New York’s third congressional district covers the Northern Shore of Long Island. Its congressman, Democrat Tom Suozzi, made an unsuccessful bid for governor rather than seeking reelection. In his place, a Republican named George Santos was elected last November, helping the GOP win a tiny majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
It was Santos’s second campaign for the seat. In 2020, he lost to Suozzi by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin. But in 2022, he beat Democrat Rob Zimmerman 52 percent to 44 percent. He is supposed to be be sworn into Congress on January 3, 2023.
It seems quite late for the New York Times to look into Santos’s resumé. It should have been done back when Santos was competing in a Republican primary in 2020. This oversight is especially unfortunate because now that the Times finally did an investigation, they’ve discovered that Santos is a complete fraud.
Here are some examples:
Santos says he attended New York University and graduated from Baruch College in 2010. Those institutions have never heard of him.
Santos says he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions say that’s straight up bullshit.
Santos says he established a tax-exempt charity called Friends of Pets United but the Internal Revenue Service says there is no charity by that name in their records.
The Times visited “the address where he is registered to vote and that was associated with a campaign donation he made in October” but the resident there had never heard of him.
But, wait, because it gets better. Santos was twice evicted (in 2015 and 2017) from New York apartments for failure to pay rent. Despite this, during the early years of the pandemic he claimed to be an aggrieved landlord of 13 New York properties who couldn’t collect his rents. The Times investigators could locate none of these properties.
For a while, around the time he was supposed to graduating from Baruch College, he lived in Brazil with his mother, a nurse, but he was arrested for stealing a checkbook and writing bad checks. That case is unresolved because he didn’t show up to face the charges.
Then there’s the matter of his money. I’ve already told you that his real estate fortune is a myth. Everything else seems to be a myth, too, or a fraud.
His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.
Devolder is his mother’s maiden name.
Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.
The places where he has had confirmed employment are just as problematic.
As he ran for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to take on a new role as regional director of Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment company.
Harbor City, which attracted investors with YouTube videos and guarantees of double-digit returns, soon garnered attention from the S.E.C., which filed a lawsuit accusing the company and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme.
…Two weeks later, a handful of former Harbor City executives formed a company called Red Strategies USA, as reported by The Daily Beast. Corporate filings listed the Devolder Organization as a partial owner — even though the papers to register Devolder would not be filed for another week.
Red Strategies was short lived: Federal campaign records show it did political consulting work for at least one politician — Tina Forte, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November — before it was dissolved in September for failing to file an annual report.
As for the Devolder Organization, which has “has no public-facing assets or other property that The Times could locate,” it too was dissolved for failure to file required reports.
One has to wonder where this man got $700,000 to loan to his campaign. Unfortunately, he won’t talk to reporters to we have no explanation.
We don’t even know where he lives, but we know this: he appeared “earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists .”
Will Congress actually seat this man? His financial disclosure forms are obviously criminally dishonest and he voted from a fake address, meaning he’s guilty of voter fraud.
There’s a lot of failure here, and not just from New York reporters who should have uncovered all this information before Election Day in 2020, let alone Election Day 2022. Why didn’t the Democrats’ opposition research teams find this derogatory information? Why didn’t the National Republican Congressional Committee discover it? Or, if they did, why did they say and do nothing about it?
The people of New York’s third congressional district should have known that Santos was lying to them about virtually everything, but they were in the dark. Now they’re stuck with a fraudster as a representative.
Kevin McCarthy is scrambling to come up with enough votes to become Speaker of the House, so he probably wants to seat Santos. But I can’t see how that can be justified. There’s no way Santos should ever become a congressman, even for a moment.
I’m fairly certain the answer to your headline question is “yes” based on past performance.
Yes, it seems so.
The good news for Republicans is that they found a case of voter fraud!