Santos Saga Grows Darker As GOP District Attorney Opens Probe

Santos Saga Grows Darker As GOP District Attorney Opens Probe

George Santos

Youtube Screenshot

At this point in the saga of Rep.-elect George Santos, it might be easier to list the things he’s claimed about his life story that are true than the lies. It’s getting more bizarre by the day. The list of lies and inconsistencies includes his name, his sexual identity, his race, his ethnicity, his education, his professional life, his charitable work, the cause of his mother’s death and how many times she died, his proximity to some of the nation’s deepest traumas, and—mostly importantly—how come he had so much money to give to his own campaign.

Actually, that last one isn’t a so much a lie as a big omission. He’s not telling anyone where the hundreds of thousands came from. That’s also the one that could get him into legal trouble.

New York’s Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly is opening an investigation to determine just how much of a fraud this guy is. “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated” from Santos “are nothing short of stunning,” Donnelly said in a statement. Santos’s would-be constituents “must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress,” she added, and “if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.” Donnelly’s spokesman, Brendan Brosh, confirmed in a statement, “We are looking into the matter.”

Maybe they’ll look into how he allegedly defrauded Saint Rita’s Catholic Church, in Long Island City, Queens, after his mother’s second death. Yes, second death. In one timeline he tweeted, “9/11 claimed my mothers life.” Another time he said that she died a few years after 9/11. Her documented death, though, was in 2016. At least that’s when Saint Rita’s picked up the tab for the funeral after Santos told the pastor the family couldn’t afford it. Father Jose Carlos da Silva told CBS that the church held a collection during the memorial mass and that “he didn’t count the money collected, but recalled that the amount raised was significant, and that he handed the collection directly to Santos.”

That’s the most special of them all, scamming his family’s congregation after his mother’s real death. But wait, there’s more. On Wednesday, more of Santos’s bizarre claims came to light.

So he’s claimed to be a descendent of Holocaust survivors, a 9/11 victim, a cancer survivor, and close to people who were killed in the Pulse nightclub massacre. And also, he’s not just questionably gay (having been married to a woman while supposedly living “openly” as gay) he’s biracial.

And his family is either fabulously wealthy and successful, or destitute. One of his sob stories that came to light Wednesday is his claim that his parents “sent me to a good prep school—which was Horace Mann School in the Bronx. And in my senior year of prep school, unfortunately, my parents fell on hard times.” Santos said his family couldn’t “afford a $2,500 tuition” and “I left school [with] four months till graduation.”

Yeah, that didn’t happen. Officials at Horace Mann have no record at all of him. “George Santos or any of the aliases you [cite] never attended HM,” the school told the Washington Post.

That’s all bizarre and certainly pathological—his pattern of claiming to have proximity to global and personal tragedies is the stuff of textbook case studies—but there are definitely parts of it that are likely to be illegal. That’s the part that remains murkiest; the money.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

Narcissist Trump Disdained The Wounded And Admired The War Criminal

Former President Donald Trump, Gen. Mark Milley and former Vice President Mike Pence

We’ve long known who Donald Trump is: narcissistic, impressed with authoritarian displays, contemptuous of anyone he sees as low status, a man for whom the highest principle is his own self-interest. It’s still shocking to read new accounts of the moments where he’s most willing to come out and show all that, to not even pretend to be anything but what he is—and holy crap, does The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg have the goods in his new profile of outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mark Milley, which focuses on Milley’s efforts to protect the military as a nonpartisan institution under Trump.

Keep reading...Show less
Ben Wikler

Ben Wikler

White House

From Alabama Republicans' blatantly discriminatory congressional map, to the Wisconsin GOP's ousting of a the states' top election official and attempt to impeach a liberal Supreme Court justice, to North Carolina's decision to allow the majority-Republican legislature to appoint state and local election board members, News from the States reports these anti-democratic moves have all recently "generated national headlines" and stoked fears ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}