Santos, George (1988- )

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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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      What Can the House Do to Address George Santos’s Falsehoods?

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      The representative-elect’s long list of fabrications has raised questions about whether he will even be allowed to take his seat next week. But House Republicans have shown little appetite for punishing him.On the campaign trail, Representative-elect George Santos, a Republican who ultimately flipped a Democratic seat in New York, misled voters about his work and educational history, his family’s heritage, his past philanthropic efforts and his business dealings.His litany of fabrications has raised questions as to whether Mr. Santos, who was elected last month to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, will be allowed to take his seat next week when Congress convenes or thrown out once he is sworn in.But House Republican leaders, who have so far remained silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, are unlikely to punish him in any significant way. Even if they could force him out of Congress, it would prompt a special election in a swing seat, setting up a potential blow to the party’s already precarious majority.And Mr. Santos has pledged to vote for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, for speaker next week as Mr. McCarthy faces a rebellion on the right and needs every vote he can get.Here are some of the options for addressing Mr. Santos’s falsehoods.Could the House refuse to seat him?The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that a person who met the constitutional requirements for office in the House of Representatives could not be refused a seat once elected. In that case, Powell v. McCormack, the court suggested that a permissible remedy for the House, should it try to exclude one of its duly elected members, would be a vote to expel the lawmaker once he or she was seated.House leaders could, in theory, band together to try to defy that precedent and force Mr. Santos to challenge the move in court. But Republicans have no appetite to do so.Could he be expelled?In theory, yes. Practically, probably not.Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states that “Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”While the Constitution grants the House broad authority to cast out one of its own, there has long been internal debate over whether lawmakers can be expelled for behavior from before they took office.Some Republicans, for example, argued that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, should not have been stripped of her committees for her social media posts from before she was elected. In the posts, she endorsed executing top Democrats, suggested that a number of school shootings were secretly perpetrated by government actors, and repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories.But House Republican leaders are unlikely to want to expel Mr. Santos in the first place.Only 20 members of Congress have been expelled from either chamber: five from the House and 15 from the Senate, according to the Congressional Research Service. Seventeen of those expulsions were related to disloyalty to the United States during the Civil War era, occurring only after the secession of the Confederate states.The others — including the most recent instance, the expulsion in 2002 of Representative James A. Traficant Jr., Democrat of Ohio — occurred after representatives were convicted on public corruption charges.Could he be removed from office in some other way?Mr. Santos could choose to resign if he faces pressure from party leadership to do so, or if he is placed under an ethics investigation and no longer wishes to bear the costs of legal representation and stress that come with those proceedings.There is no mechanism for voters to recall a member of the House of Representatives.What punishments could the House dole out?The House Ethics Committee, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers who have historically shied from punishing their colleagues, has not commented on Mr. Santos’s case and is in a state of limbo until a new Congress is seated on Jan. 3. Its investigations are known to drag on for months or even years and seldom result in significant punishment.Should House Republican leadership want to mete out some sort of punishment, they could move to censure him, a mostly symbolic gesture that requires a simple majority vote and sometimes is accompanied by a fine. After a lawmaker is censured, he or she must stand in the well of the House while a rebuke is read.House Republican leaders could also choose not to seat Mr. Santos on any committees or to relegate him to backwater committees. More

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      George Santos Faces an Investigation and Public Dismay

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

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Republican Jewish Coalition Says Santos ‘Deceived Us’ About His Heritage

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      The group said that Representative-elect George Santos would be barred from its events, but it stopped short of calling for him not to serve in Congress.The country’s most prominent group of Jewish Republican political donors said Tuesday that it was “disappointed” that Representative-elect George Santos had misrepresented himself as Jewish, and that it would bar him from its events. But the group, the Republican Jewish Coalition, stopped short of calling him unfit to serve in Congress or demanding his ouster.Mr. Santos, a Republican who was elected last month to represent a New York district that includes much of Long Island’s North Shore, has been embroiled in a widening scandal over misstatements and lies he told about his education, employment and finances.He also claimed repeatedly to be a descendant of European Jews who fled to Brazil to escape the Holocaust and said that while he was religiously Catholic, he also identified as a nonobservant Jew. He described himself as a Jew on the campaign trail in a heavily Jewish district and regularly attended events with rabbis and other leaders of the religious community.But in an interview with The New York Post published Monday, he said that he “never claimed to be Jewish” and was instead “Jew-ish.” He also denounced reporting that said he misled voters about his Jewish ancestry.Matt Brooks, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement that Mr. Santos had “deceived us and misrepresented his heritage” and that he “will not be welcome at any future R.J.C. event.”Mr. Santos, 34, was a featured speaker at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas last month. On Dec. 18, he was a featured guest, along with Representative Lee Zeldin, at a Hanukkah party thrown by the group on Long Island. The New York Times investigation into his background was published the next day.A spokesman for the R.J.C. said that no one at the coalition could recall a previous instance of an elected official falsely claiming to be Jewish.The coalition, which spent at least $3 million to help G.O.P. candidates in the midterm election through its political arm, the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, did not make any contributions to Mr. Santos before his victory. But a spokesman confirmed that the group sent Mr. Santos $5,000 earmarked for “debt retirement” after his election.Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota senator who now serves as the R.J.C.’s chairman, called Mr. Santos’s statements “shameful” in an email. “I anticipate he will have a very short tenure in the United States Congress,” he added.The group’s Democratic counterpart, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, took a harder line, calling on Mr. Santos “to not take the oath of office” in a post on Twitter and challenging the R.J.C.’s integrity for not doing the same.The R.J.C. has taken a tougher stance on perceived affronts to the Jewish community before.It repeatedly demanded that Congress remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for remarks about Israel and Israeli politics that the group termed “antisemitic tropes.”The coalition also condemned Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in 2021 for making antisemitic comments on social media, and called her out a second time — along with Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona — for speaking at a white nationalist conference.Gabriel Groisman, the former mayor of Bal Harbour, Fla., and a member of the coalition’s board of directors, said he had met Mr. Santos at the Las Vegas event and had been excited that a Jewish Republican was elected to the New York delegation in Congress, but called the recent revelations “extremely offensive.”He went beyond the R.J.C. statement, saying that “the Republican leadership should condemn Santos publicly, and he should not be given any committee assignments.”“Thankfully, terms in Congress are only two years,” Mr. Groisman added. “Hopefully we can get him out as soon as possible.”But one of the group’s new board members, Josh Katzen, the president of a Massachusetts commercial real estate firm, pointed to multiple examples of Democrats who were accused of embellishing their records in the past, including Hillary Clinton, who claimed in 2008 that she had to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire during a 1996 trip in Bosnia, and President Biden, who said he finished in the top half of his law school class and attended on a full academic scholarship.Mr. Katzen, in an email, added: “And I’m supposed to care if, in an age of rabid antisemitism, a politician wants to join my tribe? Not at the forefront of my concerns.” More

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      George Santos: What We Know and Don’t Know About the Representative-Elect

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      Mr. Santos admitted that the information in his résumé about where he worked and went to school was not true. Other discrepancies in his biography remain a mystery.For a week, Representative-elect George Santos avoided answering questions from the media, after The New York Times reported several notable fabrications on his résumé.Now, Mr. Santos has swapped out silence for a new tactic: creating the appearance of coming clean.In three separate interviews — two of them with conservative media, none with The Times — Mr. Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, even as he has denounced “elitist” institutions seeking to hold him to account and suggested that he is no more duplicitous than your average member of Congress.‘Did I embellish my résumé? Yes, I did,” he told City & State, a New York political publication. “And I’m sorry, and it shouldn’t be done. And words can’t express 100 percent how I feel, but I’m still the same guy. I’m not a fraud. I’m not a cartoon character. I’m not some mythical creature that was invented.”Voters from New York’s Third Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Nassau County and Queens, elected Mr. Santos, 34, a Republican, in November. When he enters Congress in 2023, several important unanswered questions will still hang over him.Here is what we do and do not know about the representative-elect.Mr. Santos did not work where he said he did.Over the course of his two campaigns for Congress, the first of which was unsuccessful, Mr. Santos cast himself as an accomplished veteran of Wall Street, with work experience at both Citigroup, where he said he was “an associate asset manager,” and at Goldman Sachs. Both firms told The Times that they had no record of Mr. Santos’s ever working for them.In recent interviews, Mr. Santos has claimed that he did not actually work for those companies, but rather with them, when he was employed at a company called LinkBridge Investors, which says it connects fund managers with investors.Mr. Santos told The New York Post that he had merely used a “poor choice of words.”Mr. Santos did not graduate from the schools he said he had.Mr. Santos has said he graduated from Baruch College in Manhattan with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. A biography on the website of the House Republicans’ campaign committee said he had also studied at N.Y.U. But neither college could find records verifying those claims, and in his interview with The Post, Mr. Santos admitted that he had lied about his education.“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.” he told the newspaper. “I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé.”Mr. Santos says he is not Jewish, so much as “Jew-ish.”Mr. Santos has said that his mother was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during WW II.” And he has identified as both Catholic and as a nonobservant Jew.But citing genealogy records and Brazilian records, both The Forward, a Jewish publication, and CNN have reported that Mr. Santos’s maternal grandparents appear to have been born in Brazil before World War II. Mr. Santos has responded to those revelations by modifying his story ever so slightly.“I always joke, I’m Catholic, but I’m also Jew-ish — as in ‘ish,’” he told City & State. “I grew up fully aware that my grandparents were Jewish, came from a Jewish family, and they were refugees to Brazil. And that was always the story I grew up with, and I’ve always known it very well.”Mr. Santos amends story on Pulse nightclub shooting.After he won election, Mr. Santos, who says he is gay, claimed to have “lost four employees” at the 2016 shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando, a claim for which The Times could find no evidence.During an interview on WABC radio, Mr. Santos said that those “four employees” did not actually work for his Florida company. Rather, those four individuals were in the process of being hired, he said.“We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said.Mr. Santos denied committing any crimes.Contrary to records unearthed by The Times, Mr. Santos has seemed to insist that he was never charged with fraud for writing checks with a stolen checkbook in Brazil.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”In the radio interview with WABC, Mr. Santos offered to provide documents to corroborate his assertion. But he declined to provide any documentation to The Times.Mr. Santos does not own 13 properties.During his most recent congressional campaign, Mr. Santos cast himself and his family as the owners of 13 properties. He also suggested he was a beleaguered landlord whose tenants were unjustly withholding rent.On Monday, he said his family owns property, but he does not.“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post.The sources of Mr. Santos’s $700,000 campaign loan remain unclear.Though Mr. Santos’s adulthood has been marked by a trail of unpaid debts to landlords and creditors, in 2021 and 2022, he lent $700,000 to his congressional campaign, according to federal campaign finance documents. It remains unclear where that money came from.Mr. Santos continues to claim it originated with his work at The Devolder Organization, which he described as a consulting firm to City & State.Mr. Santos has disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no property or public-facing assets linked to the firm. More

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      George Santos, the Falsehoods and the Facts

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      More from our inbox:Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaWhy Fewer Women Become TeachersCuba’s DepopulationPhoto illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “Santos Admits to a Long List of Falsehoods” (front page, Dec. 27):Representative-elect George Santos told The New York Post that he was “embellishing my résumé.” No. They were lies!As a constituent of the Third Congressional District, I don’t want Mr. Santos representing me. We don’t need a deadbeat liar who has not answered where the $700,000 donation that he made to his campaign came from. We need to see the paperwork. We don’t need another politician who promises to release his return after the audit.He’s worse than a joke. Have we no respect for the truth and a little integrity?Robert DetorPort Washington, N.Y.To the Editor:I am grateful to George Santos for redefining lying as a “poor choice of words.” For the past few years, I’d been confined to explaining eye-opening statements as “alternate facts.” I can finally bid farewell to Kellyanne Conway’s creativity and move on to the new standard for political opportunism without consequences.Michael EmmerBrooklynTo the Editor:Re “How Opposition Research Really Works,” by Tyson Brody (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 26), about opposition research on George Santos:After 40 years of working with my late husband, who delved into the background of dozens of high-level candidates, I do know this: It’s a serious job that requires diligent work and professional skills.The real work is in following up. It’s the legwork — hours searching paper land records, visiting residences, interviewing people — that makes the real difference. A candidate cannot simply rely on computer research or popular websites to get the job done.Once the information is found the opposition researcher works directly with reporters with whom they have developed a relationship and whom they trust. Reporters often don’t have time or resources to do all the legwork. Nor can a candidate rely on political party committees.Persistence, attention to detail, legwork, and an honest relationship with the press and professional campaign staff are often the key to winning an election.Otherwise, the voters may have the kind of buyer’s remorse that so many of Mr. Santos’s new constituents are now experiencing.Sandy CheitenNew YorkTo the Editor:Tyson Brody describes the process behind the Democrats’ failure to expose George Santos’s multiple misrepresentations about his life. He explains that “a junior researcher” documented some of the issues, which appeared “in small sections interspersed through a nearly 90-page document.”As a corporate investigator who has spent more than 30 years supervising hundreds of researchers producing thousands of reports, I always insist on executive summaries covering the key points in the report. I have, on countless occasions, repeated the admonition, “Don’t bury the lede.”Ernest BrodNew YorkThe writer is president of Brod Global Intelligence.Sam Bankman-Fried’s Release on BondSam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto firm FTX, leaving Federal District Court in Manhattan after being released on a $250 million bond.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Disgraced FTX Co-Founder Freed on $250 Million Bond” (Business, Dec. 23):So, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Bernie Madoff of his generation, is freed on bond less than two weeks after his arrest at a luxury apartment complex in the Bahamas. How lovely for him that his parents were willing and able to secure this bond, risking their own home — and perhaps, their reputations — in the process.It took years of vigorous advocacy for New York State to enact some form of cash bail reform for nonviolent offenders who so often languished at Rikers Island because they couldn’t raise even the minimal funds they needed to be released pending trial.It strikes me as obscene that Mr. Bankman-Fried, whose treachery and cheating have ruined so many lives, spent virtually no time in jail. Even with a firmly affixed ankle bracelet, he will clearly be living a pretty comfortable life safely ensconced in his parents’ home.One can only hope that he will eventually receive the punishment he so richly deserves.Carol NadellNew YorkHarmful Stereotypes About AfricaMauricio Lima for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Putin Wants Loyalty, and He’s Found It in Africa” (front page, Dec. 25):I was disappointed in The Times’s portrayal of Russian involvement in the Central African Republic. On what basis is the relationship between Russia and the Central African Republic characterized as one of African fealty and passive subjugation — of “master” and “vassal”?African states, and countries in the Global South more generally, continue to be inaccurately portrayed as lacking agency in how they conduct their foreign relations. We can certainly debate and inquire into the motives of the leaders of the Central African Republic in partnering with Russia. We can also debate the wisdom of this decision or how likely Russia is to be a good partner to smaller, weaker countries (just as we can question how good of a partner the West is to these same countries).However, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes to presume that the leaders and citizens of African states are merely passive recipients of the desires of foreign actors or to suggest that Western governments know what is best for them.Katherine BeallPrinceton, N.J.The writer is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.Why Fewer Women Become TeachersCalla Kessler/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “There’s a Reason There Aren’t Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actually,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 14):The enormous drop in the number of college students graduating with degrees in education (from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11) coincides perfectly with the rise of the feminist movement, which gave women a far greater range of employment opportunities than earlier, when teacher, nurse and secretary were the predominant jobs for female college graduates.Without denigrating the many excellent K-12 teachers, I think it is safe to say that many women who would have been teachers a generation earlier chose different career paths with higher salaries and, often, prestige.Ellen T. BrownSt. Paul, Minn.Cuba’s DepopulationEliana Aponte Tobar for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Largest Exodus Imperils Future of Ailing Cuba” (front page, Dec. 11):Cuba has had many mass migrations since 1959. In fact, the exodus has never stopped, only waxed and waned as the government alternatively cracked down on or encouraged emigration, or as the means to escape became more, or less, easy.In the nearly 64 years of communist rule, one of every six Cubans has left the island. More than 10,000 have drowned or disappeared in the Florida Straits, trying to reach the freedom of the U.S. Scores have been murdered by the regime’s security forces trying to escape.This depopulation is not because of U.S. sanctions; it is because of political repression and Marxist economics. Fidel Castro himself, while alive and the sole ruler, ridiculed the embargo, because he was receiving ample economic aid from the Soviets. It was only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 that Castro began blaming the U.S. for the problems communism had created.Otto J. ReichFalls Church, Va.The writer is the president of the Center for a Free Cuba and a former diplomat in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. More

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      George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History

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      The congressman-elect confirmed The New York Times’s findings that he had not graduated from college or worked at two major Wall Street companies, as he had claimed.Ending a weeklong silence, Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to a sizable list of misrepresentations about his professional background, educational history, business experience and property ownership. But he said he was determined to take the oath of office on Jan. 3 and join the House majority.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican who was elected in November to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, confirmed some of the key findings of a New York Times investigation into his background, but sought to minimize the falsehoods.“My sins here are embellishing my résumé,” Mr. Santos told The New York Post in one of two interviews he granted on Monday.Mr. Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He once said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties; on Monday, he admitted he was not a landlord.Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a yearslong marriage he had never disclosed.“I dated women in the past. I married a woman. It’s personal stuff,” he said to The Post, adding that he was “OK with my sexuality. People change.”In the interviews, Mr. Santos also firmly rejected having committed a crime anywhere in the world, despite the existence of Brazilian court records that show he admitted to committing check fraud there.“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”The admissions by Mr. Santos added a new wrinkle to one of the more astonishing examples of an incoming congressman falsifying key biographical elements of his background — with Mr. Santos maintaining the falsehoods through two consecutive bids for Congress, the first of which he lost.In both interviews, Mr. Santos also denounced reporting by both CNN and The Forward, a Jewish publication, that he may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents were born in Europe and emigrated to Brazil during the Holocaust.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More