I’ve worked in a managerial capacity in many statewide and local campaigns, and in each campaign, the rule is the same, campaign accounts are almost sacrosanct. They are almost always parked with a licensed accounting or law firm and under the sole direction of the campaign’s treasurer.
Campaign funds are never to be used to pay for one personal lifestyle.
Why?
Because it's stealing.
Yet this horrid George Santos, representative from New York’s North Shore District spent campaign funds on everything from Botox treatments, casinos, porn, and $6,000 on Ferragamo shoes.
Six Thousand dollars. On shoes.
And then there is lying, blatant, seemingly insane lying. Among many other fibs he was dumb enough to put in writing, Santos claimed to have worked in an upper management position at Goldman Sachs, (not true) and that he had relatives who were not only Holocaust victims but 9/11 survivors as well (He isn’t Jewish, and no such relatives exist)
He failed to mention that he committed check fraud in Brazil in 2008, and was arrested but failed to show up in court for his hearing (Brazilian authorities revived the case in 2022.) He has also had several judgments against him in the US concerning eviction and personal debt cases. In 2022, he was accused of failing to pay thousands of dollars in judgments from the 2010s. Another case of theft by deception was dropped in 2017. He had written bad checks in the amount of $15,000 to an Amish dog breeder from his account. He said that his checkbook had been stolen in 2017 and his lawyer successfully argued that the signatures on the checks were not Santos's.
The Washington Post reported that three other Amish dog breeders alleged that they did not file police reports against Santos and were never paid.
Allegations of mishandling funds
In January 2023, he was accused of stealing money donated to a GoFundMe fundraiser. Santos had set up the page under his alias Anthony Devolder. The fund was to raise $3000 for a homeless vet who had to have a life-threatening stomach tumor from his service dog would cost $3,000. When the $3000 was raised Santos closed the fund and withdrew the money. GoFundMe banned Santos.
There was a claim that Santos stole cash from an inheritance on several occasions, used a friend's Brazilian tax information to buy jewelry on credit, never repaid her, and threatened the victim physically.
Santos's name also came up in a 2017 international credit card skimming scheme perpetrated in Seattle by Brazilians.
In February 2023, Derek Myers, the prospective staffer filed a sexual harassment complaint against Santos with the House Ethics Committee, alleging Santos had touched his groin inappropriately while inviting him out to a karaoke bar and telling Myers that his husband was out of town.
In May 2023, a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York indicted Santos on 13 criminal charges: seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. Prosecutors accused Santos of "three distinct schemes": fraudulent solicitation of political contributions, unemployment benefits fraud, and making false statements on the financial disclosure reports he submitted to the House of Representatives. In the fraudulent solicitation scheme, Santos allegedly persuaded two supporters to donate $25,000 each to a limited liability company controlled by him and then used the money for personal expenses. Santos also allegedly obtained a total of $24,000 in unemployment benefits from mid-2020 to April 2021 while drawing an annual salary of $120,000.
Despite all of that. it took three tries…..three votes……for the House of Representatives to throw this clown out of Congress.
That means that 112 Republicans and two Democrats believe that this guy belongs in Congress. And at that, the final count against him was hardly the landslide of indignity that it should have been, and Santos almost survived the third attempt to kick him out onto the street where he belongs.
None of it fazed him. You know what he said as he left the Capito, Building? He said “Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place”
