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      George Santos Signals Intention to Seek Re-election in 2024

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      The move by Mr. Santos allows him to continue fund-raising as a prospective candidate and to spend campaign funds.Representative George Santos, the embattled Republican from New York facing criminal inquiries and ethics investigations, filed paperwork on Tuesday indicating his intent to run for re-election.The statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission does not guarantee that Mr. Santos, a first-term lawmaker representing parts of Long Island and Queens, will run for office next year.But it allows Mr. Santos to continue to raise money and spend it on various campaign-related expenses, including paying back the roughly $700,000 he lent to his campaign and paying any potential legal fees connected to the inquiries that he is currently facing.The filing also offers a clear signal that Mr. Santos is leaving the door open to defending his seat in Congress, even as he has been besieged by calls to resign from his constituents, a handful of local Republican officials in his district and fellow House members, including representatives from his own party.Mr. Santos did not respond to a message seeking comment.Mr. Santos’s political future has been severely questioned after revelations in The New York Times that he lied to voters about graduating from college, working for prestigious Wall Street firms and boasting an extensive real estate portfolio. Subsequent reporting by The Times and other outlets has also raised questions about his campaign’s fund-raising and spending practices.Federal prosecutors have been examining Mr. Santos’s campaign finances and personal business dealings, and local prosecutors in New York have been exploring Mr. Santos’s behavior during his campaign. Last month, the House Ethics Committee said it would investigate whether Mr. Santos broke laws tied to his campaign filings or his personal business.While Mr. Santos has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé and biography, he has denied any criminal wrongdoing. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has maintained that Mr. Santos was duly elected, and that the House would only take action if its Ethics Committee found cause.Yet many rank-and-file Republicans have raised concerns about Mr. Santos’s ability to properly serve constituents. Republicans in Nassau County on Long Island have said they would circumvent his office whenever possible, and 10 House Republicans have called on Mr. Santos to resign. Other Republican representatives have said they were hesitant to collaborate with Mr. Santos on legislation or party business.Mr. Santos has said he would not leave office unless all those voters who supported his campaign last year called on him to do so. A poll in January by Newsday and Siena College found that 78 percent of voters in Mr. Santos’s district wanted him to step down, including 71 percent of Republicans surveyed.Still, Mr. Santos appeared to bow to pressure in January, when he said he would temporarily recuse himself from sitting on two congressional committees. Mr. McCarthy said that he and Mr. Santos reached the decision jointly.But Mr. Santos has repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether he planned to run for re-election.In January, he repeatedly told reporters asking about his future plans that it was “too early” to answer. Last month, he told the Fox station in New York that he had not yet decided whether he would run in 2024.Mr. McCarthy — who endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign in 2022 — told reporters in Washington that he would “probably have a little difficulty” supporting Mr. Santos in a re-election bid.Local Republicans have also voiced their opposition to re-electing Mr. Santos: The Nassau County Republican Committee, a powerful local party organization, has resolutely said it would not support him in 2024.The committee’s chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., reiterated on Tuesday that Mr. Santos would not receive its endorsement.“If he decides to run, we will oppose and beat him,” Mr. Cairo said in a statement.The Federal Election Commission requires candidates to register if they raise or spend more than $5,000 toward an election, a threshold that Mr. Santos passed at the end of last year, according to campaign finance reports.Incumbent politicians are generally quick to register regardless of whether they have decided to run again, so they can continue to accept donations that can be used to pay old campaign debts.Those debts can include personal loans that candidates make to fund their campaigns, experts said. A Supreme Court decision last year cleared the way for candidates to be repaid well after their elections.Brett G. Kappel, an election lawyer, said that the commission’s guidance was also “pretty liberal” regarding the use of campaign money for legal expenses. Candidates can use funds for legal fees tied to “any investigation related to your status as an officeholder or candidate.” The inquiries into Mr. Santos’s campaign finances would likely qualify, he said.So far, only one other candidate has registered with the commission to fill Mr. Santos’s seat: Josh Lafazan, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully in last year’s primary. More

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      Democrats Put Early Money on New York to Retake the House

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      Democrats’ House super PAC plans to spend $45 million trying to flip as many as six seats Republicans won in 2022. It could set off a major spending contest.New York almost single-handedly cost Democrats their House majority in last fall’s midterm elections. Now, a leading Democratic group is preparing to pour record sums into the state, in hopes it can deliver the party back to power next year.House Majority PAC, the main super PAC aligned with congressional Democrats, will unveil a first-of-its-kind, $45 million fund this week dedicated to winning back four seats Republicans flipped in New York, and targeting two other competitive districts. Republicans currently control the chamber by only a five-seat margin.The planned Democratic infusion would dwarf outside spending in the state in recent election cycles, and reflects just how central traditionally blue New York has become to the national House battlefield for both parties. Of the 18 districts nationwide that President Biden won in 2020 that are now represented by Republicans, New York is home to six.“The path to the majority runs through New York,” Mike Smith, the group’s president, said in an interview outlining its plans. “It’s not just us seeing it. It is the Republican Party seeing it. It’s every donor around the country seeing it.”The announcement comes amid bitter Democratic infighting over how to regroup from last year’s whiplash elections. While the party outperformed expectations nationally, New York was a glaring outlier. On Election Day, Republicans here harnessed fears about rising crime and one-party Democratic rule to run a nearly clean sweep through competitive districts and secure their majority.Mr. Smith said his group was still raising the funds, but planned to move unusually early in the election cycle to try to reshape how voters view those six newly elected Republicans, who represent districts in Long Island, the Hudson Valley and Syracuse. Many of them succeeded in portraying themselves as common sense moderates in suburban territory, but they will enter a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers, as among the most endangered Republicans in the country.Among Democrats’ best cudgels may be one of those freshmen, Representative George Santos, the Republican who flipped a suburban Long Island seat only to watch his résumé unravel into a series of elaborate lies and potential frauds.Lawmakers called for the expulsion of Representative George Santos, who flipped a suburban Long Island seat, earlier this month.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“These freshman Republicans have no real track record to run on other than what’s happening in the national space,” Mr. Smith said. “And that’s George Santos, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the most extreme elements.”That effort is almost certain to set off a major spending war with Republicans, whose main super PAC has consistently out-raised and outspent House Majority PAC nationally. In New York, the Democratic group spent around $13 million last year, while Republicans’ Congressional Leadership Fund pumped in at least $21 million.Unlike traditional candidates or party committees, dark money groups can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.The Congressional Leadership Fund has yet to detail its strategy for 2024. But on Tuesday, several vulnerable House Republicans — Mr. Santos not among them — established a new joint fund-raising committee named “New York Majority Makers,” designed to help bundle smaller contributions to protect their seats.And in a sign of their significance to party leaders, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was scheduled to make an early fund-raising stop New York in March. The event will help at least one at-risk incumbent build an early fund-raising advantage while Democrats are still recruiting challengers.Cash is only one factor that could tip the balance of power. To be successful, Democrats will also have to revamp their own image in certain parts of New York where voters rejected them last fall.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the party’s new House leader, has called for a careful review of what went wrong. But for now, the party’s progressive and moderate wings have vastly different prescriptions on how to address concerns about public safety and rising living costs that are especially acute here. The party’s left flank has spent months agitating to remove the more moderate chairman of the state party, Jay Jacobs, who they believe has overseen a moribund organization.In the interview, Mr. Smith said that Democrats had let Republican candidates dominate the conversation around crime last year, which “definitely hurt us.”“There is no getting around the top of the ticket concerns,” he said, referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, who waited until the campaign’s final weeks to aggressively counter Republicans’ attacks on the issue and won by a narrower than expected margin. “That is a big part of how we got to where we are today.”Still, at least on paper, many of the districts could easily change hands in a presidential election year, when Democrats historically turn out in higher numbers.In the suburbs of Westchester and Rockland counties, Representative Michael Lawler defeated his Democratic opponent by less than a percentage point last fall by running as a moderate focused on issues like crime and inflation. Now, he has to win another term in a district that Mr. Biden won by 10 points in 2020 and where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to two.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, another relative centrist, faces similarly daunting numbers on the South Shore of Long Island, where a wave of Republican enthusiasm — and depressed turnout by Black voters — helped him narrowly win a district Mr. Biden won by 14 points.Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who narrowly won a House race on the South Shore of Long Island, may face a tougher race in 2024.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesRepresentatives Brandon Williams and Marc Molinaro will be defending Democratic-leaning districts around Syracuse and in the Hudson Valley. Representative Nick LaLota likely faces an easier race on the East End of Long Island, which narrowly voted for Mr. Biden but has been friendly ground to Republican congressional candidates for a decade now.And then there is Mr. Santos, who has not indicated clearly whether he will seek a second term in a district that Mr. Biden won by eight points. Nearly every other New York Republican freshman has called on him to resign, and local party leaders have vowed to back a primary challenger. More

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      ‘The Democratic Party in New York Is a Disaster’

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests. “Only in this country can the kid who came from the basement in Jackson Heights … ,” George Santos began, before he was momentarily overwhelmed. “To everybody watching, I want you to know that the American dream is worth fighting for. It’s worth defending, and that’s why I jumped into this race.”In another era — two or four years ago, perhaps — the Santos saga, with its absurd cascade of lies, would have been an amusing sideshow for many Democratic politicians, who would have been able to mock the chaos and move on, comfortably sure that Santos, who fabricated much of his personal and financial biography, would only further hobble a neutered Republican minority. But the new congressman, now under investigation by local and federal authorities, was instead a crucial cog in Kevin McCarthy’s House majority, having flipped the redrawn Third Congressional District in New York, an area that had been represented by Democrats for decades, by eight points.These days, New York is known as the deep-blue state where Democrats lost four seats on the way to losing the House of Representatives and effectively halting President Biden’s domestic agenda for the next two years. Kathy Hochul, who served as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before accusations of sexual harassment and assault forced him from office in 2021, won the narrowest race for governor in 28 years, beating Lee Zeldin, a Trump-supporting congressman from Long Island, by less than six points. While forecasts for a national red wave didn’t materialize — Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate were largely triumphant in tossup races across the country, and Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn remained the Senate majority leader — Democrats stumbled in territory on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley that Biden won handily just two years earlier.These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)National parties function as enormous umbrella organizations, determining the presidential primary calendar and the process for allocating delegates at the national conventions. The drudgery of running elections is left to the local and state parties, as well as individual campaigns and independent political action committees.Kathy Hochul won the narrowest race for New York governor in 28 years.Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Sipa USA, via Associated PressElsewhere in the country, state Democratic parties are much more robust than they are in New York. In Wisconsin, under the leadership of 42-year-old Ben Wikler, the party offered crucial organizing muscle in Gov. Tony Evers’s re-election win, staving off a Republican statewide sweep. The Nevada Democratic Party, despite infighting among moderates and progressives, aided Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election, investing strongly in rural voter engagement. And in California, the party chair position is publicly contested among multiple candidates, with delegates voting as Democrats traverse the state and make their case in the media.As for New York, observers across the ideological spectrum agree that the state is entering an unprecedented era, with warring political factions and a glaring power vacuum. Hochul recently became the first governor in New York history to have the State Legislature, controlled by Democrats, vote down her nominee to the state’s highest court. Progressives spearheaded opposition to the judge, Hector LaSalle, arguing that he was too conservative.In challenging Hochul from the right, Zeldin was savagely effective — “Vote like your life depends on it,” he exhorted, echoing Richard Nixon, in the final days of the campaign — in seizing on suburban anxieties around rising crime that Republicans in other states weren’t able to successfully exploit. While Manhattan and the combined might of upper-income white and middle-class Black voters thwarted Zeldin in the five boroughs, he made notable inroads with working-class Asian Americans, potentially heralding a political realignment for the city’s fastest growing demographic. Hochul’s campaign was assailed for its relative listlessness and failure to counter Republican attacks on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Nancy Pelosi chided the governor. (Hochul’s staff did not make her available for an interview.)Within the confines of New York, Democrats remain historically dominant, retaining veto-proof majorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats, as is the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. But this is a recent shift: Republicans controlled the State Senate almost continuously from the mid-1960s until 2019. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, led the state for 12 years, and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran New York City from 1994 through 2013.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Heading into 2022, Democrats were confident that after decades of Republican rule in the State Legislature, they could entirely control the state’s redistricting process, engineering favorable House maps for the fall. After a quasi-independent commission deadlocked — critics argued that it was designed to fail when Cuomo helped create it a decade ago — Democratic state legislators redrew lines that strongly favored their party. Republicans sued in court, claiming that the Democrats’ maps violated an anti-gerrymandering clause in the State Constitution. To the shock of many political insiders, the Republicans won their court battle, and an outside special master was appointed by an upstate Republican judge to quickly draw new lines. House primaries were shoved from June to August.With the special master prioritizing competitiveness, not incumbency advantage, Democrats found themselves thrown together in some of the same districts. Representative Jerry Nadler was pitted in a nasty primary against his longtime colleague Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan. (Nadler would prevail.) North of the city, Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pugilistic centrist, decided to run in a new district spanning Rockland and Westchester that included far more turf than had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a neighboring progressive.“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones fumed at the time. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism” against Jones, who is Black. Maloney held his ground, and Jones was forced to move to a new district in New York City, where he would lose in an August primary. Maloney fended off a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who ran far to his left. Then, despite a titanic war chest, he fell to Mike Lawler, a Republican state legislator, by less than a point. Jones tweeted one word: “Yikes.”And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.Protesters outside City Hall in New York in January, including Jumaane Williams, argued that Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, was responsible for losing four congressional seats.Kena Betancur/VIEWpress, via Getty Images“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”Until Cuomo’s downfall, Jacobs was known as a close ally of the imperious governor. His first tenure as party chairman came under Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, but his second began in 2019, a year after Cuomo won a commanding re-election. That election cycle was notable because Cuomo overcame a primary challenge from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who targeted him from the ascendant left. Though Nixon lost, six insurgent progressives defeated members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway group of centrist Democrats who had spent the last half decade in an unusual — and incredibly infuriating to progressives — power-sharing arrangement with State Senate Republicans. The I.D.C. had existed with Cuomo’s blessing, joining with Republicans to foil liberal priorities in the State Legislature, like tuition assistance for undocumented immigrants, tougher tenant protections and criminal-justice reforms. For Cuomo, a triangulating centrist determined to avoid having to sign or veto progressive bills while harboring dreams of the national stage, the arrangement worked just fine. (In 2018, I took a break from writing to run for State Senate myself, losing in a Brooklyn Democratic primary.)Since the state party, historically, has been a creature of the governor or the most powerful Democrat in the state, Jacobs is safe as long as Hochul tolerates him. And Hochul, some Democrats say, owes Jacobs for the work he did behind closed doors to ensure that the new governor had a comfortable primary win after Cuomo resigned and immediately began to plot a comeback. Jacobs’s fear was that a divided field could pave the way for a Cuomo revival, and he worked to rapidly hustle up institutional and financial support for Hochul that helped to deter another challenger, Attorney General Letitia James, from running against her.In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.A year later, Jacobs explored ways of undercutting the established vehicle for left-wing organizing in the state, the Working Families Party, a hybrid of party activists and labor unions that had endorsed Jumaane Williams over Hochul in the primary. He cut a check to a more moderate Democrat trying to primary Jamaal Bowman, a Westchester County congressman and a member of the Squad, the prominent group of far-left members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. After Republicans swept Democrats out of power in the New York suburbs last fall, Jacobs quickly blamed the left. “New York did underperform, but so did California,” Jacobs told the politics publication City & State in November. “What do those two states have in common? Well, governmentally, we’re among the two most progressive states in the country.”Jacobs is under fire from the party’s more progressive wing, which is calling for his ouster, but so far has had Gov. Hochul’s support.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA 67-year-old political lifer, Jacobs has an unrelated day job overseeing a string of popular and lucrative summer camps in upstate New York, in Pennsylvania and on Long Island, where he lives. Democratic business is often run out of a TLC Family of Camps office in Glen Cove, a small town on Nassau County’s Gold Coast. Politicos and journalists who want to reach Jacobs know to email his Camp TLC address; Jacobs cc’d his chief of staff at that summer-camp address to help arrange a telephone interview that lasted an hour, despite Jacobs’s initial hesitancy about going on the record.“People believe that the state party runs all the campaigns, determines the messaging, does the opposition research for every candidate and, you know, when a candidate anywhere loses, it’s the fault of the state party, and all of that is just not an accurate view of the function of the state party and what we actually do,” Jacobs said.Jacobs described the party as a “housekeeping organization” and a “coordinating entity” that works among labor unions, campaigns and other interest groups. He cited the maintenance of a voter file that campaigns use to target the electorate as among its most important work, as well as establishing campaign offices at election time. Fund-raising, too, is a big part of the work, and it’s there where Jacobs has been especially useful. A multimillionaire and prolific donor, Jacobs has given more than $1 million to various Democratic candidates and causes over the last two decades. It can be argued that it’s this wealth, in part, that has allowed him to continuously lead the Nassau County party since 2001. Few staunch Democrats are both better wired and more willing to cut checks than Jacobs.“How I run my businesses and my charitable donations and the rest would indicate, as well as my personal beliefs, would indicate that I’m really, personally, quite progressive, more so than most people would think,” Jacobs said. Rather, he argued, his message is direct: “Slow down. You’re going too fast. What you’re doing is going to lose us votes in the suburbs and rural areas.”In an unusual move for a party leader, Jacobs last year backed the rivals of several incumbent Democrats. His motivation, he told me, was “the behavior of some of these folks that are speaking on behalf of what I’d refer to as the far left. They practice the politics of personal destruction. They won’t argue the merits of what I say, but they’ll condemn me — and others, by the way, not just me — in really vitriolic terms, personal and the rest. Some of the reasons why I personally gave to some of the primaries — it was just a handful of people — it’s because of what they said about me. Personally.”Last August, Jacobs donated $2,900 — the maximum allowable amount — to a county legislator trying to unseat Bowman. The congressman won by 38 points anyway.“I don’t know Jay Jacobs,” Bowman told me. “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I’ve never met him in my life. Even though I was a newcomer in 2020, I was still duly elected, and I’m a member of the party now. One would’ve thought that the leader of the party would have reached out to have a cup of coffee or have a conversation.”Should Jacobs resign? “The short answer is yes,” Bowman answered. “But the more, I think, comprehensive nuanced answer or question is, What the hell are we even doing? You know, the whole thing about the corporate agenda, which I think Jay Jacobs and maybe even Governor Hochul and maybe others are missing is, when you talk about younger voters, millennials or Gen Z, they are not aligned with corporate interests over labor and working-class people.”But Jacobs has plenty of defenders, including county leaders across the state, who believe he’s an upgrade over his somnolent or domineering predecessors and has a realistic view of what it takes to win beyond the liberal confines of New York City. “It’s hard for me to understand this rancor from certain individuals, by the way, who never seem to be satisfied,” says Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “Only in New York could Jay win every single statewide election and hold the supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate and be chastised.”Gregory Meeks, the Queens congressman and chairman of the county organization there, echoes Jacobs’s critique: The progressive and socialist left has cost Democrats in general elections by forcing them to defend positions he believes are alienating. “Extremes cannot be the dominant part of a party, because it isolates everyone else,” Meeks says. “What’s not good for all of us is talking about defunding the police.”Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff. Among some Hochul allies, there has been quiet frustration directed at one of her top advisers, Adam Sullivan, who speaks frequently with Jacobs on Hochul’s behalf. Sullivan holds great sway in Hochul’s world because he managed her successful campaign for Congress more than a decade ago. Despite his low profile and the fact that his consulting firm, ACS Campaign Consulting, is based in Colorado, where he lives, Sullivan was one of a select few aides Hochul thanked in her victory speech. Sullivan himself disputes that there’s any behind-the-scenes friction. “The governor is completely committed to building a strong, robust party,” Sullivan says. “Everyone in her orbit is on the same page.” What isn’t clear is whether that page, and the vision for the future of the state party, includes Jacobs.Even Jacobs’s detractors acknowledge that dumping him and hunting for a replacement is only the beginning of a political project that will take many years. (Floated successors include Adriano Espaillat, a congressman who has built a strong operation among Dominican Americans in Upper Manhattan; Grace Meng, a Queens congresswoman and Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman who is the first Asian American elected to the House from New York; and Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens state senator.)All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”Through the first half of the 20th century, Tammany Hall, with origins as an Irish Catholic society in the late 1700s, was the embodiment of the local Democratic Party, using patronage to secure power and dominating state and city politics alike. Nothing equivalent rose to take its place. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would compare the state party right now to the machine that existed 50, 60, 70 years ago,” says Paterson, the former governor who later served as state party chairman during Cuomo’s tenure.New York never had a Harry Reid figure, a singularly powerful Democrat who took an obsessive interest in party building. The two Cuomos, Mario and his son Andrew, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years, and each treated the party organization as little more than a tool for self-promotion. A liberal icon to the rest of America for his soaring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mario Cuomo was assailed at home for barely lifting a finger to aid Democrats desperately trying to retake the State Senate. In 1990, The Times reported that Cuomo was hoarding more than $5 million for his own campaign while spending none for the State Senate Democrats, who were outspent 4 to 1 by Republicans. In 1994, the state party spent almost $2 million to aid Cuomo’s failed re-election effort while offering less than $30,000 apiece for the candidates for attorney general and state comptroller. By the end of the year, the party was moribund and completely broke, running up a million-dollar debt.The only Democratic governor in modern times to care about the future of the state party and down-ballot candidates was Eliot Spitzer, who won a landslide victory in 2006 and would resign, a little more than a year later, in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer was a proud liberal who wanted to break the Republican hold on the State Senate. The party, too, was trying to modernize in anticipation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president. For a brief period, under the leadership of Denny Farrell, an influential state assemblyman from Manhattan, talented operatives were hired, and Spitzer’s aides tried to implement a strategy for boosting legislative candidates.“The party itself had really dissipated,” recalls Spitzer, now a real estate developer. His team helped recruit and fund an upstate Democratic candidate who won a pivotal special election for a State Senate seat in early 2008. “It was partly fund-raising, partly finding the right candidates, partly putting the right energy into it.”Andrew Cuomo at a news conference in 2021, a few months before he announced his resignation. The two Cuomos, Andrew and his father Mario, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years.Mary Altaffer/Getty ImagesThe rise of Andrew Cuomo, who had a near-dictatorial hold on political affairs for nearly the entirety of the 2010s, put an end to nascent party-building plans. Cuomo treated Democratic politics as an extension of Cuomo politics, hoovering up resources and kneecapping Democrats he viewed as a threat. He was content to let Republicans keep the State Senate and rarely campaigned for House candidates. Donald Trump’s election, coupled with Sanders’s 2016 bid, would radicalize a new generation of Democrats. Soon, a democratic socialist candidate was winning a State Senate seat, and Working Families Party-supported insurgents were driving out the conservative Democrats who had chosen to align themselves with the Republican Party.By 2018, Ocasio-Cortez had felled one of the most powerful party bosses in New York, a sign that the left could win its battles against the establishment. “We need Democrats who are not running from their own shadow,” says Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party.The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.“What we saw is a party that did not know what role they should play,” Nnaemeka says, “and therefore played no role.”Ross Barkan writes frequently on New York and national politics. He is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid’s impact on New York City. This is his first article for the magazine. More

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      Gillibrand, Looking Left, Launches Campaign For a Third Term

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      Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York will be a heavy favorite to defend her seat in 2024, but a primary challenge could still emerge.Ending months of speculation about her future, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a liberal Democrat from upstate New York, announced in recent days that she would seek a third full term next year.Ms. Gillibrand, 56, enters the contest as a heavy favorite. The seat is considered safely Democratic, particularly in a presidential election year. And she has $4.4 million in cash and a string of recent legislative accomplishments — campaign assets she outlined in a memo rolling out her run last week.On Thursday, Ms. Gillibrand said she was confident she would win despite Republicans’ strong performance in the state in November. She also dismissed rumors that had swirled among New York Democrats in recent months that she might give up the seat.“I love being senator of New York, and I think my ability to deliver for our state has never been greater,” she said in a phone interview from Israel, where she was part of a Senate delegation visiting the country.The most pressing question facing her campaign now is whether anyone from her own party will try to challenge her. After a string of high-profile primaries from the left in New York, Democratic strategists, politicians and donors have spent months speculating whether an ambitious young member of Congress, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ritchie Torres, would take on Ms. Gillibrand.Since her appointment in 2009, the senator has made herself one of the chamber’s most vocal proponents for women and families and has shed some moderate stances on guns and immigrations to become a reliably liberal vote. Those positions could make her difficult to defeat, particularly after she passed long-term priorities this term to combat gun trafficking and overhaul the way military sexual assault cases are adjudicated.But some critics have said that since an ill-fated run for president in 2020, Ms. Gillibrand has at times appeared aloof from her home state and restless for another office, fueling speculation about her intentions. Nor has she benefited — fairly or not — from comparisons with the state’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, whose omnipresence at even the smallest New York political gatherings and stature as the Senate majority leader have often left her in his shadow.In the interview, Ms. Gillibrand said that she was committed to her current role and had “unfinished work” on Capitol Hill, including a national paid family and medical leave plan.She detailed plans for a campaign to address concerns about crime, which helped Republicans notch their best performance in decades, and to increase outreach to urban and suburban communities that slipped from the party last fall. And she said that another run for the White House was “not in the cards for me in the next cycle.”She also dismissed the threat of a primary. “I’m not concerned about that, and I would put my record against anyone,” she said.Among the most frequently discussed potential challengers are Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a national leader of the party’s left wing, and Mr. Torres, a more moderate second-term congressman. Both are young, charismatic, ambitious lawmakers of color who live in the Bronx and could, in theory, put together compelling campaigns. But so far, there are no signs that either one is taking serious steps toward a direct confrontation.Ms. Ocasio-Cortez allowed a similar bubble of speculation to build around whether she would challenge Mr. Schumer in 2022 but ultimately did not pursue it. Her spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, declined to comment for this story.Mr. Torres recently cut a $10,000 check to Ms. Gillibrand’s re-election fund, one of her aides said — not typically a sign of antagonism. Asked by text on Wednesday if he was considering a primary, Mr. Torres said, “The answer to your question is ‘no.’”Strategists close to New York’s Working Families Party and other left-leaning groups said their movement was now debating how to recalibrate after embarrassing losses in high-profile citywide and statewide races in 2021 and 2022. Besides, with her liberal track record, Ms. Gillibrand is not a top target.“From where I am sitting, I don’t see a real appetite for a challenge,” said Camille Rivera, a Democratic strategist well connected in New York’s left-leaning political circles.But Ms. Rivera said the senator does need to make some changes. “She definitely does need to be more present, but I found that she does a lot of work,” Ms. Rivera continued. “Mostly it’s taking on harder local issues like homelessness, affordable housing and mental health. ”It is no clearer whom Republicans might put forward to challenge Ms. Gillibrand. Chele Farley, the party’s nominee who lost to Ms. Gillibrand by 33 points in 2018, said she was “focused on supporting the new Republican House majority” and had not thought about 2024.Associates of Lee Zeldin, the former Republican congressman who came within six points of defeating Gov. Kathy Hochul last fall, said he had spoken about the race, but they discounted the chances he would run. In a statement, Mr. Zeldin said he was fielding calls about “various positions in government” but did not have “any update on that front to announce at this time.”Behind the scenes, Ms. Gillibrand has set a busy pace in recent weeks, leaving nothing to chance. She has met with prominent labor leaders, county Democratic leaders across New York and several deep-pocketed donors.Many of those Democratic leaders appear to be doing their best to keep a clear field for her.A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Angelo Roefaro, said the senior senator from New York would be fully supportive of Ms. Gillibrand’s campaign. Prominent union leaders made the point more starkly.“My advice to anyone thinking of a primary is, don’t do it,” said John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which represents 34,000 New York transit workers.“She’s the exact type of Democrat that has what it takes to stop the Republicans from swiping even more ground in New York State,” added Mr. Samuelsen, who recently had lunch with Ms. Gillibrand in Washington. “And she’s exactly the kind of Democrat that will fend off a challenge from the progressive left.” More

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      Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans

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      In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.A 2021 background check revealed that Mr. Santos had likely lied about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, which The New York Times publicly revealed a year later.Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday, via Getty ImagesThe existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.But Democrats struggled to do so. In 2020, the party incumbent, Tom Suozzi, dismissed Mr. Santos as a nonviable threat, and conducted no opposition research at all while cruising to victory. When Democrats did vet him two years later, they failed to find some of the most egregious fabrications that prompted members of Mr. Santos’s campaign team to quit.Democrats then labored unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by higher-profile races, to dig into the troubling leads they did unearth. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small weekly newspaper on Long Island, which labeled Mr. Santos “a fake” — and a few opinion pieces in Newsday, New York’s media machine paid Mr. Santos scant attention.More on the George Santos ControversyBehind The Times’s Investigation: The Times journalists Michael Gold and Grace Ashford discuss how Representative George Santos was elected to Congress and how they discovered that he was a fraud.Split View: New York Republicans are ready to rid themselves of the newly elected representative after his pattern of deception was revealed. But House Republican leaders badly need his vote.Facing Inquiries: Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Santos committed crimes involving his finances or made misleading statements, while authorities in Brazil said they would revive a 2008 fraud case against him.“The reality is there’s no defense, it shouldn’t have happened,” said Gerard Kassar, the chairman of the New York Conservative Party, a small but influential partner to the Republican Party that backed Mr. Santos. “It would be impossible and probably incorrect for me to say this could never happen again, but it won’t be from me not looking again.”Early warning signs missedMr. Santos had never held elected office until joining Congress in January.Jackie Molloy/BloombergMr. Santos was a political neophyte when he first showed interest in running for a House seat made up of parts of Queens and Nassau County in 2020. His only real electoral experience ended quickly: A year earlier, he was forced to drop his insurgent campaign for a low-level party position in Queens because he lacked enough valid signatures to make the ballot, according to Joann Ariola, a New York City Council member who led the Queens Republican Party at the time.Among the tight-knit Republican circles on Long Island, he was virtually unknown. And in Queens, party leaders were still sour over his initial foray.In normal circumstances, Mr. Santos would have been shooed away. Republicans in Nassau County, which comprises the bulk of New York’s Third Congressional District, have long been famous for exercising tight control over who runs, grooming and rewarding a stable of candidates like an old-school political machine.But with the country in lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and the district expected to remain under Democratic control, no one else put their hand up to run. Mr. Santos submitted a résumé and answered a vetting questionnaire riddled with lies, including that he had a 3.9 grade-point average from a college he never graduated from and job credentials he did not possess. A vetting team for the county Republican Party accepted his answers without question.“I guess unfortunately we rely on the person to be truthful to us,” Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Republican Party county chairman, said in an interview. This week, he called on Mr. Santos to resign and said he would no longer be welcome in the Nassau Republican Party.When Mr. Santos chose to run again two years later, local Republicans again gave him their support. They expected that flipping the district would once again be a stretch and, in any case, Mr. Cairo’s priority was winning state and local offices, which control thousands of local jobs and major tax and spending decisions. Efforts to recruit a more formidable candidate, like State Senator Jack Martins, did not pan out.There were already questions swirling by that time among donors and political figures about where exactly Mr. Santos lived and the source of the money that supported the lavish lifestyle he boasted about.In the summer of 2021, one of the former advisers to Mr. Santos, who insisted on anonymity, discovered his connections to Harbor City Capital, the Florida-based firm accused of a Ponzi scheme, and to other suspicious business practices that Mr. Santos had obscured. The adviser said he took the findings to a state party official later that fall and tried to pitch the story to a newspaper, which he said did not pursue it. The Harbor City connection was later reported in The Daily Beast.Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican committee chairman, was among nearly two dozen local Republicans who recently called for Mr. Santos’s resignation.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesAround that time, Mr. Santos began attracting the suspicion of a pair of friends and potential donors active in New York Republican circles. Mr. Santos claimed to one of them, Kristin Bianco, to have secured the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, when he had not. That prompted her to express concerns about Mr. Santos to plugged-in Republicans, including associates of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, one of Mr. Santos’s biggest early backers whose top political aide was assisting his campaign. Later Ms. Bianco and her friend became suspicious that they could not verify his work history.“We’re just so tired of being duped,” Ms. Bianco texted Mr. Santos in early 2022, after he refused her request to produce his résumé. Mr. Santos wrote back that he found the request “a bit invasive as it’s something very personal.”In the run-up to the 2022 contest, Dan Conston, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations who insisted on anonymity to describe them and declined to provide more detail.In the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos’s race suddenly became competitive, after a state court undid a Democratic gerrymander and adopted new congressional boundaries friendlier to Republicans. Despite the prime pickup opportunity, the Congressional Leadership Fund deliberately withheld support from the contest — but never spoke about it publicly. A spokesman for Mr. Conston’s group declined to comment on its campaign strategy or its leaders’ conversations.If party leaders were aware of any of the concerns about Mr. Santos, or others raised by his former vendors, they found ways to reassure themselves.“The thinking was the guy went through a campaign with Suozzi, who was a pretty tough and thorough guy,” said Peter T. King, a retired longtime Republican congressman from Nassau County. “So anything would have come out.”Opposition research misses the markRobert Zimmerman, center, opted not to spend campaign funds on opposition research against Mr. Santos as they ran to replace Representative Tom Suozzi, center right.John Minchillo/Associated PressThe assumption that any damaging information about Mr. Santos would have been found in the 2020 campaign turned out to be misguided. Mr. Suozzi, the popular Democratic incumbent, got a quote for the cost of an outside firm to do opposition research on Mr. Santos. But he decided not to spend the money — sparing Mr. Santos meaningful scrutiny in his first race.“No one knew George Santos, and he had less than $50,000 in campaign funds against a popular incumbent who never even said his name,” said Kim Devlin, a Suozzi adviser. “We didn’t feed anything to the press because why would we give him press?”With a more competitive race expected in 2022, researchers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did the first meaningful opposition research on Mr. Santos that summer, assembling an 87-page opposition research book. It extensively documents Mr. Santos’s past statements — including his extreme views on abortion rights and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Using public records, the committee’s researchers also turned up some red flags in Mr. Santos’s biography: multiple evictions; no I.R.S. registration for an animal charity he had claimed to have created; details about his involvement with Harbor City (Mr. Santos himself was not named in the Ponzi scheme allegations) and more recent suspicious business dealings; as well as apparent discrepancies in his financial disclosure forms that raised questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had lent his campaign.But with orders to produce similar research books on dozens of other candidates across the country, the committee’s strained research team left stones unturned. At several points, researchers explicitly flagged the need for follow-up inquiries, such as to “determine whether Santos has a criminal record.” And their study failed to turn up key problems that prompted Mr. Santos’s own vendors to quit months earlier: his fabricated educational record, his marriage to a woman and questions about his residency.A spokeswoman for the D.C.C.C. declined to comment.Opposition research by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee suggested that further inquiries should ascertain whether Mr. Santos had a criminal record.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressMr. Santos’s 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, got hold of the research book in late August, right after he won a competitive and costly Democratic primary. He decided not to spend what would have likely been tens of thousands of dollars to do more rigorous outside research.Other Democrats have second-guessed that decision in recent weeks, but at the time, Mr. Zimmerman had his reasons. While presidential and Senate campaigns typically have the financial and staff resources for exhaustive opposition research, House campaigns tend to rely on the D.C.C.C. to conduct their research.Strapped for time and cash, Mr. Zimmerman concluded that his money would be better spent on advertising and canvassing operations. And he believed that the campaign committee’s report as well as Mr. Santos’s far-right views on abortion and Jan. 6 — two of the year’s most prominent campaign themes — gave him powerful campaign fodder.“We knew a lot about him did not add up; we were very conscious of that,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an interview. “But we didn’t have the resources as a campaign to do the kind of digging that had to be done.”Mr. Zimmerman said his campaign tried to prod reporters at local and national news outlets with leads about Mr. Santos, but had little luck. The candidate himself, a public relations executive, did not hold news conferences or use paid advertising to draw attention to known discrepancies in his opponent’s record.“The response we got back pretty universally was they just didn’t have the personnel, the time or the money to do it,” Mr. Zimmerman said, referring to the publications the campaign contacted. “One person said to me, there are 60 to 80 crazy people running, we can’t investigate them all.”One outlet stood out, The North Shore Leader in Long Island, run by a Republican lawyer and former House candidate, Grant Lally. The paper published a pair of articles casting doubt on Mr. Santos’s claims that he owned extravagant cars and homes, and labeling him a “fabulist — a fake,” though it did not have other specifics that would later come out about his falsified résumé or his past.None of the bigger outlets, including The Times, followed up with extensive stories examining his real address or his campaign’s questionable spending, focusing their coverage instead on Mr. Santos’s extreme policy views and the historic nature of a race between two openly gay candidates.What did top Republicans know?Representative Daniel Goldman of New York, who has called for Mr. Santos’s resignation, filed a formal ethics complaint against him.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn the aftermath of Mr. Santos’s exposure, Democrats have said that their researchers would likely not have turned up much of the information uncovered by The Times and other media outlets after the election. Private institutions like schools and businesses are more inclined to share educational and employment records with reporters than with political parties, they say.But the opposition research firm Mr. Santos hired in the fall of 2021 — his campaign reported spending $16,600 on Capital Research Group LLC — seems to have had relatively little trouble turning up some of that same information.People working for his campaign had grown accustomed to Mr. Santos’s braggadocio and outlandish claims. But when they approached him about conducting a vulnerability study, the objective was more routine: producing a record of his past statements and other public information that would be useful later when his opponents started crafting attacks.Mr. Santos quickly signed off, but as the research dragged on, he asked to cancel the contract with the firm. When the results came back, it was clear why.Researchers found no evidence that Mr. Santos had earned degrees at Baruch College and New York University, as he had claimed. They turned up records showing his involvement with the company accused of a Ponzi scheme — a relationship he had played down. They found eviction records, business records and a suspended Florida driver’s license, which together raised questions about whether he was a legal New York resident and as rich as he claimed to be.The report also said that Mr. Santos, who was openly gay and appeared to be living with a man at the time, had been married to a woman. The study missed other fabrications that The Times later uncovered, including false claims that he worked at Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Nor did it turn up records of fraud charges in Brazil years earlier.The Times has not seen the vulnerability study, but it was described in recent days by four people with knowledge of the report who were granted anonymity because it remains confidential.The people working for Mr. Santos convened an emergency conference call to discuss the results on Dec. 1, 2021. They presented him with a choice: bow out of the race with dignity, or stay in and risk letting the Democrats turn up the same information and use it to destroy his political and personal future.After promising to produce diplomas that would prove his degrees (he ultimately did not), Mr. Santos said he would think it over. When he came back a few days later, he said he had spoken with other advisers and was convinced the findings were not as bad as they were being portrayed. He was staying in the race. Most of his team quit.What top Republicans were told of Mr. Santos’s issues is more difficult to chart. Mr. Santos required those working for his campaign to sign nondisclosure agreements, limiting the spread of the vulnerability report. But one person who was briefed on its contents said that questions about Mr. Santos’s background were discussed well beyond campaign vendors. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which closely monitors House candidates and backed Mr. Santos, sometimes requests such reports as a condition of its support.A spokesman for the group declined to comment for this article, but pointed to an earlier statement denying it had previous knowledge that Mr. Santos’s record was largely fabricated. The N.R.C.C. typically does not conduct its own independent vulnerability studies on candidates.Mr. McCarthy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign, has said relatively little about the fabrications, and has refused calls to try to oust him from the House as the speaker seeks to maintain an exceedingly narrow majority in Washington. This week, Mr. McCarthy played down Mr. Santos’s lies, comparing them to other politicians who have embellished parts of their résumés and implying he would not undo the will of voters who elected him.The House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has refused calls to push for Mr. Santos’s ouster.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSpokesmen for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story, and a spokesman for Ms. Stefanik, the highest-ranking New York House Republican, declined to comment. Allies of Mr. McCarthy maintain that they did not know about the baldest fabrications and misrepresentations, like those turned up by Republican researchers in late 2021, but only had more general concerns about his honesty.Despite the financial resources he helped marshal to the race, Mr. McCarthy had good personal reason to be wary of Mr. Santos. Earlier in 2021, an aide to the candidate was caught impersonating Mr. McCarthy’s chief of staff while soliciting campaign contributions.By the spring of 2022, Mr. Santos was in need of a new team of consultants. With help from Ms. Stefanik’s top political aide, he chose a new consulting firm and shared the vulnerability study.The new crop of vendors, led by Big Dog Strategies, never spoke to their predecessors, though, and did not know why they had left the campaign. After Mr. Santos again insisted he had graduated from college, and addressed other red flags raised in the report, the new team accepted his explanations and began plotting a campaign. They would use issues — not the candidate’s biography — to win the race.Mr. Santos has said he will not resign, and intends to serve out his two-year term.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesReporting was contributed by More

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      Does a Newly Elected G.O.P. Assemblyman Really Live in Brooklyn?

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      Lester Chang, a newly elected Republican representing a Brooklyn district, faces questions over whether he lives in the borough or in Manhattan.As Democrats returned to Albany to begin the 2023 legislative session on Wednesday, the politically explosive question of whether to remove a newly elected Assembly Republican hung over their triumphant homecoming.Democrats elected the first woman as governor of New York and retained their supermajorities in both chambers in November. But their return to the State Capitol this week was consumed by a divisive debate over whether to expel Lester Chang, a Republican war veteran who staged a surprise victory last year to unseat an entrenched 36-year Democratic incumbent in Brooklyn.Mr. Chang’s Democratic foes have accused him of actually living in Manhattan, not Brooklyn, thus failing to meet the residency requirements — a claim Mr. Chang has forcefully denied.Democrats in the Assembly are navigating uncharted territory as they consider whether to oust Mr. Chang from the lower chamber, setting up the potential of a protracted legal battle and sparking accusations from Republicans that Democrats are undermining the will of voters.“Any challenges to his eligibility should have been presented long before the election, not after the results were certified,” said Will Barclay, the Republican minority leader in the Assembly. “Blocking his path to being seated is not a precedent that should be set.”There is also intraparty distress: Some Democrats have raised concerns that removing Mr. Chang, who is Chinese American, could lead to political blowback from Asian Americans, a bloc of voters that has increasingly gravitated toward Republicans in recent elections.Ron Kim, a Democrat from Queens who is Korean American, described the situation as a political “tough spot,” saying that “a lot of Chinese voters feel like this is an effort to take away a Chinese person who was elected by the people in that community.”“In the short run, if you move forward with removing him, there will be a strong backlash from the Asian community,” he said. “In the long run, you also don’t want to see someone with even an ounce of a fraudulent background.”Following an Assembly hearing and subsequent report last month, Mr. Chang’s fate hung in the balance Wednesday, when lawmakers gaveled themselves into session and took part in a host of ceremonial duties, taking oaths of office and re-electing their respective legislative leaders.It was at first unclear if Democrats would seek to block Mr. Chang from taking office altogether, but he was ultimately allowed to take his seat this week.He received a name plate in the Assembly chamber, participated in a ceremonial swearing-in on Tuesday, and signed a formal oath of office that was sent to the New York State Department of State, according to a spokesman for Assembly Republicans. On Wednesday, in a show of solidarity, Republicans erupted into thunderous applause when Mr. Chang cast his first vote, for Mr. Barclay as leader of the chamber, in the cavernous Assembly.“It’s a distraction from the people’s business,” Mr. Chang, who became the first Asian American to represent Brooklyn in the Assembly, said in an interview on Wednesday.The last time the Assembly expelled one of its own was over a century ago in 1920, when several socialist lawmakers were voted out during the anti-communist Red Scare.Democrats may challenge assemblyman Lester Chang’s presence in Albany on residency grounds. Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesDemocrats in the Assembly met privately on Tuesday for about three hours to discuss the issue. Many lawmakers voiced their support for removing Mr. Chang, but others said they were more ambivalent about taking such an extraordinary step, according to people familiar with the closed-door discussions.Running in a South Brooklyn district that is heavily Democratic, Mr. Chang stunned Democrats in November when he narrowly defeated Peter J. Abbate Jr., a Democrat who had comfortably held the seat since 1986. His victory, in a diversifying district that is now majority Asian American, was part of a stronger than expected showing by Republicans who ran on a tough-on-crime platform statewide.Reeling from the defeat, Democrats began raising questions about whether Mr. Chang had met the residency requirements outlined in the State Constitution: In a redistricting year like 2022, candidates are required to have been a resident of the county that they are running in for at least one year before Election Day.Democrats pointed to the fact that, in 2021, Mr. Chang voted in Manhattan, where he has a rent-stabilized apartment he once shared with his late wife and that he didn’t change his voting registration until earlier last year. But Mr. Chang has argued that he also maintained a residence in the same house in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up, and where his mother, who suffers from dementia, still lives and whom he now cares for.“Home is home, 50 years, you can’t erase that,” Mr. Chang said. “I have my baseball cards, I have my yearbooks, I have all those memories. That’s home.”The imbroglio over Mr. Chang’s residency — and what constitutes a residence for the purposes of running for office — played out during a tense hearing held by the Assembly judiciary committee on Dec. 21 in which a special counsel hired by Democrats repeatedly sought to poke holes into Mr. Chang’s account, citing different records in which Mr. Chang listed his Lower Manhattan apartment as his residence.Mr. Chang and his legal team sought to rebuff those efforts, in part, with affidavits signed by Mr. Chang’s sister and neighbors, who said Mr. Chang had maintained a residence in Brooklyn. They also accused Democrats of trying to overturn Mr. Chang’s election, pointing to the fact that they did not object to Mr. Chang’s candidacy in the courts before Election Day, the norm when disputing residency requirements.“This residency issue was raised only after Lester Chang won,” Mr. Chang’s lawyer, Hugh H. Mo, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The Democrats were blindsided, they didn’t expect him to win.”The hearing was part of an investigation into Mr. Chang’s residency that was ordered by Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, after the election.Mr. Heastie has argued that the inquiry is purely a constitutional matter, not a political consideration, but has acknowledged the optics of potentially undermining the democratic process.“There’s a sense of the constitution needs to be respected,” Mr. Heastie told WNYC on Wednesday. “But I’ll also say that I don’t want to make it seem like it’s been lost on the members that an election did happen.”A subsequent report by the special counsel, released on Dec. 31, outlined evidence showing Mr. Chang may have lived in Manhattan — it said he was effectively a “visitor” in Brooklyn — but stopped short of making a recommendation.An expulsion could very well be contested in the courts, and the Assembly may decide to refer the matter to Letitia James, the state attorney general. If so, the ambiguity around his residency could end up benefiting Mr. Chang, according to Jerry H. Goldfeder, an election lawyer.“Under the executive law, she can bring a lawsuit to remove him,” he said. “But, frankly, because it’s not an open-and-shut case, it’s doubtful a court would do it.” More

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      How George Santos’s Campaign Spent Its Funds: Rent, Flights and Hotels

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      Representative-elect George Santos, under scrutiny after fabricating much of his résumé, also spent campaign funds on $40,000 worth of air travel.The company was called Cleaner 123, and over the course of four months, it received nearly $11,000 from the campaign of George Santos, the representative-elect from New York who appears to have invented whole swaths of his life story.The expenditures were listed as “apartment rental for staff” on Mr. Santos’s campaign disclosure forms and gave the address of a modest suburban house on Long Island. But one neighbor said Mr. Santos himself had been living there for months, and two others said that they had seen Mr. Santos and his husband coming and going, a possible violation of the rule prohibiting the use of campaign funds for personal expenses.The payments to Cleaner 123 were among a litany of unusual disbursements documented in Mr. Santos’s campaign filings that experts say could warrant further scrutiny. There are also dozens of expenses pegged at $199.99 — one cent below the threshold at which federal law requires receipts.The travel expenses include more than $40,000 for air travel, a number so exorbitant that it resembles the campaign filings of party leaders in Congress, as opposed to a newly elected congressman who is still introducing himself to local voters.It is not known if the spending was in fact illegal, or merely unusual. Federal and local prosecutors said this week that they would begin inquiries into Mr. Santos’s finances and background.Mr. Santos, a Republican, was elected in the Third Congressional District, a consequential swing district in Queens and Long Island, after a failed bid for the same seat in 2020. He has come under intense scrutiny after a New York Times investigation revealed that he misrepresented details of his education, work history and property ownership, along with a previously undisclosed criminal charge in Brazil.The story also raised questions about Mr. Santos’s financial circumstances, which disclosures show have improved drastically since 2020, when he reported earning just $55,000 a year.Mr. Santos has declined to be interviewed by The Times. But in the 10 days since The Times’s story was published, he has admitted to a stunning string of falsehoods. Earlier this week, he told The New York Post that he denied any criminal conduct, saying: “My sins here are embellishing my résumé.”Late Thursday, Joe Murray, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, said in a statement that there had been some money spent “unwisely” by a firm that had been fired by the campaign more than a year earlier, but he said that all expenditures were legal. The payments to Cleaner 123 were for legitimate expenses on behalf of staffers relocating to the district, he said, as were hotels booked to lodge staff members and people assisting the campaign.“Campaign expenditures for staff members including travel, lodging, and meals are normal expenses of any competent campaign. The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any irresponsible spending of campaign funds is just ludicrous,” Mr. Murray said.The representative-elect is set to be sworn into Congress on Jan. 3, when Republicans begin a new term with a slim four-seat majority in the House. While local Republican leaders have condemned Mr. Santos’s dissembling, those in Washington have been largely silent.Robert Zimmerman, a Democrat who lost a congressional election to Mr. Santos this fall, spoke at a rally on Thursday, in which people criticized Mr. Santos over reports that he lied about his background. Dave Sanders for The New York TimesQuestions arose about Mr. Santos’s residence when a reporter attempted to reach him at the Whitestone, Queens, address listed on his voter registration. Mr. Santos’s former landlord there said that he had moved out in August.Mr. Santos told The Post that he was living in Huntington, on Long Island, at his sister’s home. But court documents, as well as interviews with neighbors and a doorman, show that she resides in Elmhurst, Queens.Campaign disclosures, however, show that Mr. Santos paid Cleaner 123, which lists the house in Huntington as its address, nearly $11,000 in rent and a deposit. When reached by phone, a representative from Cleaner 123 confirmed that it was a cleaning company, but hung up before answering why it had received rent payments from Mr. Santos.Many questions remain about Mr. Santos’s campaign expenditures: It is not clear which expenditures were made on behalf of staff, versus for the candidate himself. The Federal Election Commission regulations say that campaigns are not allowed to pay personal living expenses for their candidates, including rent or utilities. Several campaign finance experts said that paying rent for staff was unusual and could be a violation, though they said that the F.E.C. rarely took action in such cases.Mr. Santos’s campaign filings show other irregularities as well: He had listed a flood of expenses under $200 — more than 800 items in total — a number that far exceeded those of candidates for similar office. More than 30 of those payments came in just below the limit at $199.99, expenses listed for office supplies, restaurants and Ubers, among other things. While F.E.C. rules urge candidates to try to save receipts for purchases below $200, they are required to keep them for all expenditures above that threshold.Paul S. Ryan, an election law expert, said that the expenditures could be an effort to hide illegal use of campaign funds, given the leeway with reporting receipts below $200. If so, he said, Mr. Santos’s attempt to hide the pattern could put him in further legal trouble, adding: “I consider deployment of this tactic strong evidence that the violation of law was knowing and willful — and therefore meeting the requirement for criminal prosecution.”Unusually for a candidate who was relatively new to politics, Mr. Santos also appears to have used his campaign accounts to fund trips across the country, along with local hotel stays, according to a review of his campaign expenditures by The Times.Over the course of his campaign, Mr. Santos spent $30,000 on hotels, $40,000 on airfare and $14,000 on car services — and campaign records suggest he also retained a campaign vehicle.The spending was funded by a campaign war chest of more than $3 million amassed by four fund-raising committees during the 2022 campaign cycle. The money came from small-dollar donors, longtime Republican contributors on Long Island and elsewhere and the campaign committees of other Republican candidates. The biggest givers lavished Mr. Santos with the maximum allowable amounts, in some cases directly, in others via a Republican super PAC or the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.A hefty chunk of the total came in the form of a $700,000 loan from Mr. Santos himself.The source of Mr. Santos’s wealth has been surrounded by some mystery: He has said on financial disclosure statements that his company, the Devolder Organization, is worth more than a million dollars; the statements also show that he earned millions between salary and dividends over the past two years. But the disclosures do not name any of the clients who helped Mr. Santos earn such a fortune — an omission that could pose legal problems for Mr. Santos, campaign finance experts say.Two former aides, who requested to remain anonymous because they didn’t want to be publicly associated with Mr. Santos, described growing concern during the campaign that the candidate was too focused on spending money frivolously and not focused enough on the nuts and bolts of winning the election.One consultant described the spending as a part of a persona Mr. Santos sought to build: as a man whose success had let him trade his humble beginnings for a life of high-end travel and fine dining.Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said the spending was atypical. “Usually a congressional candidate tries spending as little as possible for their own accommodations and travel, because they need that money for campaign purposes,” he said. “George Santos appears to be just living a lavish lifestyle for himself.”By way of comparison, Nick LaLota, the Republican representative-elect from the First Congressional District, in Long Island’s Suffolk County, spent roughly $900 on hotel stays, $3,000 on airfare and $900 on taxi services, according to his campaign filings. Sean Patrick Maloney, the outgoing head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who lost to a Republican in the Hudson Valley, spent just $8,000 on air travel, according to his filings.The $30,000 Mr. Santos’s campaign spent on hotels and Airbnb expenditures included stays in Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, Florida, California, Kansas, Michigan, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and in New York itself. Records indicate his campaign favored the Hyatt and Hilton hotel brands, expensing stays at Virginia’s Hilton Alexandria Old Town, Florida’s Hilton Melbourne, the Hilton West Palm Beach, the Hyatt Regency Orlando and the Hyatt Place West Palm Beach.In New York, his campaign booked hotel stays at the SoHo Grand in Manhattan and the Garden City Hotel and the Inn at Great Neck, both on Long Island.Mr. Santos’s campaign also paid for dozens of meals, including at high-end restaurants such as the Breakers in Palm Beach and the Capital Grille steakhouse in New York. He spent roughly $14,000 at an upscale Italian restaurant called Il Bacco, in the Little Neck neighborhood of Queens.The restaurant’s owner, Joe Oppedisano, who donated $6,500 to Mr. Santos’s campaign and related PACs and whose 2020 survival in a plane crash made tabloid headlines, was unavailable for comment, according to the woman who answered the phone at the restaurant on Thursday afternoon.Nate Schweber More

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      George Santos Breaks Silence: ‘I Have My Story to Tell.’ (Next Week.)

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      Mr. Santos, the congressman-elect from New York, has yet to address numerous inconsistencies raised by The New York Times about his background.Representative-elect George Santos broke his silence on Thursday, vowing that he would come forward next week to address questions surrounding his background.Mr. Santos has been the subject of intense scrutiny following the publication of a New York Times report that raised questions about whether he misrepresented key parts of his background and finances, and filed incomplete or inaccurate congressional disclosures.“I have my story to tell and it will be told next week,” Mr. Santos, a Republican, said on Twitter.Mr. Santos, 34, has refused to answer any questions from The Times about his past and finances, and has only pointed to a statement released by his lawyer that accused the Times of attempting to smear him. In the report published on Monday, The Times found that key pillars of Mr. Santos’s résumé — including his education, ties to Wall Street firms and charitable endeavors that formed the basis of his pitch to voters — could not be substantiated. Instead, The Times found a string of debts and legal trouble, including an unresolved criminal matter in Brazil, that raise questions about the congressman’s rise to power and wealth.Mr. Santos has faced numerous calls to address The Times’s reporting. In his statement on Twitter, he said, “I want to assure everyone that I will address your questions and that I remain committed to deliver the results I campaigned on; Public safety, Inflation, Education & more. Happy Holidays to all!”Mr. Santos’s brief statement on Twitter came a day after the incoming House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, suggested that Mr. Santos appeared “to be in the witness protection program” after he spent the week avoiding the press.“No one can find him,” Mr. Jeffries, a Democrat, said at a news conference. “He’s hiding out from legitimate questions that his constituents are asking about his education, about his so-called charity, about his work experience, about his criminal entanglement in Brazil, about every aspect, it appears, of his life.”On Wednesday, The Forward, a Jewish publication, reported that Mr. Santos may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents fled persecution around World War II.The House Republican leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, did not answer questions about Mr. Santos on Thursday afternoon before walking onto the House floor, according to several accounts on Twitter from Washington reporters.Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Joe Murray, told The Times earlier on Thursday that he did “not anticipate any response” to further inquiries, though he acknowledged that would be subject to change.On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said that her office was “looking into some of the things that were raised” by The Times’s report.Jonah E. Bromwich More