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      Did George Santos Also Mislead Voters About His Jewish Descent?

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      Genealogy websites cited by The Forward suggest that Mr. Santos’s grandparents were born in Brazil and were not “Holocaust refugees,” as he has claimed.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the incoming House Democratic leader, on Wednesday accused Representative-elect George Santos of being a “complete and utter fraud,” as a new report cast doubt on Mr. Santos’s account of his Jewish descent.“His whole life. Made up,” Mr. Jeffries said at a news conference in Washington. “Did you perpetrate a fraud on voters of the Third Congressional District of New York?”Hours before Mr. Jeffries spoke, The Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York City, reported that Mr. Santos, a Republican, may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry, a claim he made on his website and in statements during his political campaign.In his current biography, Mr. Santos says that his mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”But according to The Forward — which cited information from myheritage.com, a genealogy website; Brazilian immigration cards; and databases of refugees — Ms. Devolder’s parents seemed to have been born in Brazil before World War II. CNN later published a similar report that also cited interviews with several genealogists.Ms. Devolder died in 2016, according to an online obituary. Mr. Santos said in a 2020 interview that his family converted to Christianity in Brazil, and on Ms. Devolder’s Facebook page, which links to Mr. Santos’s, she regularly shared Christian imagery and had “liked” numerous Facebook pages associated with Brazil-based Christian organizations.Mr. Santos’s campaign, his lawyer and a political consulting firm that had been fielding reporter inquiries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.Who Is George Santos?: The G.O.P. congressman-elect from New York says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But his résumé appears to be mostly fiction.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.The Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential conservative group that has hosted Mr. Santos and billed him as a Jewish Republican, said that it had reached out to Mr. Santos’s office regarding The Forward’s reporting.“These allegations, if true, are deeply troubling,” the coalition’s director, Matt Brooks, said. “Given their seriousness, the congressman-elect owes the public an explanation, and we look forward to hearing it.”Mr. Santos, whose victory in a district covering parts of Long Island and Queens helped his party secure a narrow majority in the House next year, has not directly answered questions about his background raised by an article in The New York Times earlier this week.The Times’s report found that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about key details of his résumé that were on his campaign website at various points during his two bids for Congress, including his college graduation and his purported career on Wall Street.It also found that Mr. Santos did not include key details about his business, the Devolder Organization, on financial disclosure forms. The Devolder Organization, which was registered in 2021 in Florida, had been dissolved by state officials in September after it failed to file an annual report. On Tuesday, Mr. Santos filed paperwork to reinstate it.The claim that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents fled Jewish persecution was added to his campaign website sometime between April and October, according to a review of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. An earlier version of Mr. Santos’s biography said simply that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents “fled the devastation of World War II Europe.”Though Mr. Santos has identified as Catholic, he has more often trumpeted his Jewish heritage on the campaign trail, even as he described himself as a nonobservant Jew. As early as June 2020, when he was making his first bid for Congress, he wrote on Twitter that he was the “grandson of Holocaust refugees.”On Sunday night, Mr. Santos attended a Hanukkah party on Long Island being held by the Republican Jewish Coalition. He also spoke last month at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas.In his remarks in Washington, Mr. Jeffries did not address the new questions about Mr. Santos’s heritage. But he said that The Times’s reporting left him with doubts as to Mr. Santos’s suitability for office that he believed the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy, needed to address.“It’s an open question to me as to whether this is the type of individual that the incoming majority should welcome to Congress,” Mr. Jeffries said.Mr. McCarthy, the top House Republican, who is trying to shore up support for his bid to become the House’s next speaker, has not commented on The Times’s findings.A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy has not responded to emails or phone calls about Mr. Santos, who voiced his support for Mr. McCarthy’s potential speakership hours after The Times warned him of its report on Sunday night.Legal experts have said it is unlikely that the House of Representatives could deny Mr. Santos his seat in Congress. There are procedures that allow losing candidates to contest the results of a House election. But a Supreme Court decision in 1969 limited the House from preventing candidates from taking office unless they did not meet the Constitution’s age, citizenship and state residency requirements.Some Democrats and government watchdog groups have called for further investigation of Mr. Santos’s past claims and financial disclosure forms, either by the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics or by federal prosecutors.Representative-elect Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York City and a former assistant U.S. attorney, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed there were two possible federal crimes that prosecutors should investigate.The first issue, he said, was whether Mr. Santos had willfully and intentionally made false statements in his financial disclosure forms. Such a violation, he said, would require investigators to make sure that there was a clear and knowing intent to omit or misrepresent information.“As someone who had to make those disclosures, they’re done under penalty of perjury,” Mr. Goldman said.But Mr. Goldman, who was the chief investigator in the first impeachment case against former President Donald J. Trump, said that he believed the authorities should explore whether Mr. Santos’s apparent misstatements could be considered part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.Such a charge would be an aggressive approach, Mr. Goldman said. (It was used on Monday by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol against Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Santos has previously backed.)Prosecutors would need to prove that Mr. Santos had interfered with a federal election by willfully disseminating misinformation, and that he had worked with others to do so.“I think it’s worthy of investigation to see whether his efforts to repeatedly and pervasively lie about pretty much anything rises to the level of an effort to defraud the voters of his district to vote for him,” Mr. Goldman said. More

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      What Really Saved the Democrats This Year?

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      In the Democratic Party, despite its better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, internecine combat has been playing out in disputes over the party’s nominees and the policies they propose. At the nuts-and-bolts level of candidate selection, the debate has become intensely emotional and increasingly hostile.Strategists in the progressive wing of the party call centrists “corporate sellouts.” Centrists, in turn, accuse progressives of alienating voters by promoting an extremist cultural and law enforcement agenda.I asked Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist Welcome PAC, for his views on state of the intraparty debate. He emailed back:Far-left political science deniers refuse to accept the fact that moderate candidates still outperform those at the extremes. While there may be fewer swing voters now, the closeness of elections maximizes their importance. All the data points to moderate outperformance — from political science research to election results to common sense.Take the Dec. 16 analysis of the 2022 election by another centrist group, Third Way, “Comparing the Performance of Mainstream v. Far-Left Democrats in the House”: “Far-left groups like Sanders-style Our Revolution and AOC’s Justice Democrats constantly argue that the more left the candidate, the better chance of winning, saying their candidates will energize base voters and deliver victory,” Lanae Erickson, Lucas Holtz and Maya Jones of Third Way wrote.In an effort to test the claim of progressive groups, they note, “We conducted case studies analyzing districts with comparable partisan leans and demographically similar makeups to discern how Democratic congressional candidates endorsed by the center-left New Democrat Action Fund (NewDems) performed in the 2022 midterm elections versus those endorsed by far-left organizations.”Their results:In total, NewDems flipped seven seats from red to blue, picked up two critical wins in new seats, and helped elect 18 new members to Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. The NewDems Fund has now flipped 42 seats from red to blue since 2018, while Our Revolution and Justice Democrats have not managed to flip a single Republican-held seat over the last three cycles.I asked Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, if the organization had flipped any House seats from red to blue. He replied by email:This was not the goal of Our Revolution. Our Revolution’s goal in the 2022 elections was to push the Democratic Caucus in a progressive direction, and we succeeded with nine new members joining the ranks of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.In part because of Our Revolution’s support, he continued:The Congressional Progressive Caucus is growing by nine newly elected members, all of whom were endorsed by Our Revolution. That includes: Summer Lee, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez, Maxwell Frost, Becca Balint, Andrea Salinas, Jasmine Crockett, Jonathan Jackson, and Val Hoyle. Our Revolution’s success didn’t include just those running for Congress. Our Revolution’s success expanded to local races including St. Louis Board of Alderman President-elect Megan Green, whose victory creates a blue island in a state that is a sea of red.Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, emailed in response to a similar inquiry of mine that his group does not focus on shifting seats from red to blue: “We haven’t run really races in those areas. We’ve been focused on blue seats where the incumbent is corporate-backed and out of touch with their district.”Instead, Shahid wrote: “After the 2022 election cycle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus stated the incoming membership is the largest in its history at 103 members. The top three leaders are also all Justice Democrats: Rep. Pramila Jayapal as chair; Rep. Ilhan Omar as deputy chair; and Rep.-elect Greg Casar as whip.”In addition, Shahid argued, “Progressives have a lot to do with Democrats’ ambitious agenda under President Biden. Our work at Justice Democrats engaging in competitive primaries, win or lose, has been a big part of it — moving Democratic incumbents on key issues.”If, Shahid contended, “you think of politicians as balloons tied to the rock of public opinion, then progressives have substantially moved the rock,” adding thatmoderates have shifted in turn. John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock are not the same kind of Third Way moderates that might have run in purple states in the pre-Trump era. They embrace reproductive rights, bold climate action, a $15 minimum wage, eliminating the filibuster, student debt cancellation, and immigrant rights — things many moderates ran away from in the Obama era. The center of the party has shifted closer to the base and away from the consensus among Washington and Wall Street donors.While this debate may appear arcane, the dispute involves two different visions of the Democratic Party, one of a governing party guided by the principles of consensus and restraint, the other of a party that represents insurgent, marginalized constituencies and consistently challenges the establishment.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, was adamant in his criticism of Third Way, declaring in an email: “Every cycle, Third Way cooks the books with a false accounting of how races were run and won.”Green continued:The truth is: In swing seat after swing seat, Democrats won by running on economic populist positions that have long been supported by progressives and opposed by corporate Democrats — such as protecting and expanding Social Security benefits and fighting the pharmaceutical companies and Wall Street banks that fund Third Way. If there was one thing that caused Democrats to unnecessarily lose races this year, it was corporate Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Josh Gottheimer blocking the president’s economic agenda for a year so that the impact of things like lower-price prescriptions were not felt by voters in time for the election.Green objected to Third Way’s comparison of the results of the New Democrat Coalition PAC, which has official standing with the House, with the result of such outside groups as Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.If, however, the endorsees of the New Democrat Coalition are compared with the endorsees of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition PAC candidates flipped a total of 42 seats from red to blue, 32 in 2018, three in 2020 and seven in 2022, while the candidates endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus flipped a total of eight over the three cycles, all in 2018, according to officials of both groups. The Progressive Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition have roughly equal numbers of members.Joe Dinkin, of the Working Families Party, dismissed the Third Way study as the “conclusions of the corporate flank of the Democratic Party” that have been subject to “very little scrutiny.”In the newly elected Congress, Dinkin wrote:This will be the most progressive Democratic caucus in memory, if not ever. 16 of the new 34 Democratic members of Congress were backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC. The Congressional Progressive Caucus will have 103 members, or roughly 48 percent of the entirety of the Democratic caucus — a roughly 50 percent increase over the last decade.Dinkin continued:Centrist incumbents saw some significant losses. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Sean Patrick Maloney, a leading moderate, decided after redistricting to run in the bluer NY-17 over his former NY-18, a tougher district which included most of his former constituents, even though it meant leaving the incumbent Democrat in NY-17 without a district. Maloney lost that bluer seat. The Democrat who ran in NY-18, the redder seat SPM abandoned, was Pat Ryan — he won, and won with crucial support from the Working Families Party. Several other incumbent moderates lost their seats too, like former Republican and Blue Dog Tom O’Halleran.The intraparty debate boils down to a choice between two goals.If the objective is strengthening the left in the Democratic House Caucus, the way to achieve that goal is to nominate the most progressive candidate running in the primary. On that score, the size of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has grown, since its founding in 1991, to 103 members (as noted above). Overall, the composition of the Democratic electorate continues to shift to the left as have the votes of House Democrats, albeit slightly.If winning more seats is the top priority, the preponderance of evidence suggests that nominating moderate, centrist candidates in districts where Republicans have a chance of winning is the more effective strategy, with the caveat that a contemporary moderate is substantially more liberal than the moderate of two decades ago.Most — though by no means all — scholarly work supports the view that moderate candidates in competitive districts are more likely to win.Zachary F. Peskowitz, a political scientist at Emory, argued in an email:Candidates who are ideologically aligned with their constituencies will win more votes, on average, than relatively extreme candidates. If your goal is to win majorities in the House and the Senate, nominating moderate candidates in the most competitive districts and states — where the majority will be determined — is the best way to do it. If, instead, your goal is to push elite discourse in a liberal direction and are less concerned about immediately winning a governing majority, then nominating extremist candidates is a reasonable approach.Contrary to the argument that a more progressive candidate can mobilize base voters, Peskowitz argued that “nominating extremist candidates might increase turnout, but not enough to compensate for ceding moderates’ votes to your opponent. Moreover, there is a risk that an extremist will also mobilize the opposition to turn out to vote.”In sum, Peskowitz wrote:Progressive-aligned candidates who won the primaries in competitive districts or states did not fare well in the general election. Mandela Barnes lost the Wisconsin Senate contest to incumbent Ron Johnson and ran behind Wisconsin’s other statewide Democratic nominees. Josh Riley lost New York’s 19th Congressional District and Jamie McLeod-Skinner, the only progressive Democrat who successfully dethroned a Democratic incumbent in this cycle’s primaries, lost Oregon’s 5th Congressional District. Summer Lee in Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District was the one example of a progressive endorsed non-incumbent who won a seat that wasn’t a Democratic lock. Moderate Democratic candidates, such as Abigail Spanberger and Haley Stevens, performed strongly, holding on to seats in challenging districts.Andrew B. Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, has examined the debate over moderate-versus-progressive candidates extensively, including in a 2018 paper with Daniel M. Thompson, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., “Who Punishes Extremist Nominees? Candidate Ideology and Turning Out the Base in U.S. Elections.”Hall and Thompson write: “We find that extremist nominees — as measured by the mix of campaign contributions they receive — suffer electorally, largely because they decrease their party’s share of turnout in the general election, skewing the electorate towards their opponent’s party.”“Turnout,” they add, “appears to be the dominant force in determining election outcomes, but it advantages ideologically moderate candidates because extremists appear to activate the opposing party’s base more than their own.”Hall and Thompson compared general election results from 2006 to 2014 in House races that involved close primary contests between a moderate and a more extreme candidate. They found that instead of lifting turnout, there were “strong, negative effects of extremist nominees on their party’s share of turnout in the general election.” Extremist nominees, they observed, “depress their party’s share of turnout in the general election, on average.”Hall and Thompson conclude that it is moderates who have a turnout advantage in general elections. They make two points.First, “We have found consistent evidence that extremist nominees do poorly in general elections in large part because they skew turnout in the general election away from their own party and in favor of the opposing party.”And second, “Much of moderate candidates’ success may actually be due to the turnout of partisan voters, rather than to swing voters who switch sides. In fact, our regression discontinuity estimates are consistent with the possibility that the bulk of the vote-share penalty to extremist nominees is the result of changes in partisan turnout.”An earlier study, from 2010, “Securing the Base: Electoral Competition Under Variable Turnout,” by Michael Peress, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, produced similar results: “My results indicate that the candidates can best compete by adopting centrist positions. While a candidate can increase turnout among his supporters by moving away from the center, many moderate voters will defect to his opponent.”Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, agreed that “moderate candidates perform better in general elections,” but, he added, “that advantage is declining as baseline partisanship drives most results regardless of candidates. Because we have national partisan parity, small candidate advantages can still be important.”The moderation factor, Grossman wrote by email, “was more pronounced on the Republican side because Republicans ran more extreme candidates and those candidates had less experience. There continues to be no evidence in either party that extreme candidates mobilize their side more than they mobilize the other side or turn off swing voters.”The Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime critic of the Democrats’ progressive wing, contends in a recent essay, “Ten Reasons Why Democrats Should Become More Moderate,” that adoption of an extreme progressive stance is not only “dead wrong,” but also that “Democrats need to fully and finally reject it if they hope to break the current electoral stalemate in their favor.”In the 2022 election, Teixeira writes,the reason why Democrats did relatively well was support from independents and Republican leaning or supporting crossover voters — not base voters mobilized by progressivism. These independents and crossover voters were motivated to support Democrats where they did because many Democrats in key races were perceived as being more moderate than their extremist Republican opponents.According to Teixeira:As the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the last four years, they have actually done worse among their base voters. They’ve lost a good chunk of their support among nonwhite voters, especially Hispanics, and among young voters. Since 2018, Democratic support is down 18 margin points among young (18-29 year old) voters, 20 points among nonwhites and 23 points among nonwhite working class (noncollege) voters. These voters are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in orientation and they’re just not buying what the Democrats are selling.Teixeira’s final point:Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to embrace patriotism and dissociate themselves from those who insist America is a benighted, racist nation and always has been. Large majorities of Americans, while they have no objection to looking at both the bad and good of American history, reject such a one-sided, negative characterization. That includes many voters whose support Democrats desperately need but who are now drifting away from them.A postelection analysis conducted by officials of Impact Research, the firm that polls for President Biden, provides further support for a moderate strategy by emphasizing the crucial importance in the 2022 contest of winning support from independent voters.In their Dec. 7 study, “How Democrats Prevented a Red Wave,” John Anzalone, founder of Impact, and Matt Hogan, a partner, wrote:That Democrats’ win over independents was critical since Republicans appear to have bested them in turnout based on both finalized geographic data and exit polls. The latter found that Republicans had a 3- to 4-point advantage in party ID and that each party won about 95 percent of their own partisans. It was therefore Democrats’ performance with independents, not turnout, that helped prevent a red wave.A key factor in Democrats’ ability to win over independents, according to Anzalone and Hogan,was that these voters wanted more bipartisanship and felt Democratic candidates were more likely to deliver it. By an 11-point margin (53 percent to 42 percent), voters preferred a candidate who would “work in a bipartisan manner and compromise” over one who would “stay true to their beliefs.” Among independents, the preference for bipartisanship more than doubled to 24 points. Democrats benefited from this desire by winning the voters who preferred a bipartisan approach by a 30-point margin.As a practical matter, the debate between proponents of moderation and proponents of progressivism may be less of a dilemma for the Democratic Party than an ongoing process in which the party, its voters and its elected officials move leftward, often turbulently. At the same time, the Democratic Party has a storied history of cannibalizing its own — and Republicans are catching up quickly. It is getting harder to see a peaceable and productive resolution between the two parties or inside them.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In Virginia, Democrats Sprint to Select Nominee for Special House Election

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      After a congressman’s death last month, Jennifer McClellan, a state senator who lost a bid for governor in 2021, is the front-runner and could become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress.Democrats in Richmond, Va., the state capital, are scrambling to organize a primary election on Tuesday after the death of a congressman just weeks ago, and the race’s front-runner could become the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress since the state was founded in 1788.Representative A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who overwhelmingly won re-election in the midterms last month, died on Nov. 28 at the age of 61, following a yearslong battle with colorectal cancer.Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, set the special election for Mr. McEachin’s seat for Feb. 21. Because Mr. McEachin’s district leans Democratic — the Fourth Congressional District is a predominantly Black and Latino region that stretches from Richmond into rural counties along the North Carolina border — the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary is highly favored to win the special election in February. Mr. McEachin defeated his Republican opponent by 30 points in November.Democrats organized Tuesday’s party-run primary for just one week after the governor’s announcement, a rushed timeline made all the more complicated by holding an election five days before Christmas.“The governor definitely chose the shortest amount of time, which has made us have to put together this nomination contest on the shortest time frame,” said Alexsis Rodgers, chairwoman of the Fourth Congressional District Democratic Committee.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.Who Is George Santos?: The G.O.P. congressman-elect from New York says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But his résumé appears to be mostly fiction.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A front-runner quickly emerged: State Senator Jennifer McClellan, a veteran lawmaker who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2021. In the first 24 hours of declaring her candidacy, she raised more than $100,000, according to her campaign.Two of the state’s top Black elected officials initially expressed interest, Ms. McClellan and Lamont Bagby, a state delegate. They lead the influential Virginia Legislative Black Caucus — Mr. Bagby is the caucus chair and Ms. McClellan is the vice chair.Last week, however, Mr. Bagby dropped out and endorsed Ms. McClellan. Other Democrats soon followed with endorsements of Ms. McClellan, including all eight members of Virginia’s Democratic congressional delegation, Mr. McEachin’s widow and scores of national Democratic groups.A flag at the U.S. Capitol marked the death of Representative A. Donald McEachin in late November.Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesMs. McClellan, who has run what she called a one-week get-out-the-vote campaign and has knocked on doors with several state leaders, centered her message on her Virginia roots and legislative accomplishments. In an interview on Friday, she said being a Black woman helped shape her policies, particularly on workers’ rights and maternal health.“I bring a new perspective to the office that will help me represent the district and those who have not had a voice, in ways that other candidates cannot,” she said. She listed her noteworthy firsts — she was the first Black woman to hold her State Senate seat and was the first person to serve in the State House of Delegates while pregnant.Democrats in the district will hold a so-called firehouse primary on Tuesday. Named for the polling places where they are typically held, such elections are organized and funded by party representatives rather than local or state election officials. Democratic voters in the primary will be required to sign a pledge stating they will vote for the party’s nominee during the general election.Ms. McClellan’s main Democratic opponent is State Senator Joe Morrissey, a self-described rebel within the party. Mr. Morrissey, a former defense lawyer, was disbarred twice and spent time in jail for aiding the delinquency of a minor in 2014. The minor involved later became his wife. In January 2022, then-Gov. Ralph Northam pardoned Mr. Morrissey for his conviction in the case.Mr. Morrissey has voted against Democratic policies and has signaled his opposition to proposed state policies protecting abortion access. John Fredericks, a prominent Virginia Republican and radio host, cut an ad for Mr. Morrissey and has been encouraging his listeners to vote for him in the Democratic primary.State Senator Joe Morrissey has voted against Democratic priorities and has the support of a prominent Virginia Republican.Daniel Sangjib Min/Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Associated PressHowever, Mr. Morrissey’s criminal justice work in Richmond’s Black communities has earned him support in the district. He has also won against tough odds before. In 2019, he defeated an incumbent Democratic state senator.Representatives for Mr. Morrissey did not respond to requests for comment.During an episode of his radio show on Thursday, Mr. Morrissey railed against Democrats’ handling of the primary, saying that setting the primary election on a weekday instead of the weekend, as well as by placing zero voting locations in his home district, unfairly disadvantaged his supporters.“I don’t care that you don’t like me,” he said, addressing Democrats in the district. “That’s fine. That’s your prerogative. Go vote against me.” He added, “But what you’ve done is you have set back the voting gains that we’ve made for the last 10 years in order to get the person you want.”Other Democrats in the race include Joseph Preston, a former state delegate who served for one year, and Tavorise Marks, a businessman from the area.Virginia Republicans have already elected their nominee for the seat. Leon Benjamin, a pastor and Navy veteran whom Mr. McEachin handily defeated in November, won the Republican nomination on Saturday, in a ranked-choice primary held by the district G.O.P. committee. More

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      George Santos Dodges Questions as Democrats Label Him ‘Unfit to Serve’

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      Democratic House leaders stopped short of calling for the resignation of Mr. Santos, a Republican, who may have misrepresented himself in his résumé.Representative-elect George Santos on Monday faced a barrage of questions, as well as an uncertain future, after an article in The New York Times revealed that he may have misrepresented key parts of his résumé on the campaign trail.The Times’s report found that Mr. Santos, a Republican whose victory in Long Island and northeast Queens last month helped his party clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, may have misled voters about his college graduation and his purported career on Wall Street and omitted details about his business from financial disclosures forms.House Republicans and state party leaders were largely silent on Monday. But Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman, said in a statement that The Times’s reporting raised “serious” issues that he believed Mr. Santos should address.“Every person deserves an opportunity to ‘clear’ his/her name in the face of accusations,” Mr. Cairo said. “I am committed to this principle, and I look forward to the congressman-elect’s responses to the news reports.”Mr. Santos, 34, has declined numerous requests to be interviewed. On Monday evening, he used Twitter to recirculate a short statement that his lawyer, Joseph Murray, had released on Friday, with one small addition. On Monday, Mr. Murray characterized the Times article as a “shotgun blast of attacks,” but did not provide specific criticisms of what he had called The Times’s “defamatory allegations.”The statement was Mr. Santos’s first public acknowledgment of the questions surrounding his background since Sunday night, when — hours after he had been notified of The Times’s plans to publish its findings — Mr. Santos said on Twitter that he enthusiastically backed Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be the next House speaker.Mr. McCarthy has been working to quell an effort by hard-right lawmakers to threaten his bid to become speaker when Republicans take control of the House. He has not addressed Mr. Santos’s remarks or The Times’s reporting. A spokesman did not respond to emails and phone calls asking for an interview.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A Looming Clash: Congressional leaders have all but abandoned the idea of acting to raise the debt ceiling before Democrats lose control of the House, punting the issue to a new Congress.Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat of California, questioned on Twitter whether Mr. McCarthy might “strike a corrupt bargain” with Mr. Santos, suggesting that Mr. McCarthy would refrain from taking action against Mr. Santos in exchange for his vote as House speaker.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who will be the House Democrats’ leader when the next Congress begins in January, said in a statement that Mr. Santos was “woefully unqualified” and “clearly unfit to serve.”But Mr. Jeffries, whose caucus is days away from falling out of power, stopped short of calling for action on the part of Republican leaders, even as some state Democrats pushed for further investigation.Susan Lerner, the executive director of the government reform group Common Cause, called on Mr. Santos to step down and urged the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics and federal prosecutors to investigate.With a razor-thin majority, Republicans have few reasons for challenging or investigating Mr. Santos, and many for defending him. If Mr. Santos were to resign, there is no guarantee that a Republican would win a special election to fill his seat.Mr. Santos, who ran unopposed in his primary this year, was already expected to face a challenging re-election in 2024 in a largely suburban district that, until this year, had recently favored Democrats.Over the course of his campaigns, Mr. Santos claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before working at Citigroup and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. But officials at Baruch said they could find no record of his having graduated that year, and representatives from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs could not locate records of his employment.Experts in ethics noted that Mr. Santos’s campaign disclosures revealed little about the source of his fortune, in particular failing to name any client who paid more than $5,000 to his company, the Devolder Organization. Such an omission could be problematic if it were to become clear that he had intentionally avoided disclosing his clientele.Mr. Santos’s candidate disclosures show that he paid himself $750,000 annually, and earned dividends of more than $1 million while running for Congress.There are several avenues by which an ethics investigation could take place within the House of Representatives, but none would be likely to affect Mr. Santos’s ability to assume office in January.Any process would require bipartisan cooperation and would be likely to be lengthy. There is also the question of whether the House would claim jurisdiction over behavior that took place before the subject assumed office, though some recent actions suggest that they might be inclined to take a more expansive approach, if the behavior was campaign-related.Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chair, said that Mr. McCarthy should delay seating Mr. Santos pending an investigation. The state party has been under siege since Democrats underperformed in November, particularly on Long Island, and faced new criticism on Monday over its failure to identify or effectively publicize the inconsistencies in Mr. Santos’s résumé before Election Day.Mr. Jacobs acknowledged that the revelations would have had more impact during the campaign. “The opposition research wasn’t as complete as the Times investigation,” he said, but said that attention would be more appropriately directed at Mr. Santos rather than the party.Several of Mr. Santos’s future constituents said they were shocked and disappointed at the disclosures of his apparent misrepresentations.Andres Thaodopoulos, 36, the owner of a Greek restaurant in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, said that he did not vote in November, but that he had welcomed Mr. Santos’s promises to fight crime and cut taxes.“I feel disappointed because the people trust our lives to these leaders,” he said.On Monday night, after Mr. Santos posted his lawyer’s statement, Mr. Swalwell criticized it for insufficiently addressing the questions raised by The Times’s story, including a criminal case for check fraud in Brazil that officials there said remained unresolved.Of the 132 words in the statement, Mr. Swalwell said, “not one addresses the mountain of evidence that you’re a wanted international criminal who lied about graduating college and where you worked.”Others pointed to another seeming inaccuracy. In the last sentence of his statement, Mr. Santos’s lawyer closed with a quote he attributed to Winston Churchill: “You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”According to the fact-checking website PolitiFact, the words probably were not said by Churchill. PolitiFact instead attributed the original sentiment to the French writer Victor Hugo.Nate Schweber More

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      Gen Z Problems: Maxwell Frost Is Struggling to Rent an Apartment

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      Other young adults, who have poor credit history and are frustrated with expensive rental application fees, can relate to the housing troubles of the first Gen Zer elected to Congress.WASHINGTON — At 25, Representative-elect Maxwell Frost will be youngest member of Congress. He’s also in debt, after maxing out credit cards to win Florida’s 10th Congressional District seat.He said he was upfront about his bad credit when he applied for a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., where he now has to live part-time for at least the next two years. A broker, he said, told him that was fine. He paid a $50 application fee and then was denied the apartment because of his poor credit history.Mr. Frost, the first Gen Zer elected to Congress and a Democrat, took to Twitter in early December to voice his frustration: “This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.”While most other Gen Zers haven’t accrued campaign debt, Mr. Frost’s housing woes have generated a wide range of commiserating among Gen Z Twitter users who have short credit histories and less capital to afford expensive deposits and application fees.Mr. Frost said he also lost hundreds of dollars last year when he was searching for housing in his home district in Orlando.“Application fees are becoming a source of revenue for management companies,” Mr. Frost said in an interview. “We live in a world right now where you can run an extensive background check for $15, why are fees up to $200? Why do we use a credit score to determine if an applicant can pay rent when there’s so many things that hurt someone’s credit score?”The fees are the sour cherry on top of a brutal housing market: Last month, the typical asking rent in the United States was over $2,000, up from $1,850 in November 2021 and $1,600 in November 2020, according to data from Zillow. For Washington D.C., the typical asking rent was over $2,200 last month, a figure that’s been following the national trajectory.Some Gen Zers see no feasible way to get a place of their own: Nearly a third of people between the ages of 18 and 25 are living at home permanently, one recent report found.Raegan Loheide, 25, started looking for a new apartment with their partner and their current roommate last May. Mx. Loheide, a barista, was living in an apartment in Queens, but said their mental and physical health was deteriorating from a series of maintenance issues that their landlord refused to fix, including a roach infestation, holes in the ceiling, a lack of heat and a broken toilet.“We didn’t feel safe,” Mx. Loheide said.But in the months following, Mx. Loheide, their roommate and their partner applied to five apartments — spending hundreds of dollars on application fees — all of which they were rejected from.“The first rejection was because we didn’t have a third guarantor,” Mx. Loheide said. “I kept asking the brokers ‘why?’ but I barely ever got a real answer.”Eventually, Mx. Loheide felt they had no choice but to stay in their current apartment, even if it meant an emotional toll and more landlord troubles.“We couldn’t move,” Mx. Loheide said. “We kept expanding our budgets and scraping together more to afford to relocate, but what good is that if we can’t even get approved?”Why Landlords Care About Your CreditCredit is one of the tools property owners have to utilize to tell upfront if a tenant will be able to make their rent payments, said Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a trade association for 4,000 property managers and owners in New York.“Property owners have a fiduciary duty to figure out that the applicants that they’re screening are going to be able to pay the rent that they are applying for, because they have mortgages that they’ll have to pay with the rent money that they are collecting,” Mr. Martin said.Mr. Martin added that the money from application fees “is not in any way a form of revenue for management companies, brokers or property owners.” The fee, Mr. Martin said, goes toward covering the cost of running the background checks, credit checks and other screening processes.Still, some tactics and motives have drawn criticism.Brokers also may encourage people who will likely get denied from an apartment application to apply anyway, for financial incentives or in hopes of raising their statistics on how many applicants they can bring in, said Felipe Ernst, a faculty member in Georgetown’s masters of real estate program and founder of a D.C.-based real estate development firm.While it can create more competition for an apartment and give a landlord more options to choose from, it can negatively impact potential renters who are already struggling since application fees, which can add up to hundreds of dollars, are almost always nonrefundable, he said.“It’s borderline unethical to put someone in the wringer, knowing that they won’t get approved,” Mr. Ernst said. “But at the same time, you need to have a realistic look on your finances. I don’t go to a Ferrari dealership if I can only buy a Honda.”Vipassana Vijayarangan could not live with her boyfriend as planned because her lack of credit disqualified her from renting an apartment with him.Todd Midler for The New York TimesSettling for a Room or a CouchFor people desperate to rent apartments, they are just searching high and low for somewhere to live.In 2018, Vipassana Vijayarangan had to move to D.C. on short notice for a new job. She stayed in an Airbnb until she had pay stubs for a rental application, and with her partner, she found a suitable two-bedroom apartment to apply to in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.“I told the agent in an email, ‘I’m very interested in this apartment, but I do not have any credit,’” Ms. Vijayarangan, 31, said. “When I lived in the U.S. on a student visa, I didn’t have — and was not allowed — to get a social security card. So it was impossible for me to even apply for the secured version of a credit card until I had work authorization.”Similar to Mr. Frost’s situation, the broker assured Ms. Vijayarangan that her lack of credit wouldn’t be a problem, but in the end, her application was denied.Ms. Vijayarangan, who now works as a data scientist in New York, eventually rented a room in a rowhouse from an immigrant landlord who understood her situation, she said. But, Ms. Vijayarangan and her partner, an American citizen who had a more established credit history, ended up living apart because he could get approved but she could not. “That could have been the first time that we were living together and building a life together,” she said. “We didn’t get to do that.”Mr. Frost is now the proxy for discouraged Gen Zers, but he is just the latest in the storied tradition of members of congress lamenting the process of finding a secondary residence in D.C. after being elected. Through the years, representatives and senators have opted to split a place with one another or even sleep in their offices to save money.In an interview last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said that she has previously “dealt with very similar issues.”In 2018, just after she was first elected and was set to be the youngest woman to serve in Congress, she told The Times, “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.”Similarly, Representative Mondaire Jones, Democrat of New York, said he also ran up debt when he first ran for office.“This place is not set up for people who are not independently wealthy,” Mr. Jones said. “People here don’t understand wealth inequality because they’ve not experienced it.”Mr. Frost has a budget of less than $2,000 a month. He’s looking for a studio apartment within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol since he does not intend to have a car or a driver to chauffeur him. His geographic hopes have restricted his apartment hunt to a few gentrifying neighborhoods.Unsure when he’ll finally secure a place to live, he plans to continue couch surfing for a few months to save money and find an apartment in one of his desired neighborhoods.“I was very close to taking out a loan, which would mean spending a lot of personal money to pay back the loan,” Mr. Frost said. “Rent problems are not just mine. There are millions of Americans that have these same problems.” More

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      New York Republican George Santos’s Résumé Called Into Question

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the “embodiment of the American dream.” But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of his properties. Mr. Santos’s eight-point victory, in a district in northern Long Island and northeast Queens that previously favored Democrats, was considered a mild upset. He had lost decisively in the same district in 2020 to Tom Suozzi, then the Democratic incumbent, and had seemed to be too wedded to former President Donald J. Trump and his stances to flip his fortunes.His appearance earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists underscored his ties to Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.At the same time, new revelations uncovered by The Times — including the omission of key information on Mr. Santos’s personal financial disclosures, and criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil — have the potential to create ethical and possibly legal challenges once he takes office.Mr. Santos did not respond to repeated requests from The Times that he furnish either documents or a résumé with dates that would help to substantiate the claims he made on the campaign trail. He also declined to be interviewed, and neither his lawyer nor Big Dog Strategies, a Republican-oriented political consulting group that handles crisis management, responded to a detailed list of questions.The lawyer, Joe Murray, said in a short statement that it was “no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at The New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A Looming Clash: Congressional leaders have all but abandoned the idea of acting to raise the debt ceiling before Democrats lose control of the House, punting the issue to a new Congress.First Gen Z Congressman: In the weeks after his election, Representative-elect Maxwell Frost of Florida, a Democrat, has learned just how different his perspective is from that of his older colleagues.A criminal case in BrazilMr. Santos has said he was born in Queens to parents who emigrated from Brazil and was raised in the borough. His father, he has said, is Catholic and has roots in Angola. His mother, Fatima Devolder, was descended from migrants who fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine and World War II strife in Belgium. Mr. Santos has described himself as a nonobservant Jew but has also said he is Catholic.Records show that Mr. Santos’s mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a Rio suburb where she was employed as a nurse. After Mr. Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.In 2008, when Mr. Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by The Times. Police and court records show that Mr. Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Mr. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.That period in Brazil overlapped with when Mr. Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Mr. Santos — using multiple variations of his first, middle and last names — having graduated in 2010, as he has claimed.A biography of Mr. Santos on the website of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the House Republicans’ campaign arm, also includes a stint at New York University. The claim is not repeated elsewhere, and an N.Y.U. spokesman found no attendance records matching his name and birth date.Mr. Santos, appearing with other Republican elected officials at a post-Election Day news conference, has declined to address questions about his biography.Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday, via Getty ImagesAfter he said he graduated from college, Mr. Santos began working at Citigroup, eventually becoming “an associate asset manager” in the company’s real estate division, according to a version of his biography that was on his campaign site as recently as April.A spokeswoman for Citigroup, Danielle Romero-Apsilos, said the company could not confirm Mr. Santos’s employment. She also said she was unfamiliar with Mr. Santos’s self-described job title and noted that Citi had sold off its asset management operations in 2005.A previous campaign biography of Mr. Santos indicates that he left Citi to work at a Turkey-based hospitality technology company, MetGlobal, and other profiles mention a brief role at Goldman Sachs. MetGlobal executives could not be reached for comment. Abbey Collins, a spokeswoman at Goldman Sachs, said she could not locate any record of Mr. Santos’s having worked at the company.Attempts to find co-workers who could confirm his employment were unsuccessful, in part because Mr. Santos has not provided specific dates for his time at these companies.He has also asserted that his professional life had intersected with tragedy: He said in an interview on WNYC that his company, which he did not identify, “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. But a Times review of news coverage and obituaries found that none of the 49 victims appear to have worked at the various firms named in his biography.After two evictions, a reversal of fortunesAs he was purportedly climbing the corporate ranks, Mr. Santos claimed to have founded Friends of Pets United, which he ran for five years beginning in 2013. As a candidate, he cited the group as proof of a history of philanthropic work.Though remnants of the group and its efforts could be found on Facebook, the I.R.S. was not able to find any record showing that the group held the tax-exempt status that Mr. Santos claimed. Neither the New York nor New Jersey attorney general’s offices could find records of Friends of Pets United having been registered as a charity.Friends of Pets United held at least one fund-raiser with a New Jersey animal rescue group in 2017; the invitation promised drinks, donated raffle items and a live band. Mr. Santos charged $50 for entry, according to an online fund-raising page that promoted the event. But the event’s beneficiary, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, said that she never received any of the funds, with Mr. Santos only offering repeated excuses for not forwarding the money.During that same period, Mr. Santos was also facing apparent financial difficulties. In November 2015, a landlord in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens filed an eviction suit in housing court accusing Mr. Santos of owing $2,250 in unpaid rent.The landlord, Maria Tulumba, said in an interview that Mr. Santos had been a “nice guy” and a “respectful” tenant. But she said that he had financial problems that led to the eviction case, declining to elaborate further. The judge ruled in favor of Ms. Tulumba.In May 2017, Mr. Santos faced another eviction case, from a rent-stabilized apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. Mr. Santos’s landlord accused him of owing more than $10,000 in rent stretching over five months and said in court records that one of his tenant’s checks had bounced. A warrant of eviction was issued, and Mr. Santos was fined $12,208 in a civil judgment.By early 2021, Mr. Santos was becoming vocal on housing issues but not from a tenant perspective. During New York’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium, Mr. Santos said on Twitter that he was a landlord affected by the freeze.“Will we landlords ever be able to take back possession of our property?” he wrote.Mr. Santos said that he and his family had not been paid rent on their 13 properties in nearly a year, adding that he had offered rental assistance to some tenants, but found that some were “flat out taking advantage of the situation.”But Mr. Santos has not listed properties in New York on required financial disclosure forms for either of his campaigns; the only real estate that he mentioned was an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Property records databases in New York City and Nassau County did not show any documents or deeds associated with him, immediate family members or the Devolder Organization.It is unclear what might have led to Mr. Santos’s apparent reversal in fortunes. By the time he launched his first run for the House, in November 2019, Mr. Santos was working in business development at a company called LinkBridge Investors that says it connects investors with fund managers.Mr. Santos eventually became a vice president there, according to a company document and a May 2020 campaign disclosure form where he declared earnings of $55,000 in salary, commission and bonuses.Mr. Santos, campaigning before Election Day, captured the race for the Third Congressional District, a contest he lost in 2020. Mary Altaffer/Associated PressOver the next two years, Mr. Santos bounced between several ill-fated ventures. As he ran for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to take on a new role as regional director of Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment company.Harbor City, which attracted investors with YouTube videos and guarantees of double-digit returns, soon garnered attention from the S.E.C., which filed a lawsuit accusing the company and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Neither Mr. Santos nor other colleagues were named in the lawsuit, and Mr. Santos has publicly denied having any knowledge of the scheme.Two weeks later, a handful of former Harbor City executives formed a company called Red Strategies USA, as reported by The Daily Beast. Corporate filings listed the Devolder Organization as a partial owner — even though the papers to register Devolder would not be filed for another week.Red Strategies was short lived: Federal campaign records show it did political consulting work for at least one politician — Tina Forte, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November — before it was dissolved in September for failing to file an annual report.The Devolder Organization seems to have flourished as Mr. Santos ran for office. According to Mr. Santos’s disclosures, his work there earned him a salary of $750,000. By the time it too was dissolved — also for failing to file an annual report — Mr. Santos reported that it was worth more than a million dollars.A November win raises new questionsMr. Santos announced his intent to make a second run at Congress almost immediately after the end of his first. He figured to again be an underdog in the district, which largely favored President Biden in 2020.But things began to swing in his favor. Republicans in Nassau performed well in local elections in 2021. Mr. Suozzi opted to not run for re-election in 2022, instead launching an unsuccessful bid for governor. And with high turnout expected in a midterm election that also featured a governor’s race, Mr. Santos’s race became more competitive — and his campaign stance became more tempered.During his first campaign, Mr. Santos, an adherent of Mr. Trump, opposed mask mandates and abortion access, and defended law enforcement against what he called the “made-up concept” of police brutality.But during his second campaign, older posts on Twitter were suddenly deleted, including his claims of election fraud that he said cost Mr. Trump the election in 2020. In March 2021, he resurfaced the claim, writing on Twitter in a since-deleted post, “My new campaign team has 4 former loyal Trump staffers that pushed him over the finish line TWICE, yes I said TWICE!”Mr. Santos also briefly claimed without evidence in another since-deleted tweet that he had been a victim of fraud in his first congressional race, at one point using the hashtag #StopTheSteal, a reference to a slogan associated with Mr. Trump’s false election claims.And while he previously boasted that he attended the Jan. 6 rally (but, he has said, not the riot) in support of Mr. Trump in Washington, he has since ducked questions about his attendance and a prior claim that he had written “a nice check for a law firm” to assist some rioters with their legal bills.Mr. Santos’s improved circumstances are evident on the official financial disclosure form he filed in September with the House of Representatives, though the document still leaves questions about his finances.In the disclosure, Mr. Santos said that he was the Devolder Organization’s sole owner and managing member. He reported that the company, which is based in New York but was registered in Florida, paid him a $750,000 salary. He also earned dividends from Devolder totaling somewhere between $1 million and $5 million — even though Devolder’s estimated value was listed in the same range.The Devolder Organization has no public-facing assets or other property that The Times could locate. Mr. Santos’s disclosure form did not provide information about clients that would have contributed to such a haul — a seeming violation of the requirement to disclose any compensation in excess of $5,000 from a single source.Kedric Payne, the vice president of the watchdog Campaign Legal Center, and a former deputy chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, was one of three election law experts consulted by The Times who took issue with the lack of detail.“This report raises red flags because no clients are reported for a multimillion-dollar client services company,” Mr. Payne said, adding: “The congressman-elect should explain what’s going on.”The Times attempted to interview Mr. Santos at the address where he is registered to vote and that was associated with a campaign donation he made in October, but a person at that address said on Sunday that she was not familiar with him.Material omissions or misrepresentations on personal financial disclosures are considered a federal crime under the False Statements Act, which carries a maximum penalty of $250,000 and five years in prison. But the bar for these cases is high, given that the statute requires violations to be “knowing and willful.”The House of Representatives has several internal mechanisms for investigating ethics violations, issuing civil or administrative penalties when it does. Those bodies tend to act largely in egregious cases, particularly if the behavior took place before the member was inaugurated.Campaign disclosures show that Mr. Santos lived large as a candidate, buying shirts for his staff from Brooks Brothers and charging the campaign for meals at the restaurant inside Bergdorf Goodman.Mr. Santos also spent a considerable amount of money traveling — charging his campaign roughly $40,000 in flights to places that included California, Texas and Florida. All told, Mr. Santos spent more than $17,000 in Florida, mostly on restaurants and hotels, including at least one evening at the Breakers, a five-star hotel and resort in Palm Beach, three miles up the road from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence.Manuela Andreoni More

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      How Will History Remember Jan. 6?

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      Far-right groups stockpiling guns and explosives, preparing for a violent overthrow of a government they deem illegitimate. Open antisemitism on the airwaves, expressed by mainstream media figures. Leading politicians openly embracing bigoted, authoritarian leaders abroad who disdain democracy and the rule of law.This might sound like a recap of the last few years in America, but it is actually the forgotten story told in a remarkable new podcast, Ultra, that recounts the shocking tale of how during World War II, Nazi propagandists infiltrated far-right American groups and the America First movement, wormed into the offices of senators and representatives and fomented a plot to overthrow the United States government.“This is a story about politics at the edge,” said the show’s creator and host, Rachel Maddow, in the opening episode. “And a criminal justice system trying, trying, but ill-suited to thwart this kind of danger.”Maddow is, of course, a master storyteller, and never lets the comparisons to today’s troubles get too on the nose. But as I hung on each episode, I couldn’t help think about Jan. 6 and wonder: Will that day and its aftermath be a hinge point in our country’s history? Or a forgotten episode to be plumbed by some podcaster decades from now?When asked about the meaning of contemporary events, historians like to jokingly reply, “Ask me in 100 years.” This week, the committee in the House of Representatives investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will drop its doorstop-size report, a critical early installment in the historical record. Journalists, historians and activists have already generated much, much more material, and more is still to come.In January, a Republican majority will take over the House and many of its members have pledged to begin their own battery of investigations, including an investigation into the Jan. 6 investigation. What will come from this ouroboros of an inquiry one cannot say, but it cannot help but detract from the quest for accountability for the events of that day.Beyond that, polling ahead of this year’s midterm elections indicated that Americans have other things on their minds, perhaps even more so now that the threat of election deniers winning control over voting in key swing states has receded. But what it means for the story America tells itself about itself is an open question. And in the long run, that might mean more accountability than our current political moment permits.Why do we remember the things we remember, and why do we forget the things we forget? This is not a small question in a time divided by fights over history. We all know the old saying: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But there is another truism that to my mind often countervails: We are always fighting the last war.The story that Maddow’s podcast tells is a doozy. It centers on a German American named George Sylvester Viereck, who was an agent for the Nazi government. Viereck was the focus of a Justice Department investigation into Nazi influence in America in the 1930s. For good reason: Lawmakers helped him in a variety of ways. One senator ran pro-German propaganda articles in magazines under his name that had actually been written by Viereck and would deliver pro-German speeches on the floor of Congress written by officials of the Nazi government. Others would reproduce these speeches and mail them to millions of Americans at taxpayer expense.Viereck also provided moral and financial support to a range of virulently antisemitic and racist organizations across the United States, along with paramilitary groups called the Silver Shirts and the Christian Front. Members of these groups sought to violently overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with a Nazi-style dictatorship.This was front-page news at the time. Investigative reporters dug up scoop after scoop about the politicians involved. Prosecutors brought criminal charges. Big trials were held. But today they are all but forgotten. One leading historian of Congress who was interviewed in the podcast, Nancy Beck Young, said she doubts that more than one or two people in her history department at the University of Houston knew about this scandal.Why was this episode consigned to oblivion? Selective amnesia has always been a critical component of the American experience. Americans are reared on myths that elide the genocide of Indigenous Americans, the central role of slavery in our history, America’s imperial adventures and more. As Susan Sontag put it, “What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.”Our favorite stories are sealed narrative boxes with a clear arc — a heroic journey in which America is the hero. And it’s hard to imagine a narrative more cherished than the one wrought by the countless books, movies and prestige television that remember World War II as a story of American righteousness in the face of a death cult. There was some truth to that story. But that death cult also had adherents here at home who had the ear and the mouthpiece of some of the most powerful senators and representatives.It also had significant support from a broad swath of the American people, most of whom were at best indifferent to the fate of European Jewry, as “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” a documentary series by the filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein that came out in September, does the painful work of showing. A virulent antisemite, Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, hosted by far the biggest radio show in the country. At his peak in the 1930s about 90 million people a week tuned in to hear his diatribes against Jews and communism.In some ways, it is understandable that this moment was treated as an aberration. The America First movement, which provided mainstream cover for extremist groups, evaporated almost instantly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Maybe it was even necessary to forget. When the war was over there was so much to do: rebuild Europe, integrate American servicemen back into society, confront the existential threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Who had the time to litigate who had been wrong about Germany in the 1930s?Even professional historians shied away from this period. Bradley Hart, a historian whose 2018 book “Hitler’s American Friends” unearthed a great deal of this saga, said that despite the wealth of documentary material there was little written about the subject. “This is a really uncomfortable chapter in American history because we want to believe the Second World War was this great moment when America was on the side of democracy and human rights,” Hart told me. “There is this sense that you have to forget certain parts of history in order to move on.”As anyone who has been married for a long time knows, sometimes forgetting is essential to peace. Even countries that have engaged in extensive post-conflict reconciliation processes, like South Africa and Argentina, were inevitably limited by the need to move on. After all, you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.The aftermath of Jan. 6 is unfolding almost like a photo negative of the scandal Maddow’s podcast unfurls. With very few exceptions almost everyone involved in the pro-Nazi movement escaped prosecution. A sedition trial devolved into a total debacle that ended with a mistrial. President Harry Truman, a former senator, ultimately helped out his old friend Senator Burton K. Wheeler, a figure in the plot to disseminate Nazi propaganda, by telling the Justice Department to fire the prosecutor who was investigating it.But the major political figures involved paid the ultimate political price: they were turfed out of office by voters.Many of the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 riot, on the other hand, have been brought to justice successfully: Roughly 900 people have been arrested; approximately 470 have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges; around 335 of those charged federally have been convicted and sentenced; more than 250 have been sentenced to prison or home confinement. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge brought in any of these cases. In their report to be released this week, the Jan. 6 committee is expected to recommend further criminal indictments. One big question looming over it all is whether former President Donald Trump will be criminally charged for his role in whipping up the frenzy that led to the assault on the Capitol.A broader political reckoning seems much more distant. Election deniers and defenders of the Jan. 6 mob lost just about every major race in swing states in the 2022 midterms. But roughly 200 Republicans who supported the lie about the 2020 election being stolen won office across the country, The New York Times reported.What larger narrative about America might require us to remember Jan. 6? And what might require us to file it away as an aberration? The historian’s dodge — “ask me in 100 years” — is the only truly safe answer. But if the past is any guide, short-term political expediency may require it to be the latter.After all, it is only now that decades of work by scholars, activists and journalists has placed chattel slavery at the center of the American story rather than its periphery. What are the current battles about critical race theory but an attempt to repackage the sprawling, unfinished fight for civil rights into a tidy story about how Black people got their rights by appealing to the fundamental decency of white people and by simply asking nicely? In this telling, systematic racism ended when Rosa Parks could sit in the front of the bus. Anything that even lightly challenges finality of racial progress is at best an unwelcome rupture in the narrative matrix; at worst it is seen as a treasonous hatred of America.History, after all, is not just what happened. It is the meaning we make out of what happened and the story we tell with that meaning. If we included everything there would be no story. We cannot and will not remember things that have not been fashioned into a story we tell about ourselves, and because we are human, and because change is life, that story will evolve and change as we do.There is no better sign that our interpretation of history is in for revision than the Hollywood treatment. Last week it was reported that Steven Spielberg, our foremost chronicler of heroic World War II tales, plans to collaborate with Maddow to make Ultra into a movie. Perhaps this marks the beginning of a pop culture reconsideration of America’s role in the war, adding nuance that perturbs the accepted heroic narrative.And so I am not so worried about Jan. 6 fading from our consciousness for now. One day, maybe decades, maybe a century, some future Rachel Maddow will pick up the story and weave it more fully into the American fabric, not as an aberration but a continuous thread that runs through our imperfect tapestry. Maybe some future Steven Spielberg will even make it into a movie. I bet it’ll be a blockbuster.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More