George Santos, the Republican representative from New York’s 3rd Congressional District, pleaded not guilty to the 13 charges brought by U.S. Attorney Breon Peace. The House Ethics Committee’s subcommittee charged specifically with investigating Santos made its first move to investigate the grifter from New York in March.
Last Thursday that committee expanded the long list of charges it’s investigating to include one more act of fraud: Santos allegedly filed for unemployment benefits while working.
When the dust settles on this investigation, Santos will likely be legally living at the expense of New York taxpayers — in prison. It might be the first legitimate position he will have held in years.
The New American has followed the sordid criminal activities of the brazen and audacious grifter from New York since December (see related articles, below), suggesting that only the current resident of the Oval Office has a worse record of lies and deceit that Santos. This writer wishes to issue an apology to that current resident, though, as Santos may have set a new world record.
Vanity Fair, Intelligencer, and Wikipedia have all done their best to catalog the long list of lies, deceits, and frauds that Santos has committed on his rise to (and shortly, in his fall from) prominence in Congress.
Vanity Fair tried to condense the long list of misdeeds into a single paragraph:
In addition to lies about his work history, educational background, grandparents, mother, being Jewish, having multiple employees who died in the Pulse nightclub shooting and about a million other things, there are significant questions about the source(s) of Santos’s campaign funds. For one thing, despite being evicted on more than one occasion, he apparently had $700,000 to freely lend. Meanwhile, a relative whose name was marked down next to a donation of $5,800 said they have no idea where that money came from.
The Intelligencer magazine took the long route, listing among other things:
- Santos lied about where he went to high school…
- And college….
- He never worked on Wall Street….
- He lied about founding an animal charity….
- He … swindled a disabled vet whose dog was dying….
- It’s unclear if his mother’s death was related to 9/11….
- His grandmother was definitely not a Holocaust victim….
- And he did not have employees who died in the Pulse (nightclub) shooting….
The magazine asked:
Did he rip off an Amish dog breeder with a bad check?…
Where did the $700,000 come from?…
What’s the deal with his marriage(s)?…
Is he Jewish or “Jew-ish”?…
Was he a drag queen in Brazil?…
Was he a Broadway producer?…
Was he really a journalist in Brazil?…
Did his campaign deliberately repeatedly illegally charge donors on their credit cards?…
Was he the target of an “assassination” in December?…
Wikipedia expanded the list to dozens of pages of links and references to his crimes (see here).
Mark Chiusano, the Long Island reporter who has been on Santos’ case for years, has written a book – The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos – due to be released in November. It will be 320 pages long and is likely to have missed some additional incidents.
But Chiusano has gotten at least one thing right: Santos has set a record low for political corruption. From Amazon’s description of the book:
From Wall Street gigs to an amateur volleyball career, from embellished claims of Jewish heritage to a fabricated 9/11 story involving his mother’s death, Santos’s legend continued to grow as his web of lies evaporated in real time.
And the only thing wilder than this charlatan embedding himself in the warm, consequence-evading arms of our nation’s capital was the Queens con artist’s refusal to bow his head in shame….
From humble years spent in Brazil, to glamorous nights on the west side of Manhattan, to the stunning small-time scams employed to ease his slippery climb up the American society ladder, The Fabulist tells a story you’ll have to read for yourself to believe … and even then, it’s George Santos, so who’s to say for sure.
Related articles:
Joe Biden’s Lies Dwarf Those of George Santos
George Santos Indicted on 13 Counts of Fraud, Money Laundering, and Other Crimes
