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    ‘A bit of a clown’: a look at Congressman George Santos’s endless fabrications

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    In a way, George Santos is one of the great success stories of American politics.The New York congressman is not responsible for exceptional legislative achievements. His brief tenure in Congress will not be held up as a success story for students of political history.Santos’s accomplishment has instead been to win election by weaving a staggering, barely believable web of lies, deception and deceit that is surely unmatched in the modern age.That wave of fabrication helped Santos win election in November 2022. But a year later, the 35-year-old has been charged with 23 federal crimes, and while he has managed to cling on to his seat in the House of Representatives, he could find himself booted out of there when Congress returns to DC next week.The list of Santos’s lies bears digging into.While he was running for Congress, Santos lied about almost everything that had ever happened to him. Sometimes it was to embellish his résumé and make himself appear more electable, but frequently, and fascinatingly, he lied for no reason at all, about things of zero consequence to his political career.Santos claimed he was privately educated at an elite New York City high school. He wasn’t. He said he went to Baruch College, where – according to Santos – he graduated in the top 1% of his class. Baruch, based in Manhattan, said it has no record of him going there, and Santos later confessed he “didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning”.While running for election, he said his mother was working in the south tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. Her immigration history shows that she wasn’t even in the country.Santos said he was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Holocaust. That wasn’t true. He claimed he owned 13 properties. That was also a lie; in fact, in 2022, he was living at his sister’s home.He said he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, which he didn’t, and said he ran a pet charity, only for the New York Times to discover that a) it wasn’t a registered charity and b) there were serious questions about how the charity had spent the money it raised.Some of Santos’s lies were so banal it is unclear what the benefit was in telling them. Santos claimed he had been a “star” on Baruch’s volleyball team. (He hadn’t, obviously, but what was the point of making it up? Is the college sports vote that crucial in Nassau county?)Santos also told a roommate that he had worked as a model, and said he produced a Spider-Man musical on Broadway. Neither of those things happened.But, over a period of two years, the lies worked.Santos was an unknown when he ran against Thomas Suozzi, the Democratic incumbent in New York’s third district, in 2020. After a stronger-than-expected showing, Santos ran again in 2022. Suozzi, who had been in office for six years, had stepped down, and Santos defeated Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman by seven points, winning a seat to represent the majority of Nassau county, just east of New York City.“I ran, I lost and from defeat I grabbed the power and harnessed the energy to run again,” Santos said at a Republican Jewish Coalition event, 11 days after his win last year.“Many said I couldn’t win. Pundits across the nation, insiders, DC people [said]: ‘George Santos can’t win, let’s not pay attention to him.’“Well baby, you got that wrong.”Santos might now be wishing people had paid even less attention to him.After the New York Times reported on Santos’s litany of fabrications in December 2022, the web of lies began to fall apart. More seriously for Santos, alleged crimes were soon catching up with him, too.In October federal prosecutors charged Santos with 10 new crimes, including an allegation that he stole donors’ identities and used their credit cards without their knowledge. Santos had previously been charged with applying for and receiving unemployment benefits, even though he had a job, and misusing campaign contributions, and the total number of crimes Santos is now charged with is 23.Despite mounting evidence, the House has twice voted against expelling him. But on 17 November, when the ethics committee issued a damning report on Santos, the tide seemingly began to turn.The Republican-led committee found “substantial evidence” that Santos had used campaign funds for personal purposes, with the report detailing extravagant – and possibly illegal – spending of campaign money.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSantos allegedly spent almost $3,000 of campaign money on Botox treatments, while the committee also found that $4,127.80 had been spent at the luxury brand Hermès.Other expenditures by Santos allegedly include payments to OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content, and purchases at Sephora, a cosmetics store.Given what we now know about Santos, it’s barely believable that he got this far. Political campaigns normally conduct extensive opposition research on candidates, but Jay Jacobs, chair of the Nassau County Democrats, said that Santos “wasn’t considered a serious candidate by Republicans or Democrats”, and so slipped through the cracks.“He had run before, he was looked upon as kind of a joke, so nobody took it seriously,” Jacobs said.“Had they taken him seriously, had they felt that he had the slightest chance, I think the [Democratic] congressional campaign committee [DCCC], which does the research on this, would have dug a lot deeper.The DCCC, Jacobs said, has “435 contests across the country” that it needs to monitor. It has to choose where best to invest money and time in opposition research and background checking.“With George Santos being – and I’m sorry, but this is how I’d refer to him – a bit of a clown, they just didn’t give it that kind of attention,” Jacobs said.There was arguably a failure among the media too. The New York Times did great work in breaking the extraordinary story on Santos’s deceit, but it only did so on 19 December 2022 – more than a month after Santos had been voted into office. Santos slipped by other New York-focused newspapers and TV news channels, and slid into office.For almost a year Republicans, who have a slim majority in the House, have been willing to hold their nose regarding Santos. The damning ethics committee report, however, may prove the final nail in the coffin.After the report was published Santos said he would not run for re-election, but he is expected to face a third expulsion vote, likely to come next week. Two-thirds of the House would need to vote to remove Santos, and reports suggest that there are enough members ready to oust him, bringing an end to one of the great political con jobs of our age.“We did it! #NY03 has spoken!” Santos declared after his victory in 2022.“I promised one thing throughout this entire campaign: to be your champion in DC. Thank you for this opportunity to be your voice!”Instead, Santos has spent almost the entirety of his time in DC fending off accusations of criminal behavior and apologizing for a vast array of deceptions and mistruths.In retrospect, that promise to champion the residents of New York’s third congressional district was just another lie, in a political career defined by dishonesty. More

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      Democrats plan to subpoena Leonard Leo over perks to supreme court justices

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      Senate Democrats plan to subpoena Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow and conservative activist Leonard Leo to quiz them about their roles in organizing and paying for lavish perks for justices on the hard-right wing of the US supreme court.The announcement by Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee came on Monday amid a storm of controversy that has blown up in recent months about conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito not only accepting but also not disclosing free travel and other luxury favors provided or facilitated by influential public figures.The supreme court is now being pressed to adopt an ethics code – a move that has been publicly endorsed by three of the nine justices amid the rows about ethical controversies, including the risks of outside influence corrupting the court.The committee could act as soon as next week to authorize Illinois senator Dick Durbin, the panel’s chairman, to issue subpoenas to Crow, Leo and another wealthy donor, Robin Arkley II.Crow has been identified as a benefactor of associate justice Clarence Thomas for more than two decades, paying for nearly annual vacations, purchasing from Thomas and others the Georgia home in which the justice’s mother still lives, and helping pay for the private schooling for a relative.Leo, an executive of the Federalist Society, the powerful Washington-based conservative and libertarian advocacy group, worked with former US president Donald Trump to move the court and the rest of the federal judiciary to the right by nominating ultra-conservative judges.And Arkley helped arrange and pay for a private jet trip to Alaska for Justice Alito in 2008.Arkley and Leo have refused to cooperate with the committee’s investigation of the justices’ largely undisclosed private travel, the committee said.Crow “offered to produce certain limited information that fell well short of what the Committee needs and to which it is entitled”, Durbin and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, said in a joint statement.In a statement after Durbin’s announcement, Crow’s office called the subpoena politically motivated and said Crow had offered information to the committee.“It’s clear this is nothing more than a stunt aimed at undermining a sitting supreme court justice for ideological and political purposes,” the statement said.Leo voiced a similar objection. “I will not bow to the vile and disgusting liberal McCarthyism that seeks to destroy the supreme court simply because it follows the constitution rather than their political agenda,” Leo said in a statement.In July, the Senate judiciary panel approved legislation that would force the justices to abide by stronger ethics standards. The bill would set ethics rules for the court and a process to enforce them, including new standards for transparency around recusals, gifts and potential conflicts of interest.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe bill has little chance of passage in the closely divided Senate. Republicans have united against it, saying it could “destroy” the court. And Republicans control the House of Representatives, further providing a block on Democratic led legislation.Apart from the judiciary committee, Democrats on the Senate finance committee issued the results of their separate probe of the $267,000 loan that enabled Thomas to buy a luxury, 40-ft motorcoach in 1999. The committee found that the loan, made by longtime friend Anthony Welters, appears to have been largely if not totally forgiven after Thomas made payments of interest, only, over nine years.Durbin and Whitehouse put out a statement which said: “The Supreme Court is in an ethical crisis of its own making. Thanks to investigative reporting, we now know that for decades, some justices have been joining billionaires with business before the Court on their private planes and yachts or receiving gifts … the justices have enabled their wealthy benefactors and other individuals … to gain private access to the justices while preventing public scrutiny of this conduct.”“Due to Crow, Leo, and Arkley’s intransigence, the committee is now forced to seek compulsory process to obtain the information they hold … Durbin will be asking the committee to grant him authorization to issue subpoenas to these individuals. The chief justice could fix this problem today and adopt a binding code of conduct. As long as he refuses to act, the judiciary committee will.”
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Chief justice John Roberts urged to testify on ethics scandals for ‘good of democracy’

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      The US chief justice should testify before Congress about ethics scandals besetting his supreme court “for the good of democracy”, a leading Californian progressive said.The justices are “so cloistered, they’re so out of touch”, the congressman Ro Khanna told MSNBC on Sunday. “They don’t have a sense of what life is like, so my plea to him would be for the good of democracy come testify. What are you afraid of?”The Democratic-controlled Senate judiciary committee has requested that Roberts testify about reports regarding relations between justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch and rightwing donors or, in Gorsuch’s case, the chief of a prominent law firm involved in a property purchase.Thomas’s extensive gifts from the billionaire donor Harlan Crow have been exhaustively reported by ProPublica, which also reported an Alaska fishing trip Alito took with the billionaire Paul Singer.The justices failed to disclose such links. All deny wrongdoing. Singer, Crow and the law firm executive also deny wrongdoing and say they and the justices did not discuss politics or business before the court.Supreme court justices are nominally subject to the same ethics rules as other federal judges but in practice govern themselves.Questions have also been raised about the career of Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, who, according to the New York Times, “has made millions recruiting lawyers to prominent law firms, some of which have business before the court”.In April, turning down the invitation to testify before the Senate judiciary committee, John Roberts cited concerns about the separation of powers.Amid progressive anger over decisions on abortion, affirmative action, student debt relief and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, calls for reform to a court controlled 6-3 by conservatives after Donald Trump appointed three justices in four years have grown ever louder.Public trust in the court is at all-time lows.Speaking to the former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Khanna told MSNBC: “The court is moving us backwards and young people in particular are outraged that the court is taking away the relief of student loans. They’re moving to a time where colleges used to be just for the wealthy and largely white, so I do think this can energise young people, in particular working-class voters.”Calls for structural reform seem to have as little chance of success as calls for Thomas to resign or be impeached – calls perhaps likely to increase after the publication by the Times on Sunday of an investigation of the justice’s membership of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, “a cluster of extraordinarily wealthy, largely conservative members who lionised him and all that he had achieved”.Republicans control the House and trail Democrats by two seats in the Senate, all but ensuring a block on any such move. Furthermore, Joe Biden is against major reform, such as changing the size of the court or imposing term limits.Khanna said: “Voters know that the court is just out of touch with their lives, that the court is taking away their rights, taking away women’s rights to control their own body, taking away students’ relief in terms of the student loans. The president forgave the loans. The supreme court took that money away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[Voters] see these justices, they see all the ethical conflicts, and they’re saying, ‘Enough with it. Let’s have a clean slate and term limits.’“I’ve said everything should be on the table, but … it’s not an easy thing to do. Often people see that it is polarising or partisan. I guess term limits is an easier first step … and a judicial code of conduct of ethics.”The Senate judiciary chair, Dick Durbin, has promised a vote on ethics reform. Any measure would be highly unlikely to pass the Republican House.Khanna said: “Even Republicans in Congress, if we go out and have someone buy us lunch, the vast majority of us would have to disclose it and have all these ethics rules. I’m just flabbergasted that the supreme court doesn’t have any of those. The limits are so low for members of Congress, anybody who works in the federal government, and this is just a different set of rules.”Khanna did not support an attempt to force the chief justice to testify, via a subpoena, a move called for by another prominent House progressive, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.“I would support hearings,” he said. “I think that the chief justice should testify.“Look, I’ve met the chief justice. I met him a couple of years ago and he said he cared about the legitimacy of the court. The legitimacy of democracy. Well, if he cares about the legitimacy of democracy, he should come testify.” More

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      Alito’s wrongdoing makes a supreme court ethics overhaul an imperative | Margaret Sullivan

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      The US supreme court is an extraordinarily exclusive club. The nine members are unelected and employed for life, or until they step down voluntarily. And, as in many exclusive clubs, the membership likes to keep things just as they have always been.Tradition has its merits, of course, but recent events clearly show that change is urgently needed.The court, shockingly, is not bound by a code of ethics as lower courts are. Federal laws about financial disclosures, for example, do apply to them, but there is no clear method of enforcement.The remedy, a bad one, apparently is that these justices are so wise that they will police themselves. Clearly, that doesn’t happen, or not effectively enough.More proof came this week when the excellent investigative news outlet ProPublica revealed that, in 2008, Justice Samuel Alito took a trip to Alaska on the private jet of hedge fund manager and Republican donor Paul Singer – a trip that likely would have cost more than $100,000 if arranged independently.But Alito never disclosed the trip. What’s worse – and perhaps entirely predictable – Singer’s businesses were involved in several supreme court cases over the next few years, and Alito didn’t recuse himself.He’s being blasted for it in some corners, and so is the court. Rightly so.“The billionaire who paid for private jet rides and luxury fishing trips for Samuel Alito also bankrolled the groups funding the plaintiffs in the student loan relief case,” complained Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and Obama cabinet member. (Two lawsuits have challenged the legality of President Biden’s $400bn student loan forgiveness plan; the supreme court is expected to rule on it within weeks.)And Hackett asked the obvious question, given that reality: “How can this court be considered legitimate?”The answer is that it can’t be, until the court gets its house in order. The Alito revelations come on top of recent ProPublica reporting about Justice Clarence Thomas’s ethical lapses – specifically his acceptance of financial favors from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, another Republican donor. Crow made tuition payments for a member of Thomas’s family, paid for lavish trips and participated in a dubious real estate deal involving the home that the justice’s mother lived in.Sadly, these justices aren’t the only ones behaving badly: the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page agreed to publish Alito’s defensive statement, in an op-ed, about the ProPublica revelations before the investigative article had even run. (Alito wouldn’t comment on ProPublica’s reporting when he was given the opportunity before publication.) Call it a “pre-buttal”, and one that lacked even a basic level of journalistic solidarity on the part of the Journal’s opinion side. Thought experiment: what if, say, the Washington Post’s editorial board had allowed Elizabeth Holmes to pre-empt John Carreyrou’s investigation for the Wall Street Journal that exposed the fraudulent practices of her blood-testing company, Theranos (her crimes sent her to federal prison last month).What’s to be done about these persistent judicial ethics lapses?“When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself,” ProPublica noted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s not nearly good enough.For years, good-government groups and thinktanks have been advocating for change.In 2019, the well-respected Brennan Center for Justice, in an extensive report, urged the court to voluntarily adopt a formal ethics code, rather than wait for Congress to impose one. It also called for the court to explain justices’ reasons for recusal, in order to provide more transparency, and to strengthen its informal – and all-too-weak – practices governing gifts and financial disclosures.All good and necessary ideas. And it would be ideal for the court to get to work on all of that.But since there seems little appetite to do so, it’s left up to Congress to do it for them. Checks, balances and all of that.Today’s supreme court is extremely powerful, increasingly political and decreasingly trusted. It’s never been more obvious that ethics reform needs to happen now.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in World Politics

      The Russia-Ukraine War Shows History Did Not End, Ethics Did

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