Rep-Elect George Santos Comes Clean—Sort Of

The moderate gay Republican who won a seat in a normally Democratic congressional district has come clean—sort of—about his compelling but fake biography and his bogus finances.

Rep-elect George Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he had worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He conceded on Monday that his claim that he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties was false. In fact, he’s not a landlord at all.

Santos made the rounds to media outlets on Monday, trying to tamp down the scandal. Instead, his partial mea culpa has only whet the appetite of the Left to bring him down.

“Did I embellish my resume? Yes, I did. And I’m sorry. And it shouldn’t be done,” Santos told City & State’s “Political Personalities with Skye.”

“Embellish”? This guy’s a born politician. When the New York Times broke this story five days before Christmas, I wrote, “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.

It is what intelligence operatives call “a legend.” Santos created a fictitious persona that was detailed enough to pass the cursory inspection of the lazy New York media as well as the local Democratic Party, which would have benefitted from exposing this congressional fabulist before the election.

Santos performed his “limited hang-out” on Monday when he gave several interviews to local media, including this one to City and State New York.

Santos also, for the first time, responded to questions about the massive increase in reported assets over just two years. Santos filed a financial disclosure report with the House of Representatives in May 2020, during his first, unsuccessful run for Congress. He reported no assets, and just $55,000 in salary, commission and bonus from his employment at LinkBridge. In his second run for Congress, Santos’ 2022 financial disclosure report showed a $750,000 salary from the Devolder Organization, Santos’ financial consulting firm, where he listed his title as managing principal. He reported getting more than $1 million each of the previous two years in dividends from that company, having more than $100,000 in a checking account, having more than $1 million in a savings account and owning an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – the country where he has said his parents were born – valued between $500,000 and $1 million.

After previously working for Harbor City Capital—a firm that was effectively disbanded in 2021 after the SEC accused ownership of financial crimes—Santos claimed that his sudden wealth was because “it just worked because I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth.”

And where the hell did the money come from, George?

Santos has also claimed to be gay. But from 2012 to 2019—just before he ran for Congress for the first time—Santos was married to a woman.

Santos, who is openly gay, also responded to the the Daily Beast’s report that he was married to a woman from 2012 to 2019 – despite telling USA Today in October that he had “never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade.” That bit, too, was apparently an embellishment. He was married to a woman, and was “pretty much” in love, before he came out as gay. “I set myself free, and I set her free,” he explained. Santos now says he is married to a man, though the Daily Beast reported it could not find any record of Santos’ second marriage.

Santos told a local TV station that his company had lost four employees in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016. But a search of the obituaries from that massacre showed no victims had worked for any company supposedly owned by Santos. He says now that they weren’t employees—yet. They had been hired but hadn’t started work.

Lying about where you went to school and who you worked for is one thing. But Santos is in deep trouble for falsifying his financial disclosure forms to the SEC. That, and some possible ethics complaints in Congress, may yet sink this fabulist’s career.