos’s lies during the campaign and chose to be complicit. Investigators examining Mr. Santos’s conduct must understand the entire web of deceit, and it is therefore essential that you cooperate fully and forthrightly with those investigations.”

Santos, a Republican elected to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District on Long Island, has admitted to forwarding a number of lies about himself and his professional history as he ran for Congress in 2020 and again in 2022. Santos has said he was a high-powered banker and investment professional, graduated top of his class from Baruch College and ran a number of successful businesses and family ventures. None of that appears to be true, and Santos himself has recently appeared in the media apologizing for what he said was “embellishing his resume.”

Santos is under investigation in Brazil, where he’s been charged with stealing a checkbook, and is now facing investigations in New York and from the federal government, including the House Ethics Committee, to determine if he broke any laws among the lies he told to get elected. Officials have primarily expressed concern over the $700,000 loan he reportedly gave to his campaign in the last election cycle, and how he came to possess so much money when he appears not to have ever made more than $55,000 annually.

New reporting from the New York Times has involved Stefanik in the debacle, reporting that her chief political aide, who has gone unnamed, helped Santos on his campaign in the spring of 2022, after his first team of campaign staff resigned when they learned of his lies. Republican donors active in Long Island Republican circles are reported to have informed associates of Stefanik about concerns that Santos was a fraud as well.

On Aug. 11, Stefanik proudly announced she was endorsing Santos, who immediately opened a WinRed donation page touting the endorsement and using it to garner more campaign donations.

Stefanik’s team did not provide a response when asked about these claims on Monday.

Santos has earned the ire of his local Republican and Democratic colleagues, with Goldman and Torres initiating the House Ethics Committee complaint about Santos last week and Long Island Republicans from the local to federal level calling for him to step down.

Stefanik, as the fourth-senior Republican in the House, has followed the lead of McCarthy and stayed relatively quiet on the issue. Most recently, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said Santos is “a bad guy,” and will be removed from Congress if it’s proven that he violated campaign finance laws.