WADE VANDERVORT / AFP
Republican elected official George Santos is accused of lying to his donors and using their agent for personal gain.
UNITED STATES – The report is so damning it’s hard to believe. And yet the US House of Representatives Ethics Committee, published on Thursday, November 16th, proves in 56 pages how Republican George Santos lied about his life, embezzled money and “discredited” the institution. Cornered by the revelations, the elected official announced he would not run for Congress in 2024.
The committee spent nine months investigating George Santos, who during his election campaign posed as a graduate of New York University, who worked for the famous bank Goldman Sachs, owned several properties and came from a wealthy family, including his mother, who died after the September 11, 2001 died from a long illness associated with the seizures. “None of these items could be authenticated,” say the report’s authors.
This part of the story was already known. George Santos, elected in the November 2022 midterm elections, admitted barely two months later that he had “embellished” his resume after an in-depth investigation by The New York Times. The first calls for his resignation came when he was not yet in office (American elected officials do not arrive in Congress until January). The Queens Republican held his own, but his problems didn’t end there.
Hermès, Ferragamo, Airbnb…
After his first lies, Democratic and Republican representatives voted in March to open an Ethics Commission investigation. The results of this investigation reveal the extent to which George Santos “attempted to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his candidacy for his personal financial gain,” in addition to lying about his past.
During his election campaign, he asked his donors for money that was not used at all for his political career. Thanks to hundreds of documents, the committee shows that the thousands of dollars collected ended up in his personal account and were used to pay off his debts and for purchases at luxury brands Hermès (more than $4,000) and Ferragamo (around $6,000), but also at Sephora , shopping or paying for parking.
The list goes on. George Santos also used these funds to pay for his Airbnb rentals, rent, taxi and hotel expenses in Las Vegas while his team believed he was on his honeymoon, and to pay for Botox injections. George Santos once again illegally used donations to pay fees for OnlyFans, a platform on which Internet users sell adult content.
Following these revelations, a video resurfaced on social media showing the representative being interviewed on Fox News on March 30. In it, a journalist who is rather sympathetic to him jokes with him and refers to his tendency to lie, just like Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me If You Can.
Will George Santos soon be expelled from the House of Representatives?
“Is it true that you can peel a banana with your feet and do you have an OnlyFans account? », the moderator then asks her in the middle of the interview, which you can listen to below (in English). Enough to make George Santos hilarious. “I don’t have an account, I only found out what OnlyFans was three weeks ago when the topic came up in my office. I didn’t know the concept at all,” he says. “He really can’t tell the truth,” his interlocutor whispers loudly enough. The journalist’s answer, which was rather humorous at the time, now takes on a different meaning.
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The 35-year-old elected official’s falsifications are so numerous that members of his team interviewed by the Ethics Commission were so concerned that they advised him to seek treatment. George Santos continues to deny most of the facts. On X (formerly Twitter), he called the report “biased” and denounced “a travesty of justice.”
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Even if he no longer wants to run in 2024, it remains to be seen whether he can remain in his position until then. After surviving a vote on his expulsion from the House of Representatives on November 1st – due to his 23 federal charges of fraud, money laundering and electronic fraud – Republican Michael Guest filed a new request for his expulsion this Friday, November 17th . The vote could take place after the Thanksgiving break on November 28th.
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