George Santos

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      George Santos rails against House expulsion efforts, launching tirade against Jamaal Bowman – video

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      Santos appeared to launch a veiled threat against House members who voted against his expulsion, saying it would ‘haunt them’.

      He also launched a tirade against New York Democratic representative Jamaal Bowman who was charged last month with setting off a false fire alarm in a House office building before a vote on a government funding bill. Bowman pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a fine of $1,000 (£792).

      The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law More

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      George Santos to face expulsion vote on Thursday, House speaker says

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      The Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, said the chamber would vote on whether to expel George Santos on Thursday, leaving it up to lawmakers to decide whether the New Yorker should be removed from office for embellishing his résumé and allegedly breaking federal law.“What we’ve said as the leadership team is we’re going to allow people to vote their conscience,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.“I think it’s the only appropriate thing we can do. We’ve not whipped the vote and we wouldn’t. I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith.“I personally have real reservations about doing this, I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that. So, everybody’s working through that and we’ll see how they vote tomorrow.”On Tuesday, Santos said he would not resign in order to avoid becoming only the sixth representative ever expelled from the House.“If I resign, I make it easy for this place,” Santos, 35, told reporters. “This place is run on hypocrisy. I’m done playing a part for the circus. If they want me to leave Congress, they’re going to have to take that tough vote.”But that tough vote was already drawing near.Earlier, two Democrats, Robert Garcia of California and Dan Goldman of New York, initiated proceedings to require an expulsion vote within two legislative days. Later, two Republicans, Anthony D’Esposito of New York and Michael Guest of Mississippi, did the same.“We want to make sure that happens this week,” Garcia said. “I think whatever it takes to get that vote this week is what we’re doing. He has no place in Congress.”The list of previous expellees includes three men who fought for the Confederacy in the civil war and two convicted of crimes. The last man forced out, James A Traficant of Ohio, a congressman with a famous “piled-high pompadour” toupée who was convicted of fraud, bribery, obstruction of justice and racketeering, was expelled in 2002.On Thursday, a two-thirds majority will be required to add Santos to the list of shame.Santos was elected last year but quickly saw his résumé torn to pieces by investigative reporting and past actions subjected to legal scrutiny. He admitted embellishing that résumé – which included bizarre claims about his academic and professional history – but denied wrongdoing. Among more picaresque episodes, he denied having been a drag performer in Brazil – a denial now undermined by reporters including the author of a new biography.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not yet stood trial. As indicated by Johnson on Wednesday, many in Congress, including senior Democrats, have cited the lack of a conviction when opposing previous attempts to expel Santos, saying to do so without the verdict of a court would set a dangerous precedent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat in the closely divided Senate, is under indictment for alleged corruption. He denies wrongdoing.In Santos’s case, his own party generated a previous attempt to expel him. But it took a damning House ethics committee report, issued this month and detailing the use of campaign funds for expenses including Botox treatment and luxury purchases, to change the political equation.Johnson must govern with a narrow and unruly majority. A Santos exit would eat into that margin but Johnson this week attempted to persuade Santos to quit before he could be thrown out.Santos has said he will not run again but his refusal to quit prompted an unnamed Republican to tell Axios he thought Santos wanted the “notoriety” of becoming the sixth person ever forcibly expelled.If Santos is removed, his New York district, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens, will have a special election within 90 days. More

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      ‘George Santos models himself pretty directly off Trump’ – biographer Mark Chiusano

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      “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.” So says Matt Damon in the title role of The Talented Mr Ripley, the Oscar-winning film from 1999. The line would make a fitting political epitaph for George Santos, the New York Republican facing imminent expulsion from Congress after a scathing House ethics committee report cited “overwhelming evidence” of lawbreaking.Santos, 35, also faces federal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, false statements, falsification of records, aggravated identity theft and credit card fraud, in a 23-count indictment in his home state. If convicted, he is likely to spend years in prison.“This story is a tragedy,” says Mark Chiusano, author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, a book published this week. “He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years.“The sad thing is that he realises pretty early on that he’s not going to get there, he’s not going to be able to make a ton of money on Wall Street, he’s not going to be as famous as The Real Housewives, for example. Because of the difficulty and grittiness of the usual road to the American dream, he decides to go a different route.“He starts making everything up, rather than [be like] members of his family who just kept their heads down and worked hard and tried to build a life. He tries to take this shortcut and the shortcut eventually catches up with him and it’s a real tragedy. He has no one to blame but himself but he is in a very difficult place now.”Chiusano, 33, covered Santos at Newsday, a newspaper serving Long Island. He first spoke to Santos by phone in 2019, when he was announcing a run for Congress. When Chiusano asked where the launch would happen, he was surprised to hear Santos say right now – even though the candidate was in Florida.The author recalls: “That was the first strangeness of him and then I kept writing about other strange things he was doing. It was unclear where he lived, whether he even really lived in the district, his QAnon slogan promoting – all sorts of strange things for the next two cycles.”Like Ripley, Chiusano discovered that Santos can be charming. “One of the things that almost everyone I talked to who knew him said is he’s very charismatic and it’s true. He has a big personality. He’s a tall man. He makes friends easily. He’s a fun guy to hang out with.“I got a little bit of that sense in our phone calls but the flip side is that he can turn nasty and cutting very quickly, which he certainly did with his financial victims and to a lesser extent with me, just starting to get more critical and angry, and I’m sure there’s more of that to come once the book comes out.”Santos did not cooperate for the book.‘This hustling, grifting lifestyle’In 2020, up against an incumbent, Santos lost the election by more than 12 points. But two years later the incumbent was gone, redistricting worked in Republicans’ favour and there was local frustration over Covid and crime. Santos won New York’s third congressional district, which encompasses parts of Nassau county and Queens.His biography came under intense scrutiny – and began to fall apart. Among his most spectacular lies: his grandparents fled the Holocaust; his mother was caught up in the 9/11 attacks in New York; he was the “star” of the Baruch College volleyball team; he worked for the Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; he was a producer on the failed Broadway show Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark; he “lost four employees” in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.Furthermore, it emerged that in 2008 Santos, who has deployed an array of pseudonyms, was charged by Brazilian prosecutors for using a fake name and a stolen chequebook to buy goods including tennis shoes. Also, in 2016 he allegedly took $3,000 from an online fundraiser intended to help save the life of a dog owned by a disabled military veteran.It seems there was no “loss of innocence” or “turning point” for Santos. Raised in New York by Brazilian migrants, he was always a fabulist leaving a trail of victims.“One thing that struck me in reporting the book is how committed he was to this hustling, grifting lifestyle from a very early age,” Chiusano says.When Santos was in high school, he cheated his sister’s 16-year-old friend, who spoke little English, out of video game equipment and technology worth hundreds of dollars.“This kid saw Santos as a kind of older brother figure, a mentor looking out for him, which is a through line with Santos: he’ll befriend you and be very charming and charismatic before he turns. He did turn on this kid and the kid ended up going back to Brazil pretty empty-handed.”Not even Santos’s family was safe. Chiusano adds: “I write in the book about how he mooches off his very elderly and religiously devout grandmother, who’s living in Brazil. He gets money off her to fund his fun lifestyle in Brazil as a late adolescent teenager.“In New York he is stealing from his Aunt Elma, who again is this woman who worked very hard to build a life in New York and seems to have doted on Santos and he used that to his benefit. This commitment to doing whatever he can to make a couple of bucks is a through line in his life up to the present.”Interviewees agreed that this goes beyond everyday grifting. “A story that I heard many times was a version of: ‘Santos was talking to me and told me X and not only was it fake but he really believed it.’ The idea that he believed the lies he was telling was something that many people thought was the case.”Chiusano spent weeks in Brazil tracking down people who remember Santos as a drag queen and beauty pageant hopeful.“The Brazil piece of his story was important to the book because it shows Santos at this major moment of his development, which is that he’s in Brazil away from the New York life he knew. No one knows who he is that well so he can pretend to be this other person.“He pretends to be a very wealthy person, someone who’s on his way up in the world, using his American background to seem more impressive than he actually is. I talked to a lot of people down there who knew him and this, of course, is when he is experimenting with dressing in drag.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This has been a controversial part of Santos’s story. There’s a couple of famous pictures and videos of him dancing in drag but he claims that these pictures are all that there was. That was not what I found when I went down there and talked to people who remembered him as a drag queen.”Santos is married to a man named Matt. Yet he has endorsed Florida’s hardline “don’t say gay” bill and aligned himself with far-right Republicans who scaremonger about drag queens in schools and advocate book bans. Does he have any true political convictions or are these, too, just an act?Chiusano finds it hard to say. “He has flipped on so many things. He’s flip-flopped on abortion. He claims that he was no rightwinger and now he is very much associated with the far right of the Republican party. He’s definitely flipped and he’ll definitely say whatever he needs to satisfy an audience.“But there do seem to be some core conservative beliefs. Many members of his family are pretty conservative. They’re pretty pro-[Jair] Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who’s very conservative. I don’t think that he is secretly a super-lefty guy who is making this up. He’s conservative but he takes any opportunity that is laid in his path.”Santos belongs to what Chiusano dubs “the shamelessness caucus” in Congress, along with provocateurs such as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. “They are there mostly to get more attention for themselves,” Chiusano says. “They don’t seem to have so much interest in governing and he has joined them, sometimes voting in concert with them, co-sponsoring bills with them. Obviously a lot of people are very angry at him in Congress and are not giving him the time of day but he does have these friends on the far right.”Long obsessed with celebrity – his old tweets betray a fascination with Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton and The Real Housewives – Santos got rich in a political era in which fame is the ultimate currency.“Some of these more shameless members feel a sense of impunity, that it doesn’t matter what they say,” Chiusano says. “In fact, the crazier that they sound, the more social media clout they have.“This is the result of breakdown of all these American institutions including the media and the party system, which used to be gatekeepers that helped give voters a better sense of here’s who this person is, but also weeding out candidates who should not have gotten to higher office. This is a very modern thing and he is a symptom of the disease. He’s not the disease itself.”‘A scary idea’There is not much doubt about Santos’s political mentor: Donald Trump.Chiusano continues: “Santos models himself pretty directly off Trump. Trump is this almost sui generis figure who is kind of shaping the Republican party and he himself is the result of all these other political forces outside himself. But Trump is a person who was already famous and already had at least a perception of being very rich and certainly had more resources that Santos did.“You can see how someone like that was able to harness these crazy political forces and become president. What’s interesting to me is the Santos story shows that even a regular person can be lying and shameless and get to office and that is, in some senses, almost scarier than someone like Trump being able to do it. If there can be many Trumps who aren’t as rich and powerful as Trump and still lie their way to office, that’s a scary idea.”But it does not appear that Santos could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. The House ethics committee detailed extravagant – and possibly illegal – spending of campaign money, including thousands of dollars on Botox, luxury brands such as Hermès, and “smaller purchases” from OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content.Consequently, Santos looks set to be expelled from Congress, as even Republicans run out of patience, and has said he will not run again. He has no Trump-style option to pardon himself. But Chiusano does not believe this is the last the world will hear of George Santos.“These charges are very significant and he’s facing an uphill battle but he wouldn’t be in jail for a hundred years, like Sam Bankman-Fried seems likely to be. As far as we know now, if he’s convicted, he’ll get out as a relatively young man. I definitely see a second act for him, maybe not in elected politics but certainly in the Dancing with the Stars/rightwing podcast game. It would be back to his original love of celebrity.”
      The Fabulist is published in the US by One Signal/Atria More

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      in US Politics

      ‘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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      in US Politics

      ‘It doesn’t look good’: George Santos expects to be expelled from Congress

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      Republican George Santos has said he expects to be expelled from Congress following a scathing report by the House ethics committee that found substantial evidence of lawbreaking by the lying New York representative.In a defiant speech Friday sprinkled with taunts and obscenities aimed at his congressional colleagues, Santos insisted he was “not going anywhere”. But he acknowledged that his time as a member of Congress may soon be coming to an end.“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” he said Friday night during a conversation on X Spaces. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”The comments came one week after the Republican chair of the House ethics committee, Michael Guest, introduced a resolution to expel Santos once the body returns from Thanksgiving break.While Santos has survived two expulsion votes, many of his colleagues who formerly opposed the effort now say they support it, citing the findings of the committee’s months-long investigation into a wide range of alleged misconduct committed by Santos.The report found Santos used campaign funds for personal purposes, such as purchases at luxury retailers and adult content websites, then caused the campaign to file false or incomplete reports.“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” investigators wrote. They noted that he did not cooperate with the report and repeatedly “evaded” straightforward requests for information.On Friday, Santos said he did not want to address the specifics of the report, which he claimed were “slanderous” and “designed to force me out of my seat”. Any defense of his conduct, he said, could be used against him in the ongoing criminal case brought by federal prosecutors.Instead, Santos struck a contemplative tone during the three-hour livestream, tracing his trajectory from Republican “It girl” to “the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress”. He lashed out at his congressional colleagues, accusing them of misconduct – such as voting while drunk – that he said was far worse than anything he’d done.“They all act like they’re in ivory towers with white pointy hats and they’re untouchable,” he said. “Within the ranks of United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of shystie backgrounds.”His decision not to seek re-election, he said, was not because of external pressure, but due to his frustration with the “sheer arrogance” of his colleagues.“These people need to understand it’s done when I say it’s done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it to be done,” he added. “That’s kind of where we are there.” More

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      George Santos faces new move to expel him from Congress after ethics report

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      The embattled Republican US representative George Santos faced a fresh effort to expel him from Congress on Friday, the day after fellow lawmakers released a report that suggested federal prosecutors should bring additional criminal charges against him.The House of Representatives ethics committee chairman, Michael Guest, introduced the bill targeting the first-term lawmaker from New York, who is now known as much for being a fabulist and a criminal defendant as a politician.Santos has been engulfed in scandal since his 2022 election, following revelations that he lied about much of his past and federal fraud charges.Santos, 35, previously pleaded not guilty to federal charges of laundering campaign funds to pay for personal expenses and charging the credit cards of donors without permission, among other campaign finance violations.Guest, a Republican, released a statement on Friday that said, in part: “The evidence uncovered in the ethics committee’s investigative subcommittee investigation is more than sufficient to warrant punishment and the most appropriate punishment, is expulsion. So, separate from the committee process and my role as chairman, I have filed an expulsion resolution.”The resolution also includes the remark that: “Santos must be held accountable to the highest standards of conduct in order to safeguard the public’s faith in this institution.”The House, which Republicans control by a narrow 221-213 majority, is expected to vote on the expulsion effort when it returns from a two-week recess, so as soon as 28 November. Santos’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Despite the narrow margin in the House, Santos is not likely to get support from the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, who described the report’s findings as “very troubling”, according to a statement from his spokesperson, Raj Shah.“Speaker Johnson encourages all involved to consider the best interests of the institution as this matter is addressed further,” Shah said.Santos’s district, which includes a small slice of New York City and some of its eastern suburbs, is seen as competitive.The bipartisan ethics committee on Thursday released a report into Santos’s alleged campaign finance fraud, which documented a pattern of poor bookkeeping and misuse of campaign funds so pervasive that his election “has called into question the integrity of the House”. Santos said on Thursday he would not run for re-election in 2024, but refused to step down before then.The ethics committee said it referred more “uncharged and unlawful conduct” to the justice department for possible criminal prosecution.The report also detailed extravagant – and possibly illegal – spending of campaign money, including thousands of dollars on Botox treatments, luxury brands such as Hermès, and “smaller purchases” from OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content.A motion to expel requires two-thirds support in the House. Last time, 182 Republicans voted against expulsion as they need Santos’s seat to protect their narrow House majority, that result is expected to be less favorable to Santos next time.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      George Santos: the four strands of the Republican congressman’s web of lies

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      George Santos’s extensive lies and financial improprieties have started to catch up to the New York representative, with criminal charges in New York and a newly released House ethics committee report.The congressman built a campaign on a fake résumé, made-up personal stories and a host of complex financial transactions that benefited his personal bank account, the report and other reporting show. His falsehoods ranged from serious to mundane and, at times, bizarre.“Representative Santos’ congressional campaigns were built around his backstory as a successful man of means: a grandson of Holocaust survivors and graduate from Baruch College with a Master’s in Business Administration from New York University, who went on to work at Citi Group and Goldman Sachs, owned multiple properties, and was the beneficiary of a family trust worth millions of dollars left by his mother, who passed years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a result of long-term health effects related to being at one of the towers,” the House ethics report says.“No part of that backstory has been found to be true.”Financial irregularitiesThe House ethics report concluded that Santos used campaign funds and his position to enrich himself. He allegedly claimed to have loaned his campaign money, despite not having done so, then paid himself back. His financial disclosure forms were not accurate, and, the report said, one was “filled with falsehoods designed to make him appear wealthier than he was and furthered the fictional persona he had concocted by falsely reporting more than half a million dollars in loans to the FEC”.He also used campaign funds for personal purposes. Some examples in the House report: purchases at Ferragamo and Hermès, hotel stays in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, ATM withdrawals, paying his personal rent and personal credit card bills, spa services like Botox and “smaller purchases” at OnlyFans, an adult content service.His campaign filed a list of false donors as another way to “artificially inflate” his required financial reports, the House investigation claims. The New York indictment further alleges Santos defrauded donors and charged their credit cards without authorization.The New York criminal charges include allegations that Santos improperly received unemployment insurance despite being employed at a $120,000-per-year job. He received more than $24,000 in unemployment benefits during the Covid-19 pandemic, the charges state.Ironically, Santos touted his financial acumen when running for office, claiming he had an “extensive background in money management/growth” and was “good at it”. This background would help the House during budgeting and serve his constituents well, he said.If they’d known about his inaccurate and false financial statements, the House ethics group said, “his constituents may have had cause to question whether he was actually ‘good at’ money management and growth, or balancing costs and budgets – or, indeed, whether he had any experience in finance at all”.Personal historyThe New York Times first detailed lengthy fictions Santos told about himself, his education and his work experience, finding that his résumé was beyond embellished and outright false. He didn’t receive degrees from the schools he claimed he had. He hadn’t worked jobs he included in his work history.He also claimed to be a landlord who owned 13 properties, though no records of any property ownership have been found for him.His background has also come into question. He claimed his grandparents were Jewish and fled Europe because of persecution during the second world war, but genealogical research by Forward contradicted his story.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSantos also said his mother was at the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks, but records show she was not in the US at that time.Stolen election claimsWhile claiming the 2020 election was stolen isn’t rare for congressional Republicans, Santos also boosted election denialism. In a speech on 5 January 2021, Santos claimed his election was stolen, as was Trump’s. He said he had been ahead in the vote count for days until the results changed, which happened because more ballots were counted.“They did to me what they did to Donald J Trump, they stole my election,” Santos said. He then asked the crowd: “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald J Trump?”Dog-related storiesA few stories about pets also plague Santos. He claimed to run a charity that rescued more than 2,500 animals, though the group wasn’t registered as a non-profit and it appears Santos’s claims related to its work were greatly exaggerated.In a strange side story, Santos was also charged with writing bad checks to dog breeders with “puppies” in the memo line, though he had the charge dismissed and his record expunged because he claimed someone stole his checkbook and wrote the checks in his name.In a separate fraud case in Brazil, Santos admitted he stole a man’s checkbook and made purchases with it.Yet another dog-related story claims Santos raised thousands of dollars in a GoFundMe to help a veteran who was homeless take care of his pit bull, then pocketed the money instead of helping the dog. More

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      George Santos will not seek re-election after House details ‘pervasive’ fraud

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      The New York Republican congressman, fabulist and criminal defendant George Santos said he would not seek re-election next year, after the US House ethics committee issued a report detailing “grave and pervasive campaign finance violations and fraudulent activity” and recommended action against him.“I will NOT be seeking re-election for a second term in 2024 as my family deserves better than to be under the gun from the press all the time,” Santos said, calling the report “biased” and “a disgusting politicised smear”.But after the report detailed his conduct, moves for a new expulsion resolution began.“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the committee said.“He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit.“He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign – and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported ‘repayments’ of those fictitious loans.“He used his connections to high-value donors and other political campaigns to obtain additional funds for himself through fraudulent or otherwise questionable business dealings. And he sustained all of this through a constant series of lies to his constituents, donors, and staff about his background and experience.”Santos, 35, was elected last year, as Republicans retook the House in part thanks to a strong performance in New York. But as his résumé unraveled amid increasingly picaresque reports about his life before entering Congress, including questions about his actual name, he admitted “embellishing” his record.Allegations of criminal behaviour emerged. Santos has now pleaded not guilty to 23 federal criminal charges, including laundering funds and defrauding donors.He has survived attempts to expel him from the House, including from members of his own party. Most recently, 31 Democrats voted against making him only the sixth member ever expelled, saying he should not be thrown out without being convicted. Three congressmen were expelled in 1861, for supporting the Confederacy in the civil war. Two have been expelled after being criminally convicted, the last in 2002.Republican leaders, beholden to a narrow majority, had said they would wait for the ethics report.On Thursday, the New York Democrat Dan Goldman said: “More than 10 months after Congressman [Ritchie] Torres and I filed a complaint … the committee has … concluded that George Santos defrauded his donors, filed false Federal Election Commission reports, and repeatedly broke the law in order to fraudulently win his election last November.”Promising to “file a motion to expel Santos from Congress once and for all” after the Thanksgiving break, Goldman said Republicans “no longer have any fictional excuse to protect Santos in order to preserve their narrow majority”.Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who has tried to expel Santos, said Santos should “end this farce and resign immediately. If he refuses, he must be removed from Congress. His conduct is not only unbecoming and embarrassing, it is criminal. He is unfit to serve and should resign today”.Mike Johnson, the new Republican speaker, has said Santos deserves due process. Speaking to Fox News last month, he also said Republicans had “no margin for error”.But according to the Washington Post, citing an anonymous source, Michael Guest of Mississippi, the Republican committee chair, planned to file a motion to expel Santos on Friday, setting up a possible vote after the Thanksgiving holiday next week.Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said she “intend[ed] to vote yes on any privileged expulsion resolution … as the work of the committee is now complete, and I am no longer obligated to maintain neutrality”.Santos said: “If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the ‘ethics committee’, they would have not released this biased report. The committee went to extraordinary lengths to smear myself and my legal team about me not being forthcoming (my legal bills suggest otherwise).“It is a disgusting politicised smear that shows the depths of how low our federal government has sunk. Everyone who participated in this grave miscarriage of justice should all be ashamed of themselves.”Somewhat optimistically, he called for a constitutional convention to formalise action against Joe Biden for supposed crimes. More contritely, Santos said he was “humbled yet again and reminded that I am human and I have flaws”.The report was accompanied by extensive appendices including evidence of apparent malpractice. Santos was shown to have spent donor money on vacations, luxury goods, Botox treatment and the website OnlyFans.One exhibit showed a suggestion by a staffer to place a microphone under a table bearing donuts for reporters, an offering that made headlines earlier this year.The committee said Santos had not cooperated, “continues to flout his statutory financial disclosure obligations and has failed to correct countless errors and omissions in his past [financial disclosure] statements, despite being repeatedly reminded … of his requirement to do so.“The [committee] also found that, despite his attempts to blame others for much of the misconduct, Representative Santos was a knowing and active participant in the wrongdoing. Particularly troubling was Representative Santos’ lack of candour during the investigation itself.”The committee said it would refer its findings to federal prosecutors. Members of Congress, it said, should take any action “appropriate and necessary … to fulfill the House’s constitutional mandate to police the conduct of its members”.Outside Congress, Brett Edkins, of the pressure group Stand Up America, said: “This report has one clear conclusion: Santos is wholly unfit to hold office.“If George Santos had any shame or remorse over deceiving hard-working New Yorkers and his colleagues in Congress, he would resign immediately. Instead, he continues to use every possible lie and excuse to cling to power … since he refuses to step down, House Republicans should grow a backbone and expel him.” More