Unsurprisingly, Democratic reactions to Santos’ behavior were even more fiery: Ritchie Torres, the Democratic representative for New York’s 15th congressional district who works just down the road from Santos, wrote an NBC op-ed near the beginning of the year titled “My new co-worker George Santos is a distraction and a danger to democracy” that called Santos a “liar, cheat and fraud” and “deceitful to the core” within the first two sentences. Former GOP representative Adam Kinzinger started a petition to boot Santos out of office. Representative Nick LaLota - a fellow New York Republican - and six others then called for Santos’s campaign funds to be frozen by the Department of Justice and by the Federal Elections Commission. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN back in January that he “always” had questions about the congressman’s résumé on Tuesday. There is a feeling of compulsion to them.Īnd so many questions now hang over Santos’s head that most of his fellow Republicans ceased to defend him, even before he became a legal liability. These alleged lies range from the very serious to the comically absurd, from the personal to the professional, and from the clearly self-serving to the head-scratchingly strange. He even seems to have claimed he was running an imaginary animal charity. How did Santos do it? As his house of cards comes tumbling down, the answer seems to be: By fictionalizing himself into the perfect candidate.Īside from the financial and legal crimes he’s now been charged with, Santos also stands accused of lying about the entire contents of his résumé, including where he went to college, and even where he went to high school whether he is married to a man or a woman (he spoke of a husband in his campaign bio, but records only appear to show a marriage and divorce to a woman) how his mother died (not in 9/11, it turns out) whether his grandmother was in the Holocaust and indeed whether any of his family is actually Jewish (it appears they are all actually Brazilian Catholics.) An indictment suggests he allegedly lied about being unemployed in order to collect fraudulent benefits, and spent “thousands of dollars on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments”. This was a once-safe Democratic seat, where people voted for Joe Biden by a double-digit margin in 2020. When the 34-year-old representative from New York’s 3rd congressional district flipped the seat in the November midterms, it was celebrated by Republicans as a rare and significant victory. Charged with crimes ranging from false statements to fraud on Wednesday, the former golden boy of the Republican Party may be about to end his career in a spectacular flame-out even his most ardent detractors couldn’t have predicted. Anyone who’s taken a passing look at the news lately knows it’s been a bad week for George Santos.
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