George Santos

For other people with the same name, see George Santos (disambiguation).

In this Portuguese name, the first or maternal family name is Devolder and the second or paternal family name is Santos.

George Santos
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 3rd district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2023
Preceded by	Thomas Suozzi
Personal details
Born	George Anthony Devolder Santos (1988-07-22) July 22, 1988
Political party	Republican
Website	House website

George Anthony Devolder Santos (/ˈsæntoʊs/, /ˈsɑːntoʊs/; born July 22, 1988) is the United States representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, covering part of northern Nassau County on Long Island and northeast Queens. A member of the Republican Party, after unsuccessfully running for Congress in 2020 against incumbent Thomas Suozzi, Santos was elected to the open seat in 2022. Before serving in Congress, Santos worked for a variety of businesses in New York and Florida. Most recently, he worked for a Florida-based alternative investment firm accused of running a Ponzi scheme, although Santos was not named in any charges and has denied any knowledge of the fraud. After a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint against the company, Santos formed a company called Devolder Organization LLC.

Santos has made numerous dubious and false claims about his biography, work history, and financial status in public and private. Six weeks after his election, numerous news outlets reported that large parts of his self-published biography appear to be fabricated, including claims about his ancestry, education, employment, charity work, property ownership, and crimes of which he claimed to be a victim. Santos has admitted to lying; as of January 2023, he is under investigation by federal, state, county, and Brazilian authorities.

There have been several judgments against Santos in eviction and personal debt cases in the United States, involving thousands of dollars. In 2008, he confessed to check fraud charges in Brazil but failed to appear in court, leaving the case unresolved. In the wake of his election, Brazilian authorities revived the case in late 2022.

Early life, family and education

Santos was born on July 22, 1988, to Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder and Gercino Antonio dos Santos Jr., both of whom were born in Brazil. His maternal grandparents, Paulo Horta Devolder and Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, were also born in Brazil. Three of his four maternal great-grandparents were also born in Brazil, with the other born in Belgium in 1863 and immigrating to Brazil in 1884. His paternal grandparents are not known. Santos has claimed to have dual citizenship in the U.S. and Brazil through his parents; in 2013, a Brazilian court described him as an American national. He has a sister, Tiffany Lee Devolder Santos.

The New York Times verified Santos earned a high school equivalency diploma in New York in 2006. He has admitted to lying about graduating from any college.

Brazilian authorities allege Santos lived in Brazil in July 2008 where he committed check fraud and that he confessed to the crime in November 2010. In September 2011, a judge ordered him to respond to the charges and in December he was subpoenaed by the court. Santos maintains "I am not a criminal here – not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world." Brazilian authorities revived the case in January 2023.

Early career

Santos left Brazil while the check fraud case against him was ongoing and moved to New York City. From October 2011 to July 2012, Santos worked as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens.

The New York Times verified Santos worked for a company called MetGlobal from 2014 to 2016. In 2016, he moved to Florida and spent most of the year setting up a local office of HotelsPro, a MetGlobal subsidiary. He registered to vote and changed his driver's license to his Florida residence.

Beginning in 2017, Santos worked for LinkBridge Investors, a small company that "hosts closed-door conferences" for investors. His 2019 campaign disclosure form and a company document list him as a vice president.

Harbor City Capital

In mid-January 2020, Santos began working for Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based alternative investment firm. The Securities and Exchange Commission later filed a civil suit accusing the company of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Several months later, during his first run for Congress, Santos became the firm's New York regional director. He was not personally named in the lawsuit, nor were other colleagues of his, and he publicly denied any knowledge of the fraud. He claimed in a 2020 interview to be managing $1.5 billion in funds for Harbor City, with a fixed yield income return of 12 percent and an internal rate of return of 26 percent.

In April 2020, Santos made a since-deleted tweet from his personal account, under the name George Devolder, saying Harbor City offered investors stability in markets then roiled by the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, with "a strategy that mitigates loss and risk while creating cash flow, meanwhile your principle [sic] is 100% secured by an SBLC held by various major institutions." Two months later, an investor replied, saying that after they had received the standby letter of credit Santos referred to, Deutsche Bank told them it "was a complete fraud and not signed by the bank officer on the document". In response, Santos said, "I'm sorry I'm not following you" and asked the investor to email him for further discussion, reassuring them that the SBLC was "100% legitimate and issued by their institution". The bank later told CNN that Harbor City had never been a client, and the SEC said the company had never received any SBLC.

Harbor City paid Santos at least through April 2021, after which he founded the Devolder Organization, which he has claimed as the basis of his wealth.

Devolder Organization

Santos has given inconsistent explanations of what the Devolder Organization did. According to his financial disclosures, Santos was the sole owner and managing member of the Devolder Organization, which he said was a family-owned company that managed $80 million in assets. On financial disclosure forms, Santos called Devolder a "capital introduction consulting" firm. Although based in New York, the company was registered in Florida, where it was dissolved in September 2022 for failing to file annual reports, which Santos said was because its accountant missed the annual filing deadline. During his 2022 congressional campaign, Santos lent his campaign more than $700,000, and reported receiving a salary of $750,000 and dividends of between $1 million and $5 million from Devolder, even though he also listed the company's estimated value as in the same range.

Despite the claims about the company's size, Santos's financial disclosure forms did not list any clients using the company's services; three experts in election law interviewed by the Times said that this omission "could be problematic if such clients exist". In July 2022, Dun & Bradstreet estimated Devolder's revenue at less than $50,000. On December 20, 2022, the day after the Times article was published, Santos re-registered the Devolder Organization in Florida. Josh Marshall reported on Talking Points Memo that Santos listed himself as the registered agent on the paperwork, which could only be done if he lived in Florida and not New York. He gave as the company's mailing address a Merritt Island apartment purchased by a couple in August.

U.S. House of Representatives

2020 election

See also: 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in New York § District 3

After a 2019 bid to get elected to the Queens County Republican Committee failed to get enough signatures to qualify him for the ballot, Santos ran as a Republican for the United States House of Representatives in New York's 3rd congressional district against Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi. Normally an unknown candidate with such minimal experience would have been discouraged by the Nassau County Republican Committee, known for the tight control its leadership exercises over often competitive races for its nominations. But due to the pandemic depressing interest in the race, which the incumbent Suozzi was expected to win handily in any event, no other candidates put their names forward, leaving Santos as the party nominee that year. Queens Republicans, still angry over his abortive challenge to them the year before, were unsupportive.

Suozzi later recalled that he, too, had no doubt he would defeat Santos in 2020 since Santos was an underfinanced unknown who did not at the time live in the district, and that "during our few joint campaign appearances, all virtual, he came across as a phony". While he went as far as getting a price quote for opposition research on Santos, the campaign decided against it as Santos was so little known in the district that it would be counterproductive to increase his name recognition by drawing attention to him, even negatively. As expected, Suozzi won, 55.9 percent to 43.4 percent, a margin of about 46,000 votes. Despite the loss, local Republicans were pleasantly surprised by the strength of Santos's performance.

2022 election

See also: 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in New York § District 3

Shortly after his loss to Suozzi, Santos formed GADS PAC, a Leadership PAC, and began raising money to run again. "George never stopped being a candidate", said former New York state Republican chair Nick Langworthy, himself elected to Congress along with Santos. "I mean, he was spending time at Mar-a-Lago, raising money in different circles." Throughout 2021, Santos continued raising money and securing support. New York Representative Elise Stefanik was an early supporter, and one of her aides was already helping Santos build a campaign.

By January 2021, he had raised more than $5,000, enough to require that he file a personal financial disclosure form with the House listing all assets and liabilities. He did not do so at the time. Some Republicans began to have reservations about Santos. In mid-year one of his former advisors found out about his connections to Harbor City and some of its business practices; he was unsuccessful in getting a newspaper to cover it. After learning that Santos falsely claimed to have been endorsed by Trump, a major New York Republican donor who could not verify his claimed work history shared her suspicions with friends close to Stefanik. They texted Santos asking for his résumé, saying they were "tired of being duped" after he refused; he told them the request was "invasive".

With Santos's permission, his campaign commissioned a vulnerability study on him late in the year, to see what an opponent might be able to unearth to use against him. Some of his campaign staff were so taken aback by what it found, including much of which has later come to light, that they advised Santos to drop out of the campaign. He refused, disputing some of what it found, saying he would show them his diplomas. He never did, and after he told them he did not believe the information was as damaging as they did, the staff members quit. Through Stefanik, he was able to hire new staffers, who accepted his explanations for what the vulnerability study had found. Santos required the departed staffers to sign nondisclosure agreements, but they may have still shared its content with campaign vendors.

Among Republican officials, there had also been discreet discussions about the dubiousness of his claimed past employment and personal wealth, but most doubts were resolved with the assumption that he had been carefully vetted in 2020 and that Suozzi's campaign would have brought anything serious to light, as he was known to do. Some Republicans tried to recruit state senator Jack Martins. But it was assumed that he would be running against Suozzi again, so winning the 3rd district seemed unlikely, and thus Republicans in it concentrated their efforts on state and local office.

Those assumptions soon changed. Suozzi announced near the end of 2021 that instead of running for another term he would challenge Kathy Hochul for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, leaving the seat open, which improved Republicans' chances more. Next was the redistricting cycle, in which as the U.S. Constitution requires new congressional district boundaries are drawn up based on the findings of the decennial census. After New York's first effort at using a redistricting commission instead of the state legislature failed, the Democratic majorities in that body passed their own map in January 2022, which would have included parts of the Bronx and Westchester County across Long Island Sound from the North Shore in the 3rd, making it even more likely to vote Democratic. Several months later, the state's Court of Appeals, its highest court, struck down the map as violating the provisions of the state constitution that mandate the redistricting commission, and ordered new maps drawn by a special master. Those maps were seen as fairer to Republicans. The redrawn 3rd District, approved by the court for that year's election, was entirely on Long Island, taking in more of Queens than it had before, but none of Suffolk County, and in eastern Nassau County extending into the South Shore, making the district more favorable for Republicans.

Santos, unopposed for the Republican nomination, ran for the open seat against Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman,, who had run for the then-similar 4th district seat 40 years earlier, securing this year's nomination in late August after a six-way primary. His campaign had access to a 78-page opposition research file on Santos compiled by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), that had, in addition to statements of political positions anathema to Democratic voters, found some of the issues with Santos, such as his evictions and judgements, the pet-rescue charity unknown to the IRS and his reticence about the Devolder Organization. Some issues were flagged as needing further research, such as whether Santos had a criminal record. Since that further research would cost thousands of dollars, Zimmerman decided that with the limited time he had until the election his campaign would instead focus its spending on voter outreach and advertising.

Media coverage focused on the race being the first instance of two openly gay candidates competing against one another in a general election for a seat in Congress, as they attacked each other for the alleged extremism of their political positions; Zimmerman warned that Santos "might actually be able to win just by avoiding discussing his own record." Democrats took Santos seriously enough that Jill Biden campaigned for Zimmerman. His campaign tried in vain to interest the media, at both the national and local levels, to look more closely at Santos. "We knew a lot about him did not add up; we were very conscious of that," Zimmerman said later. "But we didn't have the resources as a campaign to do the kind of digging that had to be done."

One local outlet, The North Shore Leader, a weekly newspaper serving the affluent suburban area of that name that has historically been the core of the district, did report on the questions raised by Santos's personal financial disclosure forms when he finally filed them in September 2022, as well as some other dubious claims of his personal weath. No other media outlet reported on the matter until after the election. In October 2022, the Leader, whose publisher, Grant Lally, a longtime Republican activist who had himself previously been the party's nominee for the 3rd district, wrote that it "would like to endorse a Republican" in the race, but Santos "is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot ... he’s most likely just a fabulist – a fake". The Leader endorsed Zimmerman.

Late in the campaign, both parties realized the elections on Long Island would be close and could decide control of the House. A Democratic political action committee spent $3 million in the 3rd district race to support Zimmerman. On the Republican side, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) spent nothing, while at the same time committing $1.5 million to the neighboring 2nd and 4th district races, also ultimately won by Republicans. Sources told the Times that the CLF's leadership had been made aware of the issues around Santos.

Santos defeated Zimmerman in the November 2022 election by around eight percentage points, flipping the district (in what observers saw as a "mild upset") and helping Republicans retake control of the House by a narrow margin.

Santos was one of several incoming House Republicans to attend a Manhattan gala organized by the New York Young Republican Club that featured Republican politicians alongside white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and other extreme right-wing figures. He was featured as a "special guest" at the event. The gala also featured Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican representatives-elect Cory Mills and Mike Collins, far-right commentator and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, white supremacy activist Peter Brimelow, and members of the Freedom Party of Austria and Alternative for Germany, two right-wing European parties with an authoritarian heritage.

In a December 2022 email, Santos offered a bus trip to Washington that included an opportunity to attend his swearing-in ceremony and a campaign-led tour of the "Capitol grounds" for a donation ranging from $100 to $500; charging for tours of the U.S. Capitol is a violation of Congressional ethics rules.

Tenure

On January 3, 2023, Santos's first day in Congress, a series of unsuccessful ballots in the 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election meant that he and other representatives-elect could not be sworn in as representatives. Santos voted for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker in each of the 15 rounds of voting. Other New York House Republicans kept their distance from him on the House floor. Anthony D'Esposito, the representative from the neighboring 4th district, who had previously appeared with Santos in interviews, did not greet him. Santos was not included in a photo of the Republican members from southern New York with McCarthy that was posted on Twitter.

In the first weeks of the 118th Congress, Santos cosponsored a resolution to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

On January 11, 2023, a number of local Republican officials, including the leadership of the Nassau County Republican Committee and Representative Anthony D'Esposito, called for Santos to resign. Joseph Cairo said that Santos "disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople", Representative Brian Fitzpatrick said, "I don’t think [Santos] should be [in the House of Representatives], that’s for sure", and called for an "expedited review" of Santos's behavior. Santos publicly rejected the calls for him to step down.

Political positions

Santos has aligned himself with former president Donald Trump. In a March 2019 event held by the conservative #WalkAway Foundation that encouraged members of the LGBTQ community to leave the Democratic Party, Santos (introducing himself as Anthony Devolder) claimed to have formed a group called United for Trump and asked a transgender YouTube star how she "can help educate other trans people from not having to follow the narrative that the media and the Democrats put forward".

On January 6, 2021, Santos attended Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. He later said that Trump "was energized", gave "a great speech", and was "at his full awesomeness" that day. After the speech, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, disrupting the counting of the electoral votes that formalized Trump's loss in the 2020 United States presidential election. Santos later said he was "never on Capitol grounds" on January 6, called it a "sad and dark day", and acknowledged that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. He was later captured on video saying that he had written a "nice check to a law firm" to bail January 6 arrestees out of jail, saying: "Don't want to publicize it, but pretty adamant about that. Imagine breaking into your own house and being charged for trespassing."

In August 2021, Santos called President Joe Biden a "pathological liar".

Santos has called police brutality a "made-up concept". In a 2022 speech to the Whitestone Republican Club in Whitestone, Queens, Santos called abortion "barbaric" and compared it to slavery.

False biographical statements scandal

In September 2022, The North Shore Leader raised questions about Santos's net worth increase from "barely above 'zero'" to $11 million between 2020 and 2022. On December 19, 2022, after Santos won the 2022 election but before he was to take office in January 2023, The New York Times reported that he had apparently misrepresented many aspects of his life and career, including his education and employment history. The Times also reported Santos had unresolved charges for check fraud in Brazil. The same day, Santos's lawyer wrote that Times was "attempting to smear [Santos's] good name with these defamatory allegations"; Santos did not produce any documents to substantiate his claims, despite several requests. On December 21, The Forward and Jewish Insider reported that Santos had lied extensively about his family's supposed Jewish heritage. His initial claims that his maternal grandparents were Jewish Holocaust refugees who fled Soviet Ukraine and occupied Belgium were false; both his maternal grandparents were born in Brazil. On December 22, Santos wrote on Twitter: "I have my story to tell and it will be told next week"; the same day, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation had been opened into Santos. The Daily Beast also first reported on Santos's previously unknown marriage; Santos had been married to a woman between 2012 and 2019.

On December 26, 2022, Santos broke his silence with interviews on WABC radio and in The New York Post. He denied being a criminal to WABC radio, saying, "I'm not a fraud. I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress." Santos admitted to the Post that he lied about graduating from college and working for Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. During the interview, he said: "I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was 'Jew-ish.'" He also acknowledged his former marriage, but described himself as "very much gay".

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which had previously hosted Santos at their events, announced on December 27 that he would no longer be welcome at them. According to the organization's CEO, Matt Brooks, Santos "deceived us and misrepresented his heritage. In public comments and to us personally he previously claimed to be Jewish"; during Santos' 2022 campaign appearances, he called himself an "American Jew" and a "Latino Jew" on multiple occasions. The same day, Santos was interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News, his first television appearance since the controversy broke. Gabbard asked him about the meaning of "integrity"; Santos said he showed "courage" by admitting his mistakes on national television. Gabbard then asked him, "Do you have no shame?", to which Santos responded that he "can say the same thing about the Democrats"; Gabbard then told him that that her question was not about Democrats. Asked about his purported Jewish heritage, Santos responded: "My heritage is Jewish. I've always identified as Jewish. I was raised as a practicing Catholic ... I understand everybody wants to nitpick at me". Asked about his lies about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, he said that whether they were lies was "debatable" and that the nature of his work would require a "discussion that can go way above the American people's head", a characterization Gabbard called insulting. By the next day, federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York were investigating Santos's finances, and the Nassau County district attorney was investigating him for unspecified reasons.

Throughout December, Republican leaders were largely silent on the scandal, with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy declining to comment. The New York Post reported that a senior House Republican aide had told them House Republican leaders were aware of the false biographical claims before the election, saying the topic had become a "running joke". Some former Republican supporters called upon Santos to explain himself, including former Long Island Republican representative Peter T. King. Then Representative-elect Nick LaLota called for the House Ethics Committee to investigate Santos. Nassau County Republican chairman Joseph G. Cairo said he was "deeply disappointed" in Santos, saying, "I expected more than a blanket apology" after Santos publicly addressed the issue for the first time. "The damage that his lies have caused to many people, especially those who have been impacted by the Holocaust, are profound," but did not call for Santos to resign or be investigated. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene defended Santos, while retiring Representative Kevin Brady said Santos "certainly is going to have to consider resigning".

Other false claims about family, religion, and education

Santos has used the name Anthony Zabrovsky to fundraise for a pet charity ("Ironbound Animal Rescue"), while records contradict his claim that his maternal grandparents had a Ukrainian Jewish last name of Zabrovsky. Santos has also claimed that he was biracial and was born to an African American father, who had Angolan roots, but there is no evidence of that.

On his campaign website, Santos wrote that his mother was "the first female executive at a major financial institution" and that she worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and died "a few years later" after surviving the September 11 attacks. His mother's actual occupation has been described as domestic worker or home care nurse; upon her death, a Brazilian community newspaper described her as a cook. Santos's former roommates and friends said she spoke no English. In July 2021, Santos wrote on Twitter that "9/11 claimed my mothers [sic] life"; in an October 2021 interview, he said his mother was "caught up in the ash cloud" during 9/11 but "never applied for relief" because the family could afford the medical bills; in December 2021, he wrote on Twitter that his mother had died five years earlier; in December 2022, he claimed that both of his parents survived being "down there" at the World Trade Center during 9/11. A priest at the family's Catholic church reported that Santos had told him the family could not afford a funeral when Santos' mother died in 2016. The priest recalled that a collection at a memorial Mass raised a "significant" amount for the family, which he gave to Santos; he also had a friend set up a GoFundMe.

Santos claimed in 2019 and 2020 to have attended the Horace Mann School, an elite preparatory school, before withdrawing because of family hardship. The school reports it has no record of Santos. Santos holds a high school equivalency diploma.

Santos falsely claimed to hold a bachelor's degree in finance and economics from Baruch College and to have graduated in the top percentile of his class with a 3.89 grade point average; his claimed period of attendance overlapped with his time in Brazil. Friends of his have recalled times when he claimed to be taking classes at Baruch but never seemed to study. In January 2023, Nassau County Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo said during a press conference that Santos falsely told him that he was a "star player" on the Baruch volleyball team, as his LinkBridge supervisor had been, and that it had won the league championship. Santos also falsely claimed to hold a master of business administration from New York University (NYU) and to have scored 710 on the Graduate Management Admission Test. An acquaintance who lent Santos money in 2014 recalled Santos claiming to be a graduate of NYU's business school but seeming not to know the school's name.

Other false claims about employment and charity

Throughout his career, Santos has used various aliases, including Anthony Zabrovsky and Anthony Devolder.

After returning from Brazil, Santos told friends that while there he had worked as a journalist for a major news organization. Some looked for his name on the organization's website but could not find it.

Santos called himself a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" and said he had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company has any record of him. His campaign website stated that he "began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm", but Citigroup sold its asset management division in 2005. On a 2022 podcast, Santos claimed that while employed at Goldman he attended the SALT private equity conference seven years earlier where, on a panel, he criticized his employer for investing in renewable energy, calling it a taxpayer-subsidized scam. Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the conference, said there is no record of Santos having attended any SALT conference.

Santos's claimed employment at Citigroup overlapped with his employment as a Dish Network customer service representative during the same period. He later told the Post that his claim to have been employed there was "a poor choice of words" and that a subsequent employer had been in "limited partnerships" with those companies.

While working as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens, from October 2011 to July 2012, Santos reportedly told acquaintances and coworkers that his family was wealthy and had extensive real estate holdings in the U.S. and Brazil. He repeated this claim during his 2022 congressional campaign, saying that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York. No such properties were listed on his campaign's financial disclosure forms or in public records. Santos admitted to the Post that the claim was false and he owned no properties as of the end of 2022.

Santos said he founded a charity for rescue animals called Friends of Pets United (FOPU) in 2013 and ran it until 2018. He said the group was a tax-exempt charity, but the Internal Revenue Service has no record that the group was registered as a nonprofit organization. Friends of Pets United held a 2017 fundraiser event for a New Jersey animal rescue group, but the organizer of the rescue group said that Santos never gave it any of the proceeds.

In a November 2022 interview, Santos discussed the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that year, saying, "I happened to, at the time, have people that worked for me in the club ... my company at the time, we lost four employees that were at Pulse." None of the 49 victims killed in the attack appears to have a connection to any of the companies named in Santos's biography. In a December 2022 interview, Santos changed his story, saying, "We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando".

Conflicting residential claims

Santos has offered conflicting accounts of his residence. During his 2020 campaign, he listed his home as in Elmhurst, Queens, outside the boundaries of the district in which he was then seeking office. Santos and his partner later moved to a rowhouse in Whitestone, Queens; its owner said they had moved there in July 2020. In January 2021, Santos claimed the couple had found stones and eggs thrown at the apartment after they returned to it from a party at Mar-a-Lago. The owner, who lived in the building's lower unit, did not recall any such incident and the Times found no relevant police report. In March 2022, Santos told Newsday that he had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse because of the vandalism, but seven months later he said he still lived in the Whitestone home. He was registered to vote at the Whitestone address during his congressional campaigns, but did not appear to live there.

Santos's landlord said he actually had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse in August 2022, leaving $17,000 in damages, but records showed he was still registered at the address when he voted that November. He continued to receive mail there after the election, including the certificate of his election victory, according to the landlord, who had disposed of most of it. Santos told reporters that he planned to move to Oyster Bay, but he and his partner apparently moved into a house in Huntington, outside his congressional district's boundaries, in August 2022. He told the Post that the house was his sister's, but the Times later found that she lived in Elmhurst.

Unverified claims

In a 2020 interview, Santos said he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and received radiation treatment. As of December 30, 2022, neither he nor his campaign has clarified details or answered questions about that claim. He also claims to suffer from an immunodeficiency and acute chronic bronchitis.

Legal issues

Brazilian check fraud charges

After obtaining his high school equivalency diploma, Santos spent time in Brazil. In 2008, he forged checks, stolen from a man his mother was caring for, to buy R$1,313 (about US$700) worth of clothing. When writing the checks, Santos presented identification bearing his photo but the check owner's name. The store owner became suspicious when the signatures on two checks did not match. Santos later admitted the theft to the store clerk (who had been liable to the store accepting the checks) in an Orkut post: "It was always my intention to pay, but I messed up", he wrote, and promised he would do so.

In 2010, Santos confessed to police and was charged with check fraud, but did not respond to a 2013 court summons. After Brazilian authorities told The New York Times that the case remains unresolved, Santos said, "I am not a criminal here – not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world." On January 2, 2023, the Times reported that prosecutors in the state of Rio de Janeiro were reviving the fraud charges because Santos' whereabouts had become known.

Evictions and unpaid judgments

Three times in the mid-2010s, Santos was evicted from rented Queens properties (in Jackson Heights, Whitestone, and Sunnyside) due to failure to pay rent. A Queens court entered a civil judgment of $12,208 against him in the second eviction. Santos told the Post that his mother's illness had forced his family into debt at the time; as of December 2022 he had yet to pay the rent he owed, as he "completely forgot about it".

In September 2014, an acquaintance lent Santos several thousand dollars he said he needed to move in with his boyfriend. Santos refused to pay the money back; a judge later rejected his claim that the money had been a gift and ordered Santos to repay it with interest, which he had not done as of 2022.

After that eviction, in September 2014 Santos signed a one-year lease on a single-family house in Whitestone, around the time he asked a friend for the money to move in with his boyfriend, that resulted in the judgment against Santos that he had not paid off as of 2022. In 2023, the boyfriend told the Times that he had dated Santos for several months before they moved in together; that Santos had claimed that he would get money from an investment he had done with Citigroup, so the boyfriend paid most of the bills; and that Santos "never ever actually went to work"; the relationship soured in early 2015 over a surprise gift of plane tickets to Hawaii from Santos that turned out to be illusory. After the boyfriend came to believe Santos had taken his cell phone to pawn it, he searched the Internet for Santos's name and found the 2013 Brazilian charges against him, leading him to move out.

Santos remained in the house through November of that year, owing a month and a half's rent. His landlady filed for eviction, and he agreed to leave by December 24 and pay her $2,250 in back rent. In mid-January 2016, he told Queens Housing Court, in a statement signed under oath, that he was robbed of the money on his way to pay the back rent, and that police were unable to take a report at the time, telling him to return later. There is no record he ever did. The next month, after the eviction became final, Santos registered to vote in Florida, where he was working for HotelsPro. He voted in that year's election in November, and then re-registered again in New York six days later.

Campaign finance issues

Santos filed personal financial disclosure forms the House requires of congressional candidates in early September, 20 months past the due date, when he had raised $5,000 in campaign funds. The Leader took note of the contrast between them and similar forms he had filed for the 2020 elections. In 2020, he had listed a net worth of $5,000 and claimed his only income was his $50,000 Harbor Hill salary. By 2022, he said he was worth between $2.5 and $11 million, including $1–5 million in personal bank accounts, a Rio condominium valued between $500,000 and $1 million, and business interests accounting for the rest. He reported no real property in the U.S., at odds with past claims that he owned two mansions on Long Island, one of which, in the Hamptons, he had reportedly told fellow Republicans he was selling for around $10 million because he rarely used it (the Leader reported that at the time, someone with no connection to Santos owned it, and it was valued at $2 million).

The Leader also noted that a $600,000 loan Santos had reported making to his campaign earlier in the year on his required campaign financial disclosure forms was not listed as a liability on his personal forms, even as he had disclosed a $20,000–50,000 car loan he took out for the Nissan he drove. He claimed no income.

In a later interview with Semafor, Santos said he was able to take advantage of a network of around 15,000 "wealthy investors, family offices, 'institutions' and endowments" after leaving Harbor City and forming Devolder to get contracts worth several million dollars. "If you're looking at a $20 million yacht, my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000", he said. He did not identify any of his clients when asked to do so.

During his campaign, Santos made large expenditures; he used campaign funds to pay for shirts for staff from Brooks Brothers, meals at the restaurant at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, and $40,000 in airline fares, including to locations in California, Texas and Florida, and a stay at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, part of $30,000 in hotel bills, $14,000 paid to car services and an equivalent sum spent at a Queens restaurant. That much airfare, the Times later noted, is far more than most candidates spend on their first election and closer to the amounts spent by party leaders who have served in Congress for years. Two campaign aides told the Times that staff were increasingly concerned during the campaign that Santos was more interested in spending the $3 million raised for the race "frivolously" than on winning the election.

Ten days after breaking its original story, the Times took a closer look at his campaign's financial disclosures. It noted that a company called "Cleaner 123" had received $11,000 over four months as rent for campaign staff housing in the district. Neighbors of the house said that Santos and his partner appeared to have been living there during that time. The forms also included a number of expenses of $199.99, just below the $200.00 threshold at which campaigns must include the receipts along with their disclosure forms. An election law expert the Times talked to suggested that this could indicate awareness of the law and intent to violate it.

The day before Santos took office, the New York Daily News reported that in July 2021 he had loaned GADS PAC $25,000, five times what it had on hand at the time; the next day, the PAC donated the same amount to the campaign of Lee Zeldin, a Republican congressman also from Long Island who became the party's gubernatorial nominee in 2022. Starting in April 2022, GADS PAC, by then flush with donations from Santos's supporters, repaid him in four installments over the next two months. Effectively, Santos had arranged for his campaign contributors to repay the loan.

Robert Maguire, an expert on the subject at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), found several aspects of the transaction "extremely strange," including Santos's loan to a PAC (rather than his campaign committee, as is more typical) and his establishment of a leadership PAC for himself before even being elected to Congress (such PACs are used by party leaders and committee chairs or ranking members, to support colleagues).

In December 2022, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) wrote to Nancy Marks, Santos's campaign treasurer, about possible violations of federal campaign finance regulations it had identified in Santos's reports filed after the election. Three individual contributors appeared to have given more than the $2,900 per cycle limit during September and October. Other potential violations include contributions from apparent political organizations not registered with the FEC and insufficient disclosures regarding other contributions, such as the 48-hour notice required for contributions of more than $1,000 during the last 20 days before the election, after the last required report has been filed. The FEC also noted that Santos's disclosures regarding his loans to the campaign lacked required information such as their terms and any co-guarantors. The campaign has until January 24, 2023, to correct those violations by filing an amended report listing all required information and any corrective actions taken, such as returning the excess funds or applying them to a different candidate or cycle. Santos's attorney denied that the Santos campaign "engaged in any unlawful spending of campaign funds".

In January 2023, CNBC reported that the head of a company Santos's campaign had paid $50,000 for consulting called Republican donors claiming to be McCarthy's chief of staff and asking them to support Santos. Some contributors to Santos's campaign said they were motivated to give to him because of his supposed Wall Street experience or his claim to be Jewish, both later found to be fictitious, and felt cheated in the wake of those disclosures.

Also in January 2023, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC over the Santos campaign's apparent violations. The complaint alleged that Santos used campaign funds to pay personal expenses; concealed the source of $700,000 he had given his campaign; and falsified campaign expenditures. End Citizens United filed separate complaints with the FEC, Department of Justice, and Office of Congressional Ethics. Accountable.US filed an additional FEC complaint by the end of the week, alleging over $100,000 in contributions over the limit.

On January 10, 2023, two House Democrats from New York who have been critical of Santos, Ritchie Torres and Dan Goldman, filed an ethics complaint with the House Ethics Committee over Santos's financial disclosure reports; Santos denied wrongdoing. Interviewed by Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican from Florida, on Steve Bannon's podcast, Santos repeated his earlier denials of wrongdoing beyond what he had already admitted and did not answer questions about where the $700,000 had come from.

Two days later, the Times reported that RedStone Strategies, a Super-PAC supporting Santos in the race that told potential donors a month before the election that it had raised $800,000 and was seeking to raise another $700,000, had not registered with the FEC as a campaign organization. It was thus not known who donated to RedStone or ran it; the Devolder Organization and one of Santos's former Harbor Hill coworkers who lived at the Merritt Island address are listed as officers of a similarly named concern in Florida records. There was no record that RedStone spent any money buying advertising in support of Santos. It also described itself as a 501(c)(4) organization, which means that while it can spend on political advocacy as long as that is not its primary purpose, it cannot support candidates directly.

In 2020, Marks and Tiffany Santos established a PAC named Rise NY. Its New York state campaign finance records show a wire transfer of $6,000 in April 2022 to RedStone, to a Merritt Island bank. Rise had raised money from many Santos donors who had exceeded the $2,900 limit for direct contributions. PACs are allowed to contribute to candidates and parties without limit, but cannot independently support campaign activities. Rise's Twitter account posted accounts of voter registration events and rallies it claimed to have organized during the campaign, and it reported paying the salaries of some of Santos's campaign staff as well as $10,000 to a company Marks runs and a $20,000 salary to Tiffany Santos for her services as its president. Records also show multiple expenditures at Il Bacco, the Queens Italian restaurant where Santos's 2022 campaign spent $14,000, and at a gas station near Santos's Whitestone apartment.

In his two congressional runs combined, Santos reports having spent over $25,000 at Il Bacco, an eatery popular with New York City Republicans, which had limited seating available during 2020 due to pandemic restrictions; the city suspended its liquor license for part of 2021 after a Republican event that flouted those restrictions and led to at least one documented infection. Santos's 2022 campaign reports owing Il Bacco nearly $19,000 for its election night victory party, in addition to seven of the instances where the campaign had reported spending exactly $199.99.

Santos appointed Il Bacco's owner, Joe Oppedisano, along with his daughter, the restaurant's manager, to his Small Business for Santos Coalition; Oppedisano in turn donated $6,500 to his campaign and its associated PACs. Oppedisano's brother Rocco also gave $500 to Santos, a facially illegal contribution since he is not a U.S. citizen and had his permanent resident status revoked after guns and drugs were seized from his properties in 2009; he was expelled from the U.S. a decade later after trying to reenter illegally on a boat from the Bahamas also carrying 14 undocumented Chinese nationals.

Others

The Times reported that the vulnerability study done in late 2021 by Santos's campaign found that his Florida driver's license had been suspended.

Two of Santos’s former roommates accused him of stealing personal effects, including a $520 Burberry scarf he wore to a January 5, 2021 “Stop The Steal” rally, and said that expensive dress shirts, phones and checks went missing while Santos was living with then.

Personal life

Santos married a woman in 2012; they divorced in 2019, 12 days before he officially filed his first congressional campaign. In 2014, he began dating a man; the two lived together until the man moved out early the next year.

In 2020, Santos indicated he was living with a partner named Matheus (or Matt), whom he has subsequently referred to as his husband.

In October 2022, Santos told the media: "I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade". Santos did not publicly acknowledge his first marriage until after it was reported in December 2022; he told the Post in December 2022: "I dated women in the past. I married a woman", adding that he was "OK with my sexuality. People change."

Electoral history

New York's 3rd congressional district, 2020

Party		Candidate	Votes	%
	Democratic	Thomas Suozzi	196,056	52.6
	Working Families	Thomas Suozzi	9,203	2.5
	Independence	Thomas Suozzi	3,296	0.9
	Total	Thomas Suozzi (incumbent)	208,555	56.0
	Republican	George Santos	147,461	39.6
	Conservative	George Santos	14,470	3.9
	Total	George Santos	161,931	43.5
	Libertarian	Howard Rabin	2,156	0.5
Total votes			372,642	100
	Democratic hold

New York's 3rd congressional district, 2022

Party		Candidate	Votes	%
	Republican	George Santos	133,859	49.4
	Conservative	George Santos	11,965	4.4
	Total	George Santos	145,824	53.8
	Democratic	Rob Zimmerman	120,045	44.3
	Working Families	Rob Zimmerman	5,359	2.0
	Total	Rob Zimmerman	125,404	46.2
Total votes			271,228	100
	Republican gain from Democratic

See also

• Dan Johnson, Kentucky state legislator who committed suicide in 2017 after fabrications about his past were revealed
• Douglas R. Stringfellow, one-term Utah congressman known for having lied extensively about his past

External links

• A false resume Santos used in 2019
• Representative George Santos official U.S. House website
• George Santos for Congress
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Ballotpedia candidate profile – 2022 Candidate Connection survey answers (Archive at Archive.org)

• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
• Legislation sponsored at the Library of Congress
• Profile at Vote Smart