Rep. George Santos won a seat in Congress but the apparent fabulist has at least one criminal charge pending against him in Brazil and he is already the target of three other US criminal investigations.
It appears that Santos, who beat Democrat Robert Zimmerman during the 2022 midterm election, spun a web of lies about his personal and professional background, some of them touching on major historical and tragic events.
Since the New York Times reported that he made it all up, it’s been an unending cascade of revelations—each more bizarre than the last—showing that we can’t really trust anything that he has ever said.
“Poke around at practically any sentence he has uttered in public over the past few years, you’ll likely find something about it that isn’t quite right,” said Prem Thakker, an associate writer at The New Republic. “There’s so much—too much!—to keep track of.”
Santos falsely claimed to have Jewish ancestry and said that his maternal grandparents fled to Brazil during the Holocaust.
He also said the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks claimed the life of his mother – but she actually died in 2016.
In July 2021, Santos tweeted that “9/11 claimed my mothers life.” A few months later, in December, he honored his mother with a tweet that read “December 23rd this year marks 5 years I lost [sic] my best friend and mentor. Mom you will live forever in my heart.”
Santos allegedly stole two checks from his mother’s purse and used them to buy shoes and clothes. They belonged to an 82-year-old man in Brazil whom his mother was caring for as a home health aide. Santos was charged with embezzlement, and the case is still open.
A Brazilian news outlet is reporting that a woman says she traveled with George Santos back to the United States in 2011, and that he drained her bank account and pawned her jewelry.
The congressman-elect’s House website claimed he voted “nay” on the omnibus bill, which was approved before Santos was in office.
The four criminal investigations of Santos are being pursued by the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor, the Nassau County District Attorney, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and the New York Attorney General.
Federal prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York are looking into Santos’s finances and financial disclosures.
The Nassau County district attorney is investigating Santos over the falsehoods in his résumé, although the office has not said what specifically it will be looking at.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has said her office will investigate Santos for his multiple apparent fabrications.
The freshman congressman was also hit with two ethics complaints this week, one to the House Ethics Committee over his financial disclosures and one to the Federal Election Commission for alleged misrepresentation and misuse of campaign funds.
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