George Santos, He holds press conferences acknowledging he lied about most of the things he said during his campaign (over 30 claims). He donated H*** sums of money from his company which no one has any idea where the funding came from. This guy has Brazilian mob stink all over him. Sounds like a perfect Republican.
He will have ethics charges against him almost immediately after taking office.
Democrats — including the outgoing House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the next House Democratic minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York — have suggested Mr. Santos is unfit to serve in Congress. Top House Republican leaders, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have largely remained silent.
The House can only prevent candidates from taking office if they violate the Constitution’s age, citizenship and state residency requirements. Once he has been seated, however, Mr. Santos could face ethics investigations, legal experts have said.
Of greater potential concern are questions about Mr. Santos’s financial disclosures, where he reported earning millions of dollars from his company, the Devolder Organization.
Mr. Santos disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no public-facing assets or other property tied to the firm. Mr. Santos also did not list any clients on his disclosures, despite the requirement that candidates list any compensation over $5,000 from a single source.
Intentionally omitting or misrepresenting information on a congressional financial disclosure is considered a federal crime.
George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History
The congressman-elect confirmed The New York Times’s findings that he had not graduated from college or worked at two major Wall Street firms, as he had claimed.
A man in a suit and tie stands at a lectern, mid-speech.
Congressman-Elect George Santos at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas in November.Credit...Mikayla Whitmore for The New York Times
In a video interview with City & State, Mr. Santos asserted that his consulting practice at the Devolder Organization built upon the work he had done at his former firm, LinkBridge.
“I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress,” Mr. Santos said, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that — no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”
The WABC interview itself was something of a political curiosity. Mr. Santos was interviewed by John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate and a big Republican donor, and Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic congressman who resigned in disgrace in 2011.
Mr. Weiner asked Mr. Santos about his claim, made in an interview last month shortly after his election, that a company he had worked for “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. The Times reviewed news coverage and obituaries and found no evidence that could support the claim.
On Monday, Mr. Santos shifted his account slightly, telling Mr. Weiner that those four people were not yet employees but instead were in the process of being hired.
“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 did not name the company or provide additional information to support his statement. Public records show that Mr. Santos had a Florida driver’s license and was registered to vote in that state in 2016.
Mr. Santos was mostly recently registered to vote at a house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, but the house’s owner said he moved out months before the election.
In The Post’s interview, Mr. Santos confirmed The Times’s reporting that he was currently living in Huntington, N.Y, a town just outside his congressional district. (Members of Congress are only required to live in the state they represent, not the district.)
Mr. Santos also admitted that he was not, as he claimed last year on Twitter, a landlord who makes significant income from 13 properties owned by him and his family.
“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post, even though a financial disclosure he filed with the House in September said he owned an apartment in Rio de Janeiro.
