Republican Official Says George Santos Lied About 3.9 GPA and Being a College Volleyball 'Star'

Ronda Churchill/Bloomberg via Getty George Santos

Just weeks after a New York Times report found that Rep. George Santos fabricated several key pieces of his backstory, the chair of the Nassau County Republican Committee says there are other lies that have since been unearthed, including that the lawmaker claimed to be a college volleyball "star" at Baruch University, despite never attending the school.

"He said he was a star and that they won the championship and he was a striker," Joseph Cairo, chair of the committee, said in a press conference Wednesday.

Elsewhere in the press conference, Cairo called on Santos to resign, saying: "George Santos' campaign last year, 2022, was a campaign of deceit, lies, fabrication."

"He deceived voters. His lies were not mere fibs. He disgraced the House of Representatives … He's not welcome here at Republican headquarters," Cairo said.

Republicans in Congress have also called for Santos to resign. Four House Republicans — all from New York, like Santos — released statements on Wednesday saying the freshman lawmaker "does not have the ability to serve here in the House of Representatives."

Even amid investigations and mounting calls from those in his own party to resign, Santos remains defiant, telling reporters gathered outside his office on Thursday, "I will not resign. I will be continuing to hold my office elected by the people."

A spokesperson for Santos has not responded to PEOPLE's requests for comment.

RELATED: U.S. Rep.-Elect George Santos Now Under Federal Investigation for Financial Disclosures: Report

In a two-page resumé first given to the Nassau County Republican Committee in 2020, when Santos launched his first bid for U.S. representative (a race he ultimately lost), the 34-year-old claimed "to have graduated in the top 1 percent of his class at Baruch College, earned an M.B.A. at New York University and more than doubled revenue as a project manager at Goldman Sachs," the Times reported this week.

But as he admitted last month, Santos did not attend any university — neither for undergraduate nor graduate studies — and did not work at Goldman Sachs, as he had previously asserted.

Two years after his failed 2020 campaign, Santos was elected in November to represent New York's 3rd Congressional District, flipping a seat red in the process. Reports about the lies — which the lawmaker has deemed "embellishments" — first began to surface weeks later.

And while he's admitted to lying about some things, Santos has remained tight-lipped about others, such as the source of his campaign funding.

In 2020, when Santos launched his first run for the House, he stated in a financial disclosure that he had no assets and no earned income. But his financial situation appeared to have markedly improved by the time he decided to launch a second run for the House in 2022, with Federal Election Commission filings showing he lent at least $580,000 to his campaign, and $27,000 to his political action committee.

In financial disclosure documents, Santos said he earned millions of dollars in 2021 and 2022 from a business he started in May 2021.

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Santos is currently under federal investigation over questions about his finances, and the Nassau County District Attorney's Office in New York recently announced that it, too, is investigating the incoming lawmaker.

Earlier this week, New York Reps. Daniel Goldman and Ritchie Torres — both Democrats — filed an official complaint with the House Committee on Ethics, calling for them to launch an investigation into whether Santos broke the law by leaving some details out of his financial disclosures.

A separate complaint — filed Monday by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center — argues that "unknown individuals or corporations may have illegally funneled money" into the Santos campaign, and alleges that the lawmaker lied "about how his campaign raised and spent money" in addition to lying about "virtually every aspect of his life."