Republican Rep.-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to many of the lies he got caught in only after being elected to Congress, but denied the broader implications of his pattern of lying and dodged some of the bigger issues raised by reports. In a series of interviews, Santos admitted to “résumé embellishment” but shrugged it off, saying that “a lot of people overstate in their résumés.”
While the list of lies Santos admitted to or downplayed is long, one huge question remains both important and completely unanswered: How did he lend his campaign $700,000? In 2020, when he ran for Congress and lost, his financial disclosure said he had little income. Just two years later, he supposedly had his own business that was paying him enough to cough up high six figures, though financial disclosure forms didn’t list any clients. Santos’ campaign website no longer claims his business, the Devolder Organization, manages $80 million in assets, but in his Monday interviews, he basically waved off questions about where that $700,000 came from.
“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,” Santos told City & State, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that—no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”
Oh, well, if George Santos says there was no criminal conduct, we should definitely believe him. That guy is so trustworthy!
Santos is claiming, to be clear, that he moved from a job at a place called LinkBridge Investors, from which he declared a total of $55,000 in income, to a job at an investment company that the S.E.C. accused of being a Ponzi scheme, then parlayed those connections and experiences into starting a self-owned company that was founded in May 2021 and somehow by November 2022 had paid him enough to lend his campaign $700,000. Suffice it to say there are still a lot of questions to be answered, and considering Santos’ record on telling the truth, he’s going to need to provide a lot of documentation to be believable.
In his interviews—in addition to City & State, he talked to the New York Post and WABC, where he was interviewed by supermarket chain owner and major Republican donor John Catsimatidis and disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner—Santos admitted to not having graduated from college. He had previously claimed he had degrees from Baruch College and New York University. He also admitted to not having worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs as he had claimed, now saying that it was a “poor choice of words” to have said that when what really happened (he now claims) is that LinkBridge Investors had connections with those firms and he had done work for them through that.
But even as he owns up to lying, Santos is still lying. It was not a “poor choice of words” to have wrongly implied that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs—he was extremely specific, with his campaign website claiming 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.”
Santos also admitted, in the Trumpian third person, “George Santos does not own any properties” after having campaigned as a landlord who owned 13 properties.
That’s not all: Santos tried and failed to explain away his very specific previous claims that his Jewish grandparents fled the Holocaust. “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told the New York Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
One thing Santos flatly rejected rather than semi-admitting but not coming fully clean on was The New York Times report that he had confessed to and been charged with check fraud in Brazil more than a decade ago, with the case remaining unresolved. In his WABC interview Santos insisted, “I am not a criminal. Not here, not abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I ever committed any crimes.”
He added, “To get down to the nit and gritty, 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. I’ve been around a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They’ve done business dealings with me.”
Do they, though? That part is not very clear at all.
Of all of Santos’ lies and omissions, though, the money part remains by far the most important. How did he suddenly come up with hundreds of thousands of spare dollars to lend his campaign when nothing in his background or financial disclosures indicates he had a legitimate source for that kind of money? There are a lot of possible answers, and few of them are as simple as a “poor choice of words.” Some of them are crimes that could potentially lead to prison time.
While the list of lies Santos admitted to or downplayed is long, one huge question remains both important and completely unanswered: How did he lend his campaign $700,000? In 2020, when he ran for Congress and lost, his financial disclosure said he had little income. Just two years later, he supposedly had his own business that was paying him enough to cough up high six figures, though financial disclosure forms didn’t list any clients. Santos’ campaign website no longer claims his business, the Devolder Organization, manages $80 million in assets, but in his Monday interviews, he basically waved off questions about where that $700,000 came from.
“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,” Santos told City & State, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that—no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”
Oh, well, if George Santos says there was no criminal conduct, we should definitely believe him. That guy is so trustworthy!
Santos is claiming, to be clear, that he moved from a job at a place called LinkBridge Investors, from which he declared a total of $55,000 in income, to a job at an investment company that the S.E.C. accused of being a Ponzi scheme, then parlayed those connections and experiences into starting a self-owned company that was founded in May 2021 and somehow by November 2022 had paid him enough to lend his campaign $700,000. Suffice it to say there are still a lot of questions to be answered, and considering Santos’ record on telling the truth, he’s going to need to provide a lot of documentation to be believable.
In his interviews—in addition to City & State, he talked to the New York Post and WABC, where he was interviewed by supermarket chain owner and major Republican donor John Catsimatidis and disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner—Santos admitted to not having graduated from college. He had previously claimed he had degrees from Baruch College and New York University. He also admitted to not having worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs as he had claimed, now saying that it was a “poor choice of words” to have said that when what really happened (he now claims) is that LinkBridge Investors had connections with those firms and he had done work for them through that.
But even as he owns up to lying, Santos is still lying. It was not a “poor choice of words” to have wrongly implied that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs—he was extremely specific, with his campaign website claiming 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.”
Santos also admitted, in the Trumpian third person, “George Santos does not own any properties” after having campaigned as a landlord who owned 13 properties.
That’s not all: Santos tried and failed to explain away his very specific previous claims that his Jewish grandparents fled the Holocaust. “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos told the New York Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
One thing Santos flatly rejected rather than semi-admitting but not coming fully clean on was The New York Times report that he had confessed to and been charged with check fraud in Brazil more than a decade ago, with the case remaining unresolved. In his WABC interview Santos insisted, “I am not a criminal. Not here, not abroad, in any jurisdiction in the world have I ever committed any crimes.”
He added, “To get down to the nit and gritty, 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. I’ve been around a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They’ve done business dealings with me.”
Do they, though? That part is not very clear at all.
Of all of Santos’ lies and omissions, though, the money part remains by far the most important. How did he suddenly come up with hundreds of thousands of spare dollars to lend his campaign when nothing in his background or financial disclosures indicates he had a legitimate source for that kind of money? There are a lot of possible answers, and few of them are as simple as a “poor choice of words.” Some of them are crimes that could potentially lead to prison time.