You will not be shocked at the news that people running for federal office have often “fudged” their resumes, pretending to have accomplished things or been places that they’ve never done or never been.
Voters, if they support that candidate, tend to shrug their shoulders and look the other way. But what should we do with Representative-elect George Santos of New York? Santos has lied about more than where he worked or where he went to school. George Santos has created an entirely new human being in such glorious and wondrous detail that it took five New York Times reporters spread out over two continents to unravel it.
Santos missed his calling. He easily could have been a spy 50 years ago, having created such a marvelous legend that he could have passed as a harmless American despite his real identity as a Soviet agent.
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Santos ran for Congress in New York’s 3rd congressional district on Long Island. He ran as the “full embodiment of the American dream” according to the Times. Indeed, he said he was the son of Brazilian immigrants, which may be true, but about the rest of his resume, no one is really sure.
The Times says Santos “catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a ‘seasoned Wall Street financier and investor’ with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.”
None of that is true. Baruch college, from which Santos says he graduated, has no record that he ever attended. The Wall Street firms for which he says he worked have no record of him, either. His animal rescue group was a scam.
There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.
Santos apparently held one fundraiser for the pets that the supposed beneficiary says she never received a dime from. He claims to have owned 13 properties but was evicted twice.
And Devolder Organization, the company he claims he ran? It’s nowhere to be found.
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.
And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times find, records of his properties.
Santos says he’s the first openly gay Republican to be elected. He says he lost four employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016. But the Times could find no evidence in a review of news coverage and obituaries that any of the 49 victims worked at the various firms named in his biography.
Santos appears to have used tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds to live the high life while running for Congress.
Campaign disclosures show that Mr. Santos lived large as a candidate, buying shirts for his staff from Brooks Brothers and charging the campaign for meals at the restaurant inside Bergdorf Goodman.
Mr. Santos also spent a considerable amount of money traveling — charging his campaign roughly $40,000 in flights to places that included California, Texas and Florida. All told, Mr. Santos spent more than $17,000 in Florida, mostly on restaurants and hotels, including at least one evening at the Breakers, a five-star hotel and resort in Palm Beach, three miles up the road from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence.
What’s even more interesting than Santos’s fabricated past is that the opposition research by Democrats failed to find most of this stuff. The 3rd district was competitive, having been represented by Rep. Tom Suozzi for four terms before he retired to run for governor. Democrats should be kicking themselves for failing to expose this fabulist before the election.
Santos had his lawyer respond to the allegations and, as any good grifter would do, called the New York Times a bunch of liars. That they may be, but with dozens of other news sites checking the Times story and finding the same things wrong with Santos’s resume, he might want to try another tack.
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