Stefanik, whose aggressive questioning of Gay went viral, took credit for her departure.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, whose questions at a Congressional hearing last month brought up Dr. Claudine Gay and two other prominent university administrators about anti-Semitism on their campuses, took a victory lap Tuesday afternoon after Dr. Gay announced her resignation as president from Harvard University.

“TWO DOWN,” Ms. Stefanik crowed on social media, punctuated by three red siren emojis. Last month, University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned just four days after testifying before Congress and Ms. Stefanik’s aggressive questioning about whether students who called for the genocide of the Jews should be punished, evaded.

The controversial conversations between Ms. Stefanik and all three university presidents came at the end of a five-hour congressional hearing, called by Republicans in the House of Representatives, on the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses. The moment went viral, forcing the trio of presidents, including Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to clarify their answers, leading to a period of intense scrutiny of all three.

In Ms. Gay’s case, that led to an investigation into her past work, which led to accusations of plagiarism, ultimately leading to her resignation on Tuesday.

Ms. Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, sees the resignation as a political victory.

“I will always deliver results,” Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, said in a statement Tuesday. “Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made it the most watched congressional testimony in the history of the United States Congress.” Ms. Stefanik added that “this is just the beginning of what will be the biggest scandal of any college or university in history.”

In an interview with Fox News Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Stefanik vowed that an ongoing congressional investigation into the universities, which she announced in the wake of the hearing, would continue to expose “institutional rot.” And she once again took credit for Dr.’s resignation. Gay, arguing that “this liability would not have occurred if there had not been very clear moral questions at the hearing.”

Those questions hardly occurred. During the hearing, Ms. Stefanik tried to grab the three administrators four times. She repeatedly tried to get them to agree with her that the call for “intifada” and the use of slogans such as “from the river to the sea” amounted to a call for genocide against Jews, which should not be tolerated in campuses.

They had countered her whims with legal responses that might not have made international headlines on their own. But then they fell into a kind of Ms. Stefanik persecution trap, refusing to answer “yes” when she asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct on bullying and harassment.

“I thought, ‘How can I dig deeper into this and ask this question in such a way that the answer is simply ‘yes’?’ Ms. Stefanik said in an interview last month. “And they screwed up.”

Ms. Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006, has had a fraught relationship with her alma mater. Following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the Harvard Institute of Politics removed Ms. Stefanik from its advisory board, citing her “public claims of voter fraud in the November presidential election that have no evidentiary basis.”

Ms. Stefanik, once a moderate Republican who more than any other lawmaker in Congress represents to Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans the worst of what has happened to the Republican Party under Mr. Trump’s rule, called her resignation at the time ” a ritual of passage and badge of honor.”

On Tuesday, one of Ms. Stefanik’s top advisers, Garrett Ventry, joked on social media that Ms. Stefanik was now the de facto president of Harvard University.

But she was not the only House Republican to take credit for Ms. Gay’s resignation on Tuesday.

Representative John James, Republican of Michigan, shared on social media a clip of his own questioning during the hearing and wrote that Dr. Gay came “after I questioned her last month about what actions she had taken to combat anti-Semitism. .”