George Santos, who made history in 2022 when he became the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican candidate elected to Congress, pleaded guilty Aug. 19 to two felony fraud charges. The deal comes after a two-year-long series of revelations of increasingly questionable stories about Santos’s past and his personal resume. Among details Santos claimed included being a descendant of Holocaust survivors and his mother being a 9/11 victim, as well as having been a former executive at Goldman Sachs and a graduate of Baruch College and New York University. Those stories and more led directly to the fraud of which Santos was accused.
The guilty plea ends the long dramatic saga of Santos’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall as a GOP star. Santos’s election wasn’t just historic, it helped secure a narrow majority for Republicans and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy for whom Santos was a reliable vote. Santos had become a darling of the Freedom Caucus House GOP, befriended by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO). He had also been endorsed by Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference. A photo of the two had been on Santos’s Twitter/X profile for over a year.
But when the conflicting stories about Santos’s past snowballed into layers of fabrication that spilled over into outright fraud, calls for his resignation began and never stopped, led by fellow New York congressman and Democrat, Daniel Goldman.
Calls for Santos’s resignation arose after a story in the New York Times on Dec. 19, 2022 asked, “Who is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His résumé may be largely fiction. Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, says he’s the ‘embodiment of the American dream.’ But he seems to have misrepresented a number of his career highlights.”
Now Santos, only the sixth lawmaker ever to be ousted from the House and the first who was neither convicted nor a member of the Confederacy, will await sentencing Feb. 7. Santos was expelled from the House Dec. 1, 2023 after the House Ethics Committee issued a scathing 56-page report Nov. 16, 2023. It was a dramatic fall from grace for the freshman Congressman who won his election in a landslide, besting a gay Democrat for the seat in a blue district Joe Biden had won by nearly 10% in 2020.
The decision to accept a plea deal came after Santos was facing a 23-count superseding indictment in U.S. District Court in New York, including charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and making materially false statements to the Federal Election Commission. He was initially indicted on 13 counts in May last year.
Prosecutors said Santos defrauded his campaign donors by luring them to contribute to a limited liability company (LLC) that he controlled. But then Santos allegedly used that money for his personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing from Hermès and Ferragamo and cosmetics at Sephora. Reports show that after one $50,000 payment from the campaign committee to Santos, the “funds were used to, among other things: pay down personal credit card bills and other debt; make a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermes; and for smaller purchases at OnlyFans; Sephora; and for meals and for parking.”
He also spent campaign funds on Botox, aestheticians and rent.
Santos is accused of “stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, said in a statement in Oct. 2023 when the last indictment was filed.
Peace also said then that the GOP congressman “falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen.”
On Aug. 19, Santos said in court, “I deeply regret my conduct, I fully accept responsibility for my actions, and I understand my actions have betrayed the trust of my supporters.”
Later, Santos seemed on the verge of tears as he met with reporters outside the Alfonse M. D’Amato U.S. Courthouse in Central Islip after he delivered his plea agreement.
Santos said, “I am dedicated to making amends for the wrongs I have committed. This plea is not just an admission of guilt. It’s an acknowledgment I need to be held accountable like any other American that breaks the law.”
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace had harsh words for Santos as he told reporters that the former Congressman “rode into court on a campaign of lies.”
Peace said Santos “finally, under oath, told the truth. And the truth is that he’s a criminal.”
As part of the deal, Santos pleaded guilty to the wire fraud and identity theft charges, but admitted to all of the conduct he was charged with, including “falsely claiming COVID unemployment benefits when he was employed, swindling donors and using the identities of his relatives to enrich himself and live a luxurious lifestyle.”
“By pleading guilty, Mr. Santos has acknowledged that he repeatedly defrauded federal and state government institutions as well as his own family, supporters and constituents,” Peace said in a statement on Aug. 19. “His flagrant and disgraceful conduct has been exposed and will be punished.”
The charges carry a minimum of two years in prison and a maximum of 22 years. U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert told Santos that sentencing guidelines call for him to serve six to eight years. As part of the agreement, Santos must pay $373,749.97 in restitution and forfeiture of $205,002.97.
After his initial arraignment last year, Santos claimed he was being politically persecuted. “I will fight the witch hunt,” he said at that time.
Santos had refused repeatedly to resign his seat. Two previous attempts to remove him from office had failed to garner either support from GOP leadership or the requisite two-thirds majority of the House until the report last November. That led to the Dec. 1 vote and the resolution to oust Santos passed narrowly, 311 to 114, with 105 Republicans voting in favor of expulsion.
All four top House GOP leaders had voted to keep Santos in Congress and Speaker Mike Johnson both refused to whip the vote and said he thought it set a bad precedent to oust a member who had not been convicted. The last time that happened was after the Civil War when members of the Confederacy were expelled. Santos is only the sixth lawmaker ever to be ousted from the House and the first who was neither convicted nor a member of the Confederacy.
In previous attempts to remove Santos, key Democrats voted against expulsion, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (MD-08) who said then, “This would be a terrible precedent to set, expelling people who have not been convicted of a crime and without internal due process.”
But Raskin also said that a House Ethics Committee investigation recommending expulsion would serve as due process.
