On the menu today: Should George Santos serve in the upcoming Congress? It’s not just that the congressman-elect isn’t a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, as he had claimed, and made up large swaths of his résumé. There’s also the more significant question of how he suddenly amassed a fortune: a fortune he used to finance his successful congressional campaign.
Lies, Damned Lies, and $600,000
If the balance of partisan power of the House of Representatives would not change, and if it would have no effect on the upcoming selection of speaker of the House, would you want George Santos to stay in the House, or would you want him to resign?
It has become de rigueur among conservatives to point out that the Democrats are gargantuan hypocrites when it comes to a political figure’s lying about his background — and they are.
A few days ago, Tom Elliott listed all of the tall tales, sketchy claims, likely hallucinations, and outright lies offered by Joe Biden over the years. Among the highlights were Biden’s claims that:
- he was arrested during a civil rights march;
- he spent part of a summer working as a tractor-trailer driver;
- he was arrested while trying to meet Nelson Mandela;
- his son, Beau, was killed in Iraq (Beau Biden passed away after battling brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.);
- he graduated “top of his class” in college (he in fact graduated “near the bottom”);
- he hit a 368’ home run in one of the congressional baseball games;
- his first job offer was from an Idaho timber company.
There’s a lot more on Tom’s list. I just felt like offering links and background on the handful above.
Liberals are tying themselves in knots to explain how Biden’s false stories are mere exaggerations, or instances of Grandpa’s getting confused, while Santos’s lies require an automatic expulsion from Congress. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes attempted to draw such a distinction: “I think there’s a line between ‘normal’ politician bs-ing and conman serial lying, and he’s got infractions on either side of that line. I mean it would have been a pretty big deal if it turned out Joe Biden didn’t actually have a law degree!”
One of the reasons that pathological liars are attracted to politics is because there are partisans who are very eager to forgive and shrug at “normal politician BS-ing.” Aspiring officeholders see other politicians and think, “If they can get away with those lies, I can get away with my own!”
Imagine if we had an honest president. In that case, would Republicans want George Santos to take the oath of office on January 3, or would they tell the voters of New York’s third congressional district, “Nope, this guy is no good, go find somebody else”?
Or would they want to leave his fate in the hands of the voters, to be evaluated in the 2024 Republican congressional primary and/or general election?
New York’s third congressional district scores a D+3 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and Biden carried the district 54 percent to 44 percent in 2020. In other words, Santos’s victory (52 percent to 44 percent) in 2022 was an upset, a pleasant surprise for a GOP that didn’t get many other pleasant surprises in the midterms. If Santos were to resign, there’s no guarantee that a Republican candidate would replace him.
If the GOP had won a massive House majority in 2022, would Republicans feel differently about Santos’s remaining in the House? If this district was in Wyoming and represented a lock for whichever Republican won the primary, would they feel differently?
In case you’re new to the story, Representative-elect Santos admitted that he never graduated from any college, despite previously claiming to have received a degree from Baruch in 2010. He claimed to work at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither firm has any record of his working there; now Santos says he worked for a firm that worked with those financial giants. Then there are the indications that he’s not Jewish and perhaps not all that gay:
Santos, elected to Congress on Nov. 8 to represent the Long Island- and Queens-based 3rd District, was also accused of lying about his family history, saying on his campaign website that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Nazis during World War II.
Santos now says that he’s “clearly Catholic,” but claims that his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos said. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’” [Note that Santos had issued statements that included the phrase, “As a proud American Jew . . .”]
Santos, the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican elected to the House, also faced accusations that he lied about his sexual orientation, with the Daily Beast reporting last week that he was previously married to a woman until shortly before he launched his unsuccessful 2020 campaign against Democrat Tom Suozzi.
The soon-to-be lawmaker confirmed to the Post on Monday that he was indeed married to a woman for about five years, from 2012 until his divorce in 2017, but insisted that he is now a happily married gay man.
You know we have become a more tolerant and open society when a politician is getting outed as straight.
Almost nothing that Santos claimed during the campaign has checked out, as our Ryan Mills reports:
Santos also claimed to have headed an animal-rescue charity, though the Internal Revenue Service has no record of it. Times reporters found no evidence to back up claims that he had a family-owned real-estate portfolio of 13 properties. Instead, they found that Santos had faced eviction lawsuits from his landlords in 2015 and 2017. And the woman who answered the door at the address where Santos is registered to vote told reporters she was not familiar with him.
Keep in mind that there is a potential public-corruption angle here, too, because Santos appears to have gotten extremely rich extremely quickly, and no one is sure who has paid him and for what:
He furthered the impression that he was independently wealthy by lending his campaign at least $580,000, and his political action committee at least $27,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The loans played a key role in his surprising victory and helped give Republicans a narrow majority in the House.
In his first bid for the House, Santos said in a 2020 financial disclosure that he had no assets or earned income, and he only cited a commission worth more than $5,000.
But by the time Santos filed his 2022 financial disclosure, he declared he was worth millions of dollars, with most of the wealth coming from a Florida company in which he was the sole owner: the Devolder Organization.
At one point, Santos said on his campaign website that Devolder was a privately held family firm that had $80 million in assets under management, a claim that has since been removed.
Documents filed with the Florida secretary of state show that Santos organized the company in May 2021, one month before he declared his latest candidacy. A little more than a year later, on July 30, 2022, the financial data company Dun & Bradstreet estimated that Devolder had a revenue of only $43,688.
. . .
In any case, on Sept. 6, when Santos filed his financial disclosure report with the clerk of the U.S. House, he said the Devolder Organization had provided him with millions of dollars. Santos reported that the Devolder Organization had paid him an annual salary of $750,000 in 2021 and 2022, and that the company was worth between $1 million and $5 million.
Congressional candidates and members of Congress are required to complete financial-disclosure forms, and Congress has authorized the U.S. attorney general to seek a civil penalty of up to $50,000, up to five years of imprisonment, or both, against an individual who knowingly and willfully falsifies or fails to file or to report any required information.
Right now, the most consequential question is where Santos got that $600,000 or so that he used to finance his campaign.
For all we know, some foreign power may have bought itself a congressman. This isn’t outlandish speculation, as one of his largest donors has ties to the Russian government. The Daily Beast pointed to a February 12 tweet from Santos that reads, “We are going to enter a war in the middle of the Eastern Europe winter against Russia, to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. Meanwhile this is the sight at the US southern border, where our sovereignty is no longer a priority.”
Shockingly, pathological liars aren’t all that consistent in their foreign-policy beliefs, because ten days later Santos was telling Fox News that President Biden was too weak in standing up to Russia.
Congressional candidate George Santos, R-NY, feels President Biden has essentially looked the other way while Russia attacked Ukraine because of frail leadership, but the Republican candidate with family ties to the region believes a stronger administration would cut the Kremlin out at the knees.
“If we’re going to be honest about it, Joe Biden is a colossal failure for us, and I hate saying that because his failure is our failure, as a country. I want our country to succeed,” Santos told Fox News Digital from the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando as the Russian invasion unfolded. . . .
“It sends a signal to Russia, we’re pulling back sanctions. . . . If you’re not going to enforce your sanctions, if you’re not going to stand by them, to not only remove them from the SWIFT [banking] system,” Santos said.
“They need to remove them from the international banking community altogether,” he continued. “Cut them at the knees, cut their supply to oil, cut the pipeline. Sanction the pipeline, stop it. Don’t make it operational. It’s not operational yet. Sit down with Germany and say, ‘We need to make them understand that they are going to have severe consequences for their actions,’ but instead we’re giving them a pat on the shoulder.”
Could you imagine if there was some Russian plot to elect a congressman, and that congressman then turned around and called for tougher sanctions on Russia? Then again, based on what we know so far, does George Santos seem like the kind of crook who could stay bought?
ADDENDUM: The Washington Post does a deep dive into the current wave of Covid-19 infections in China, having tracked “hundreds of posts on popular Chinese platforms, including Weibo and Douyin, and reviewed material that was reposted on Twitter and other sites. The Post’s preliminary analysis found evidence of overwhelmed health-care facilities in major cities, particularly along the country’s heavily populated east coast.”
As I wrote yesterday, the Chinese government’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak has been marked by shameless, obvious, blatant dishonesty since the beginning, and the whole world has paid the price. “This should also blow up the narrative that China is some sort of supercompetent, ruthlessly effective colossus offering the world a brutal but effective governance alternative to Western liberal democracy. Beijing demonstrates at least as much incompetence, butt-covering, dishonesty, spin, denial, and corruption as Washington, London, or Paris. China simply doesn’t have a free press to expose the mess.”