Over the summer, George Santos was an underdog Republican congressional candidate from New York when he singled out one thing that set him apart: his Wall Street experience.
(Bloomberg) — Over the summer, George Santos was an underdog Republican congressional candidate from New York when he singled out one thing that set him apart: his Wall Street experience.
The 34-year-old Republican told Bloomberg News in an interview in July that he dealt with “billions and billions on spreadsheets” during a career in finance that included stints at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc.: “I just did basic asset management. Citigroup was in the beginning of my career and Goldman Sachs,” he said. “Nothing fancy, nothing super ooh-la-la.”
Four months later, he won the election to a seat in Congress representing parts of Queens and Long Island.
But now, the claims that Santos repeated on the campaign trail are coming under scrutiny following a New York Times report on Monday. Neither Goldman Sachs nor Citigroup has any record of Santos ever working there, the companies told Bloomberg News.
Santos has offered no evidence to rebut claims that he didn’t work at those Wall Street firms, and his lawyer wouldn’t directly address the issue.
The questions raised about Santos’s past as well as other details from the Times story have left politicians from both sides of the aisle wondering how Santos made it all the way to victory on Election Day without, it seems, the Republicans who backed him or the Democrats who opposed him diving too deeply into his life story.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee produced a 87-page opposition research report on Santos that took his service at Goldman and Citigroup at face value, although it did raise questions about an animal charity he ran and campaign finance issues. Santos’s lawyer didn’t address the charity.
The Times also examined how Santos lent his own campaign more than $700,000, even though the company he lists as his employer doesn’t have a website or a LinkedIn page and he listed no clients in campaign disclosures.
House Financial
Bloomberg News had interviewed Santos, the son of Brazilian immigrants whose full name is George Anthony Devolder-Santos, and other candidates in July, August and September for a story on the record number of Black and Latino Republican candidates running for Congress in the midterms.
Santos and campaign officials didn’t return messages seeking comment on Monday. His Long Island attorney, Joe Murray, called the Times report a “hit piece” and questioned the timing of the reports, just two weeks before Santos is due to be sworn in.
Santos is seeking a seat on the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
“George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, immigrant and Republican who won a Biden district in overwhelming fashion by showing everyday voters that there is a better option,” Murray said in a written statement.
Now the question around Santos is: What’s next?
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who endorsed Santos, will have to decide how to deal with a candidate once seen as a face of a more diverse GOP. Republicans on Jan. 3 will have just a 10-seat majority in the chamber, meaning McCarthy will need every vote he can muster to be elected speaker that day.
Santos said he would support McCarthy to replace Nancy Pelosi as House speaker the day before the Times story ran. A McCarthy aide declined to comment Tuesday on whether the House GOP Leader has talked to Santos personally since the story appeared, or plans to say anything publicly about Santos.
“Kevin McCarthy is far more interested in getting George Santos’s vote for the speakership than he is in getting to the truth of what happened here,” said Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party.
An Ethics Committee can pursue an inquiry once he’s sworn in, according to Blake Chisam, a former staff director and chief counsel for the committee. But a variety of lesser potential punishments rather than expulsion, which is rare, would be more likely, even if Santos is found to have violated any House rules of behavior or conduct.
Credible Basis
A House Democratic leadership aide told Bloomberg on Tuesday that there are no plans for Democrats to seek to block Santos from being seated as a House member when new and returning members are sworn-in for the new congressional session.
Even if prosecutors thought there was a credible basis for opening a criminal investigation, the Justice Department or another agency would not be able to establish that and indict by Jan. 3, the aide said.
There is precedent for objections being raised on the opening day of a Congress against a representative-elect’s being sworn into office. But those efforts have centered on disputed election results — not alleged lying or other misconduct and offenses.
Santos’s petitions to get on the ballot used an address in Whitestone, Queens. According to the Times story, a reporter visited that location on Sunday and talked to a woman who said she didn’t know Santos. Making a false statement on a nominating petition is a felony under New York law.
The House Ethics Committee generally focuses on conduct while in office, and not during elections. But Santos’s personal financial disclosures are reported on a federal form to the House of Representatives.
If Santos knowingly misrepresented his assets and sources of income, he may have violated the False Statements Act. Santos claimed to be worth between $2.6 million to $11.2 million with a salary of $750,000 in a disclosure he filed in Sept. 2022 and reviewed by Bloomberg News. When he ran in 2020, he disclosed no assets and an income of $55,000 which included his salary, commission and bonus.
The Republican party in Nassau County, New York — which forms the heart of Santos’s new district — said Monday that it’s waiting for an explanation from Santos. But chairman Joe Cairo called the allegations against him “serious.”
During the campaign, Santos talked about his upbringing, his identity, and his support for former President Donald Trump.
‘Checking a Box’
“When I was going to board rooms, a lot of people would say you’re just checking a box and a quota because you’re tan, or your last name, or you’re gay — one of the three. And I would beg differ and say ‘No, I just think I’m really talented and I know what I’m doing,’” he told Bloomberg in July.
After Trump was elected, though, Santos said he felt more appreciated for his skills.
“Trump did more for Blacks and Latinos than any other president,” he said.
In theory, the doubts over his background should not come as a complete surprise. A Democratic dossier on Santos, created last summer while he was unopposed for the Republican nomination to New York’s third Congressional District, flagged questions about his personal financial disclosures and highlighted his evictions and court judgments.
And it noted that Santos’s claimed charity, “Friends Of Pets United,” was not registered with the Internal Revenue Service — although it allowed that the charity could be under a different name.
“I’ve always conduced myself honorably as an individual,” Santos said in the July interview.
The most damaging revelations — that Santos allegedly fabricated whole parts of his education and employment history — wouldn’t have shown up in public records.
One Democratic official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive opposition research methods, said the party missed the information because it doesn’t usually conduct interviews and didn’t have access to employment and education records.
Politically speaking, it’s a learning lesson for Democrats. The 2022 campaign was Santos’s second run for the seat and was redrawn from a reliably Democratic district in 2020 to a more competitive one in 2022. Santos was one of a handful of New York Republicans that won Democratic-leaning seats and helped Republicans gain a majority in the House.
Read more: NY Loses Luster as Democratic Bastion After GOP House Gains
“This is not a district that the Democratic Party should have lost, so there’s naturally recriminations as to why,” said Evan Stavisky, a Democratic political consultant who worked for Representative Thomas Suozzi’s congressional campaigns.
During his campaign, Santos said it was his desire to give back that anchored him during his time in business.
“Some of these folks, they get really, really elaborate. They make a little bit of money, and then they just start doing stupid — I’m not a greedy person,” Santos told Bloomberg in July.
–With assistance from Sridhar Natarajan, Jenny Surane and Bill Allison.
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