The elected congressman George Santos, 34, son of a Brazilian mother and an American father, faces a barrage of questions, as well as an uncertain future, after an article published by The New York Times revealed that he may have distorted important parts of his resume during the campaign and fabricated other stories about his life and professional career.
The Times report found that Santos, a Republican whose victory in Long Island and northeastern Queens last month helped his party secure a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, may have misled voters about his academic background and his alleged career on Wall Street, and omitted details about his business dealings in financial disclosure forms.
Santos declined several interview requests from the publication. On Monday night, he took to Twitter to share a brief statement from his attorney, Joseph Murray, who characterized the Times article as a “barrage of attacks” with “defamatory allegations.”
Santos’s campaign for the House of Representatives touted a fairy tale biography: he is the son of a Brazilian immigrant and the first openly gay Republican to win a seat in the House. He graduated from a public college in New York City, Baruch College, to become an “experienced Wall Street financier and investor” with a family real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that has saved over 2,500 dogs and cats.
However, the New York Times investigation, which examined public documents and court records in the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify the claims Santos made during the campaign, questions important parts of the resume he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the prominent Wall Street firms mentioned in Santos’s campaign biography, told the Times they have no record of him working there. Officials at Baruch College, where Santos claimed to have graduated in 2010, could not find any record of anyone with that name and birth date graduating that year.
There is also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, is, as Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: the IRS could not locate any record of a registered charity by that name.
His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign over $700,000 during the midterm election, donated thousands of dollars to other candidates over the past two years, and reported a salary of $750,000 and over $1 million in dividends paid by his company, the Devolder Organization.
However, the company, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is a mystery. On a campaign website, Santos once described Devolder as the “family business” managing $80 million in assets. In his financial disclosure to Congress, he described it as a capital introduction consulting firm, a type of boutique firm that serves as a link between investment funds and high-net-worth investors. But Santos’s disclosure did not reveal the name of any clients, an omission that election law experts said could be problematic.
And while Santos described a family fortune in real estate, he did not disclose, nor did the Times manage to find records of his properties.
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Records show that Santos’s mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a suburb of Rio, where she worked as a nurse. After Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.
In 2008, when Santos was 19, he stole a checkbook from a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by the Times. Police and court records show that Santos used the checkbook to make purchases including a pair of shoes. Two years later, he confessed to the crime and was subsequently indicted. Prosecutors in Brazil confirmed that the case remains unresolved, as Santos did not respond to an official subpoena, and a court representative could not locate him at his address.
This period in Brazil coincides with the time Santos said he was attending Baruch College.
In his campaign biography, Santos also claims that his professional life intersected with a tragedy: he told WNYC in an interview that his company “lost four employees” in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. But a Times investigation found that none of the 49 victims appear to have worked at the various companies mentioned in his biography.
Ethics experts noted that Santos’s campaign disclosures revealed little about the source of his wealth, particularly he does not mention the name of any client who paid more than $5,000 to his company, the Devolder Organization. Such an omission could be problematic if it becomes clear that he intentionally avoided revealing his clientele.
There are several avenues through which an ethics investigation could occur in the House of Representatives, but none would likely affect Santos’s ability to take office in January.
Any process would require bipartisan cooperation and would likely be time-consuming. There is also the question of whether the House would claim jurisdiction over behavior that occurred before the legislator took office, although some recent actions suggest they may be inclined to take a more expansive approach if the behavior is related to the campaign.
But the Times notes in its article that, with a narrow majority, Republicans have little reason to investigate Santos. If the future congressman resigns, there is no guarantee that a Republican would win a special election to fill his seat. And so, it would be one less seat for Republicans in the House.
Source: The New York Times