George Santos

In this Portuguese name, the first or maternal family name is Devolder and the second or paternal family name is Santos.

George Santos
Official portrait, 2023
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 3rd district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2023
Preceded by	Thomas Suozzi
Personal details
Born	George Anthony Devolder Santos (1988-07-22) July 22, 1988
Political party	Republican
Website	Campaign website House website

George Anthony Devolder Santos (/ˈsɑːntoʊs/; born July 22, 1988) is an American politician who is the U.S. representative from New York's 3rd congressional district, having first been elected in 2022. A member of the Republican Party, his district covers part of northern Nassau County on Long Island and northeast Queens.

Santos has made numerous dubious and false claims about his biography, work history and financial status, in public and private. Questions about his finances emerged in September 2022 in The North Shore Leader, a local Long Island publication. Six weeks after the election, numerous news outlets began reporting that large parts of his self-reported biography appear to be fabricated, including claims about his ancestry, education, employment, charity work, property ownership and crimes he claimed to be the victim of. Santos has admitted to lying and, as of early January 2023, is under investigation by federal, state, county, and international authorities.

Santos claimed that his mother's parents were Ukrainian Jews who fled from the Holocaust to Brazil, but records obtained by several sources showed that his mother's parents were born in Brazil and none of her ancestors were Ukrainian or Jewish. Despite originally claiming to have "Jewish background beliefs" and calling himself a "a proud American Jew", Santos later said that "I never claimed to be Jewish...I said I was 'Jew-ish'."

There have been several judgments against Santos in eviction and personal debt cases in the United States, involving thousands of dollars. In 2008, he confessed to check fraud charges in Brazil, but did not appear in court, leaving the case unresolved. Santos denied committing a crime and said, "I'm not a wanted criminal in any jurisdiction"; Brazilian authorities revived the case after his other falsehoods were discovered.

After unsuccessfully running for Congress in 2020 against incumbent Thomas Suozzi, Santos was elected to the open seat in 2022.

Early life and background

Santos was born on July 22, 1988, to Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder and Gercino Antonio dos Santos Jr., both of whom were born in Brazil. Through his parents, Santos has claimed to have dual citizenship in the United States and Brazil; a Brazilian court described him in 2013 as an American national. He has a sister, Tiffany Lee Devolder Santos. His maternal great-grandfather was born in Belgium and immigrated to Brazil in 1884.

Santos claimed that his maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled to Belgium and then to Brazil to escape the Holocaust during World War II, and separately claimed that his mother was an "immigrant from Belgium", but genealogical records and other evidence show that his ancestors have lived in Brazil for at least three generations, and nothing indicates they have any connection to Ukraine, have any Jewish heritage, or are Holocaust survivors. Santos has used the name Anthony Zabrovsky to fundraise for a pet charity, while records contradict his claim that his maternal grandparents had a Ukrainian Jewish last name of Zabrovsky. Santos has also claimed that he was biracial and was born to an African American father, who had Angolan roots, but there is no evidence of that.

Santos told Jewish Insider in November 2022 that "my mother's Jewish background beliefs...are mine". In a 2022 campaign position paper his campaign sent to pro-Israel groups, Santos called himself a "a proud American Jew". CNN reported that during Santos's 2020 and 2022 campaign appearances, he called himself an "American Jew" and a "Latino Jew" on multiple occasions. In December 2022, he told the New York Post, "I never claimed to be Jewish...I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was 'Jew-ish'."

On his campaign website, Santos wrote that his mother was "the first female executive at a major financial institution" and that she worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and died "a few years later" after surviving the September 11 attacks. His mother's actual occupation has been described as domestic worker or home care nurse; upon her death, a Brazilian community newspaper described her as a cook. Santos's former roommates and friends who met her say she spoke no English and made her living by selling food and cleaning houses; they attributed claims that she worked in finance to his imagination.

In July 2021, Santos wrote on Twitter that "9/11 claimed my mothers life"; in an October 2021 interview, he said his mother was "caught up in the ash cloud" during 9/11 but "never applied for relief" because the family could afford the medical bills; in December 2021, he wrote on Twitter that his mother had died five years earlier; in December 2022, he claimed that both of his parents survived being "down there" at the World Trade Center during 9/11.

Santos has said that he "was born and raised in abject poverty". A Catholic priest at a church the family attended, Saint Rita's Catholic Church in Queens, reported that Santos had told him the family could not afford a funeral when Santos's mother died in 2016. The priest recalled that a collection at a memorial Mass raised a "significant" amount for the family, which he gave to Santos. He also had a friend set up a GoFundMe to pay for his mother's funeral. Santos later went skiing in the Poconos, which his friend believes was paid for with the money raised by the GoFundMe.

Santos claimed in 2019 and 2020 to have attended the Horace Mann School, an elite preparatory school, before withdrawing because of family hardship. The school reports it has no record of Santos.

After obtaining a high school equivalency diploma, Santos spent time in Brazil. In 2008, at 19 years old, Santos forged checks using a checkbook stolen from a man there being cared for by Santos's mother. He used them to buy US$700 (equivalent to $1,000 in 2023) worth of clothing at a store near where they lived in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of Niterói. A year later, he admitted the theft to the store's owner in an Orkut post, writing, "It was always my intention to pay, but I messed up", and promising he would do so. In 2010, Santos confessed to Brazilian police and was charged with check fraud, but did not respond to a 2013 court summons; Brazilian authorities told The New York Times that the case remains unresolved. In his Post interview a week after the Times first reported on this, Santos denied it, saying, "I am not a criminal here—not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world." The Times noted that it had documentary records of the charges. On January 2, 2023, the Times reported that Rio de Janeiro prosecutors were reviving the fraud charges now that Santos's whereabouts were known.

Santos claimed to hold a bachelor's degree in finance and economics from Baruch College, but the school has no record of this, and the period Santos said he was at Baruch overlapped with his time in Brazil. Friends of his recall that he made this claim as well at the time he was supposedly taking classes there, but never seemed to study. He also claimed to hold a master of business administration degree from New York University, which also has no record of his attendance.

In December 2022, Santos told the Post: "I didn't graduate from any institution of higher learning. I'm embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé...we do stupid things in life."

Career history and claims

Throughout his career, Santos has variously used various aliases including Anthony Zabrovsky and Anthony Devolder.

After his return from Brazil, Santos told friends that while there he had worked as a journalist for a major news organization. Some looked for his name on the organization's website but could not find it.

From October 2011 to July 2012, Santos worked as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens. During this time, he reportedly told acquaintances and coworkers that his family was wealthy and had extensive real estate holdings in the United States and Brazil. He repeated this claim during his 2022 congressional campaign, claiming that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York. No such properties were listed on his campaign's financial disclosure forms or in public records. Santos admitted to the Post that the claim was false and he owned no properties as of the end of 2022.

A 2013 Rio de Janeiro court notice of embezzlement charges against Santos describes him as an "American teacher", 25 years old, and single. In September 2014, an acquaintance lent Santos several thousand dollars he said he needed to move in with his boyfriend. The acquaintance recalled that Santos said he had graduated from the New York University Stern School of Business, although Santos seemed unfamiliar with the institution's Stern School name. Santos refused to pay the money back; a judge later rejected his claim that the money had been a gift and ordered Santos to repay it with interest, which he had not done as of 2022.

Santos said he founded a charity for rescue animals called Friends of Pets United in 2013 and ran it until 2018. He said the group was a tax-exempt charity, but the Internal Revenue Service has no record that the group was registered as a nonprofit organization. Friends of Pets United held a 2017 fundraiser event for a New Jersey animal rescue group, but the organizer of the rescue group said that Santos never gave it any of the proceeds.

For most of 2016, Santos moved to central Florida, where he was setting up a local office of HotelsPro, a travel technology company owned by MetGlobal, of which he was a vice president. In a November 2022 interview, Santos discussed the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that year, saying, "I happened to, at the time, have people that worked for me in the club...my company at the time, we lost four employees that were at Pulse." None of the 49 victims slain in the attack appear to have a connection to any of the companies named in Santos's biography. In a December 2022 interview, Santos changed his account, saying, "We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando".

False Wall Street claims

Santos described himself as a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" and said he had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company has any record of him. Santos's campaign website stated 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", but Citigroup sold its asset management division in 2005. On a 2022 podcast he claimed that while employed at Goldman he attended the SALT private equity conference seven years earlier where, on a panel, he criticized his employer for investing in renewable energy, calling it a taxpayer-subsidized scam. Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the conference, said there is no record of Santos having sat on a panel or even having attended any SALT conference.

Santos's claimed employment at Citigroup overlapped with his employment as a Dish Network customer service representative during the same period. He clarified to the Post that a subsequent employer had been in limited partnerships with those companies and his claim that he had been employed there was "a poor choice of words".

By 2019, Santos was working for LinkBridge Investors, eventually becoming a vice president, according to his campaign disclosure form and a company document. While running for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to become a regional director at Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm the Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently accused of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos was not personally named in the lawsuit, nor were other colleagues of his, and he publicly denied any knowledge of the fraud.

Devolder Organization

According to his financial disclosures, Santos was the sole owner and managing member of the Devolder Organization, which he said was a family-owned company that managed $80 million in assets. On financial disclosure forms, Santos called Devolder a "capital introduction consulting" firm. Although based in New York, the company was registered in Florida, where it was dissolved in 2022 for failing to file annual reports, which Santos said was because its accountant missed the annual filing deadline. During his 2022 congressional campaign, Santos lent his campaign more than $700,000, and reported receiving a salary of $750,000 and dividends of between $1 million and $5 million from Devolder, even though he also listed the company's estimated value as in the same range.

Despite the claims about the company's size, Santos's financial disclosure forms did not list any clients using the company's services; three experts in election law interviewed by the Times said that this omission "could be problematic if such clients exist". In July 2022 Dun & Bradstreet estimated Devolder's revenue at less than $50,000. On December 20, 2022, the day after the Times article was published, Santos re-registered the Devolder Organization in Florida. Josh Marshall reported on Talking Points Memo that Santos listed himself as the registered agent on the paperwork, which could only be done if he lived in Florida and not New York. He gave as the company's mailing address a Merritt Island apartment purchased by a couple in August.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2020

See also: 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in New York § District 3

Santos ran as a Republican for the United States House of Representatives in New York's 3rd congressional district against Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi. He lost to Suozzi, 55.9 percent to 43.4 percent, a margin of approximately 46,000 votes.

2022

See also: 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in New York § District 3

In 2022, Santos again ran for Congress in the 3rd district, although the district borders were redrawn after the 2020 redistricting cycle. Suozzi chose to retire and instead run for governor; Santos ran against Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman. Santos and Zimmerman are both openly gay, making this the first instance of two openly LGBTQ candidates competing against one another in a general election for a seat in Congress. The district covers a portion of northern Long Island (in Nassau County), along with a small portion of northeast Queens. The Long Island portion of the district includes Oyster Bay and North Hempstead, while the Queens portion includes the neighborhoods of Whitestone, Bayside, Little Neck, and Queens Village.

Questions about Santos's background emerged in September 2022, when The North Shore Leader, a weekly newspaper serving the affluent suburban area of that name that has historically been the core of the 3rd district, questioned his finances, including an "inexplicable rise" in reported net worth from 2020 to 2022, but no other media outlet continued reporting on the matter until after the election. In October 2022, the Leader wrote that it "would like to endorse a Republican" in the race, but Santos "is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot...he’s most likely just a fabulist—a fake", so the Leader endorsed Zimmerman.

Financial questions

Santos filed personal financial disclosure forms the House requires of congressional candidates in early September, 20 months past the due date, when he had raised $5,000 in campaign funds. The Leader took note of the contrast between them and similar forms he had filed for the 2020 elections. In 2020, he had given a net worth of $5,000 and claimed his only income was his $50,000 Harbor Hill salary. By 2022, he said he was worth between $2.5 and $11 million, including $1–5 million in personal bank accounts, a Rio condominium valued between half a million and a million dollars, and business interests accounting for the rest. He reported no real property in the U.S., at odds with past claims that he owned two mansions on Long Island, one of which, in the Hamptons, he had reportedly told fellow Republicans he was selling for around $10 million because he rarely used it (the Leader reported that at the time, someone with no connection to Santos owned it, and it was valued at $2 million).

The Leader also noted that a $600,000 loan Santos had reported making to his campaign earlier in the year on his required campaign financial disclosure forms was not listed as a liability on his personal forms, even as he had disclosed a $20,000–50,000 car loan he took out for the Nissan he drove. He claimed no income.

In a later interview with Semafor, Santos said he was able to take advantage of a network of around 15,000 "wealthy investors, family offices, 'institutions' and endowments" after leaving Harbor City and forming Devolder to get contracts worth several million dollars. "If you're looking at a $20 million yacht, my referral fee there can be anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000", he said. He did not identify any of his clients when asked to do so.

During his campaign, Santos made large expenditures; he used campaign funds to pay for shirts for staff from Brooks Brothers, meals at the restaurant at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, and $40,000 in airline fares, including to locations in California, Texas and Florida, and a stay at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, part of $30,000 in hotel bills and $14,000 paid to car services. That much airfare, the Times later noted, is far more than most candidates spend on their first election and closer to the amounts spent by party leaders who have served in Congress for years. Two campaign aides told the Times that staff were increasingly concerned during the campaign that Santos was more interested in spending the $3 million raised for the race "frivolously" than on winning the election. David Brooks, a columnist for the paper, likened Santos to Jay Gatsby, the title character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, which mostly takes place in the areas of Long Island's North Shore within the 3rd District. Gatsby, too, uses shadowy business dealings to overcome humble beginnings and reinvent himself as a rich man who throws lavish parties at his mansion.

Ten days after breaking its original story, the Times took a closer look at his campaign's financial disclosures. It noted that a company called "Cleaner 123" had received $11,000 over four months as rent for campaign staff housing in the district. Neighbors of the house said that Santos and his partner appeared to have been living there during that time. The forms also included a number of expenses for exactly $199.99, just below the threshold at which campaigns must include the receipts along with their disclosure forms. An election law expert the Times talked to suggested that this could indicate awareness of the law and intent to violate it.

The day before Santos was set to take office, the New York Daily News reported that in July 2021 he had loaned GADS PAC, a Leadership PAC he had set up after his 2020 loss to Suozzi, $25,000, five times what it had on hand at the time; the next day, the PAC donated the same amount to the campaign of Lee Zeldin, a Republican congressman also from Long Island who became the party's gubernatorial candidate in 2022. Starting in April 2022, GADS PAC, by then flush with donations from Santos's supporters, repaid him in four installments over the next two months. Effectively, Santos had arranged for his campaign contributors to repay the loan.

While none of these actions appeared to violate campaign finance law, Robert Maguire, an expert on the subject at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), found several aspects of the transaction unusual. When they make loans for campaign purposes, candidates generally make them to their campaign committees rather than their PACs. Maguire was also struck that Santos had established a Leadership PAC for himself before even being elected to Congress, as those are so named because they are mostly used by party leaders and committee chairs or ranking members, to support colleagues. "As with everything with Santos, while maybe not illegal, it's extremely strange and leaves you scratching your head and wondering, 'What's going on here?'", Maguire said. "The simplest explanation appears to be that he wanted credit for the donation, but he didn't want to take the financial hit ... It's an instance of him trying to have his cake and eat it too."

Election and aftermath

Late in the campaign, both parties realized the elections on Long Island would be close and could decide control of the House. A Democratic political action committee spent $3 million in the 3rd District race to support Zimmerman. On the Republican side, the Congressional Leadership Fund spent nothing, while at the same time committing $1.5 million to the neighboring 2nd and 4th district races, also ultimately won by Republican candidates. Evan Chernack, Zimmerman's campaign manager, who knew about some of Santos's questionable business dealings, believes this suggests that Republicans at the national level were aware of at least those matters.

Santos defeated Zimmerman in the November 2022 election by around eight percentage points, flipping the district (in what observers saw as a "mild upset") and helping Republicans retake control of the House by a narrow margin.

After winning election to Congress, Santos was one of several incoming House Republicans to attend a Manhattan gala organized by the New York Young Republican Club that featured Republican politicians alongside white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and other extreme right-wing figures. He was featured as a "special guest" at the event. The gala also featured Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican representatives-elect Cory Mills and Mike Collins, far-right commentator and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, white supremacy activist Peter Brimelow, and members of the Freedom Party of Austria and Alternative for Germany, two right-wing European parties with an authoritarian heritage.

In a December 2022 email, Santos offered a bus trip to Washington that included an opportunity to attend his swearing-in ceremony and a campaign-led tour of the "Capitol grounds" for a donation ranging from $100 to $500. Charging for tours of the U.S. Capitol is a violation of Congressional ethics rules. It is unclear whether charging for tours of outdoor public space is a violation of ethics rules. Politico called Santos's move "unusual", writing that invitations to swearing-in ceremonies are generally reserved for close friends and family.

Tenure

On January 3, 2023, Santos voted to elect Kevin McCarthy to be Speaker of the House.

Political positions

Santos is the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican elected to Congress.

Santos has aligned himself with Donald Trump. He has called police brutality a "made-up concept". In a 2022 speech to the Whitestone Republican Club in Whitestone, Queens, Santos called abortion "barbaric" and compared it to slavery.

In August 2021, Santos called President Joe Biden a "pathological liar".

Post-2020 election activism

On January 6, 2021, Santos attended President Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. Santos later said that Trump "was energized", gave "a great speech", and was "at his full awesomeness" that day. After the speech, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, disrupting the counting of the electoral votes that formalized Trump's loss in the 2020 United States presidential election. Santos later said he was "never on Capitol grounds" on January 6, called it a "sad and dark day", and acknowledged that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. He was later captured on video saying that he had written a "nice check to a law firm" to bail January 6 arrestees out of jail, saying: "Don't want to publicize it, but pretty adamant about that. Imagine breaking into your own house and being charged for trespassing."

False biographical claims

On December 19, 2022, after Santos won the 2022 election but before he was to take office in January 2023, The New York Times reported that he had apparently misrepresented many aspects of his life and career, including his education and employment history. An attorney for Santos said the report was a "smear" and "defamatory" but did not address its substance. Santos did not produce any documents to substantiate his claims, despite several requests from the Times to do so. Other news organizations confirmed the Times's reporting.

On December 19, Santos posted on Twitter a statement from his lawyer saying that The New York Times was "attempting to smear [Santos's] good name with these defamatory allegations"; on December 22, Santos wrote on Twitter: "I have my story to tell and it will be told next week." Calls grew from constituents and Democrats for Santos to resign or not take his seat. Democrats, including Zimmerman, called for the House Ethics Committee, Federal Election Commission, and U.S. Attorney's Office to probe Santos's conduct. Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said that Santos should resign or not be seated in the House, pending an investigation of the "litany of deceptions"; the group's director said that while "there have been instances where candidates have exaggerated their background" in the past, the group "hadn't seen anybody who's made up an entirely false life story."

Responses from Republican leaders

Republican leaders were largely silent on the scandal. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy made no comment. Some former Republican supporters called upon Santos to explain himself, including the chairman of the Nassau County Republican Committee and former Long Island Republican representative Peter T. King. It was later reported that senior House Republican leaders were aware of the false biographical claims before the election, with an insider saying the topic had become a "running joke".

A week after the Times's story broke, Nick LaLota, another newly elected Long Island Republican representative, called for the House Ethics Committee to investigate Santos. Nassau County Republican chairman Joseph G. Cairo said he was "deeply disappointed" in Santos, saying, "I expected more than a blanket apology" after Santos publicly addressed the issue for the first time. "The damage that his lies have caused to many people, especially those who have been impacted by the Holocaust, are profound." He did not call for Santos to resign or be investigated.

On December 31, former California Republican chairman Ron Nehring called on Santos to not take his seat, telling MSNBC, "Every single day that this guy continues to remain in office once he's sworn in, it does damage to the Republican Party...it's really astonishing that anybody would say we need to let the investigations play out for a while before we decide what to do." The next day, Representative Kevin Brady said Santos "certainly is going to have to consider resigning".

Observers expressed doubt about whether the House would take action, given the chamber's narrow Republican majority in the incoming Congress. Santos said he would vote for McCarthy for speaker of the House in the January 3, 2023, election on the floor of the House, and McCarthy is struggling to obtain the majority of votes necessary to win the speakership (the narrow Republican majority means that McCarthy cannot win without almost all House Republicans' votes). Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress, said that because the House has the responsibility to determine the qualifications of its members, it could decline to seat Santos, triggering a special election, and that Congress would do so "if we had a system that was genuinely built around integrity", but added that "the odds of that happening are zero". Walter Shaub, the senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, said that Republicans were unlikely to remove Santos from office via expulsion or exclusion, but could deny him committee assignments. CREW's policy director said that Santos should not be given access to national security or intelligence information, and suggested that "in the regular course of events" he would be unable to obtain a security clearance.

Continuing fallout

Several days after the revelations, the New York State Attorney General's Office said it would review Santos's conduct. By December 28, federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York were investigating Santos's finances, and the Nassau County district attorney was investigating him for unspecified reasons.

On December 26, 2022, Santos admitted to lying about his educational and employment history in interviews with WABC radio and the Post. He told WABC radio: "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." Santos told the Post that the controversy "will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good...I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign."

The next day, Santos was interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News, his first television appearance since the controversy broke. Gabbard asked Santos about the meaning of "integrity"; Santos said he showed "courage" by admitting his mistakes on national television. Gabbard then asked Santos "Do you have no shame?", to which Santos responded that he "can say the same thing about the Democrats"; Gabbard then told Santos that that her question was not about Democrats. Asked about his purported Jewish heritage, Santos responded: "My heritage is Jewish. I've always identified as Jewish. I was raised as a practicing Catholic...I understand everybody wants to nitpick at me". Asked about his lies about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, Santos said that whether they were lies was "debatable" and that the nature of his work would require a "discussion that can go way above the American people's head", a characterization Gabbard called insulting.

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which had previously hosted Santos at their events, announced on December 27 that he would no longer be welcome at them, because according to the organization's CEO, Matt Brooks, Santos "deceived us and misrepresented his heritage. In public comments and to us personally he previously claimed to be Jewish". Former U.S. senator Norm Coleman, the group's chairman, told the Times in an email he did not think Santos would be in Congress long.

On January 3, 2023, Santos's first day in Congress, he, like all other new members, could not be sworn in as the House failed to elect a new Speaker despite the vote going to multiple ballots; Santos, as he had pledged the month before, supported McCarthy in all three rounds of voting. The Times described his first day in Congress as "awkward", noting his unfamiliarity with the layout of the Capitol and the distance other Long Island House Republicans kept from their colleague. Anthony D'Esposito, who represents the neighboring 4th district and had previously appeared with Santos in interviews, did not even greet him. Santos was also not included in a photo of the state's Republican members with McCarthy that 2nd district Representative Andrew Garbarino posted to Twitter.

Following calls for his resignation, including from Republicans, Santos told New York Republican officials that he does not plan to run for reelection in 2024.

Defenses

Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has also supported McCarthy's bid for the speakership, defended Santos. She acknowledged that he had lied, but also accused multiple Democrats of lying. She chastised Gabbard, a former Democratic representative from Hawaii, for giving Santos "zero grace" despite having admitted to his misrepresentations, saying, "George has not even had the chance to take action for his district on the House floor because he isn't even sworn in yet."

The conservative website The American Spectator also offered a defense of Santos. Contributing editor Scott McKay suggested that Santos's deceptions had merely called attention to what he considered the real scandal:

[S]ure—it's a scandal that George Santos got elected to Congress on the basis of his fraudulent background. But is George Santos the scandal? Hardly...Santos is, whether wittingly or otherwise, doing something Rush Limbaugh used to do to great effect: he's illustrating absurdity by being absurd...[He] read the room. He realized that Stupid Woke America values "diversity" over competence or merit, and so he fed Stupid Woke America what it wanted.

Personal life

Residences and evictions

Santos has offered conflicting accounts of his residence. During his 2020 campaign, he listed his home as being in Elmhurst, Queens, outside the boundaries of the district in which Santos was then seeking office. Santos and his partner later moved to a rowhouse in Whitestone, Queens; its owner said they had moved there in July 2020. In January 2021, Santos claimed the couple had found stones and eggs thrown at the apartment after they returned to it from a party at Mar-a-Lago, vandalism that had required him to spend several hours on the phone with the police and insurers. His landlady, the owner, and occupant of the rowhouse's lower unit did not recall any such incident and the Times found no police report of any vandalism at the address during that time. In March 2022, Santos told Newsday that he had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse and into an unspecified other neighborhood because of the vandalism; seven months later he said he still lived in the Whitestone home. He was registered to vote at the Whitestone address during his congressional campaigns, but did not appear to live there.

Three times in the mid-2010s, Santos was evicted from rented Queens properties (in Jackson Heights, Whitestone, and Sunnyside) due to failure to pay rent. A Queens court entered a civil judgment of $12,208 against him in the second eviction. Santos told the Post that his mother's illness had forced his family into debt at the time; as of December 2022 he had yet to pay the rent he owed, as he "completely forgot about it".

After that eviction, in September 2014 Santos signed a one-year lease on a single-family house in Whitestone, around the time he asked a friend for the money to move in with his boyfriend, Pedro Vilarva, that resulted in the judgment against Santos that he had not paid off as of 2022. In 2023, Vilarva told the Times that he had dated the "charming and sweet" Santos for several months before they moved in together. Santos claimed that he would get money from an investment he had done with Citigroup, so Vilarva paid most of the bills. "One day it's one thing, one day it's another thing. He never ever actually went to work", he recalled. The relationship soured in early 2015 over a surprise gift of plane tickets to Hawaii from Santos that turned out to be illusory. After Vilarva came to believe Santos had taken his cell phone to pawn it, he searched the Internet for Santos's name and found the 2013 Brazilian charges against him, leading him to move out.

Santos remained in the house through November of that year, owing a month and a half's rent. His landlady filed for eviction, and he agreed to leave by December 24 and pay her $2,250 in back rent. In mid-January 2016, he told Queens Housing Court, in a statement signed under oath, that he was robbed of the money in Queensboro Plaza on his way to pay the back rent to his landlady's lawyer and that police were unable to take a report at the time, telling him to return later. There is no record he ever did. The next month, after the eviction became final, Santos registered to vote in Florida, where he was working for HotelsPro. He voted in that year's election in November, and then re-registered again in New York six days later, The Intercept reported.

Santos's landlord said he actually had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse in August 2022, leaving behind $17,000 in damages, but records showed he was still registered at the address when he voted that November. He continued to receive mail there after the election, including the certificate of his election victory, according to the landlord, who had thrown most of it out. Santos told reporters that he planned to move to Oyster Bay, but he and his partner apparently moved into a house in Huntington, outside his congressional district's boundaries, in August 2022. He told the Post that the house was his sister's, but the Times later found that she lived in Elmhurst.

Health

In a 2020 interview, Santos said he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and received radiation treatment. As of December 30, 2022, neither he nor his campaign has clarified details or answered questions about that claim.

Santos also claims to suffer from an immunodeficiency and acute chronic bronchitis. He said that he had contracted COVID-19 but fully recovered through the use of an inhaler over three days.

Marriage and sexuality

In October 2022, Santos told the media: "I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade". In 2014, Santos began dating Pedro Vilarva; the two lived together until Vilarva moved out early the next year after having had enough of Santos's prevarications.

In December 2022, The Daily Beast reported that Santos married a woman in 2012 and that they divorced in 2019. Santos did not publicly acknowledge this marriage until after it was reported; he told the Post in December 2022: "I dated women in the past. I married a woman", adding that he was "OK with my sexuality. People change."

See also

• List of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States Congress
• Douglas R. Stringfellow, one-term Utah congressman found to have lied about his World War II exploits and falsely represented himself as having been paralyzed from the waist down due to purported German torture while a POW

External links

• George Santos for Congress
• Ballotpedia candidate profile - 2022 Candidate Connection survey answers

• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
• Profile at Vote Smart