The Nassau County district attorney said her office would examine Mr. Santos, who has admitted lying about his work and educational history during his campaign.
Days after Representative-elect George Santos admitted misrepresenting his background, a Long Island prosecutor said she would investigate whether he had committed any crimes, while those who supported his campaign expressed mixed emotions about the revelations now swirling around him.
Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney, said in a statement that the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos are nothing short of stunning.”
“No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it,” Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, said in the statement, which was first reported by Newsday.
Ms. Donnelly’s statement added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January but who has come under scrutiny after The New York Times uncovered numerous discrepancies in his campaign biography and in his descriptions of his business dealings.
In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.
But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations.
Felestasia Mawere, who said she had voted for Mr. Santos and had given money to his campaign, insisted that he should not serve in Congress after admitting to having misled voters.
“He cheated,” Ms. Mawere, an accountant who lives in Manhasset, said. Of the falsehoods in his biography, she added, “He intentionally put that information knowing that it would persuade voters like me to vote for him.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Santos appeared to retain the support of many in his party, including those who are set to be his constituents.
Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican.
“When they don’t like someone, they really go after them,” Ms. Silver, a courier for Uber Eats and DoorDash, said, before echoing Mr. Santos’s primary defense: “Everyone fabricates their résumé. I’m not saying it’s correct.”
Others who made financial contributions to Mr. Santos’s campaign did not appear ready to cast him aside, although only a few of about three dozen donors contacted for comment responded.
Lee Mallett, a general contractor from Louisiana and the chairman of the state contractors’ board there, said Mr. Santos’s immediate task was straightforward.
“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.”
Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.
“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.
House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.
On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he “expected more than just a blanket apology” from Mr. Santos.
Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.
“Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,” Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should “cooperate fully” with any investigations.
Mr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.
In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely “embellished” his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.
“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.”
On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.
But a spokesman for the school told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.
Questions also remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.
On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work involved “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.
As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions on such sales. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.
Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.
Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)
Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street, including his previous claims that he was a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” who had taken part in “landmark deals.” A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her “way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution” has also been expunged.
Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.
In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the “grunt work.” But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization and was not questioned further about whether it was tax-exempt as he had claimed.
The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.
Dana Rubinstein and Grace Ashford contributed reporting.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
