A guide to the many lies of Representative George Santos, who has been arrested on federal charges, from the Holocaust and the Pulse shooting and 9/11 to fake jobs at Goldman Sachs to fake attendance at Horace Mann and Baruch and NYU.
New York Representative George Santos was indicted on May 10 on 13 federal charges, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and lying to Congress. While this was certainly a dramatic twist in the Santos saga, it wasn’t exactly a shock. Since the New York Times first revealed in December 2022 that Santos was not quite the man he sold himself as to voters, it’s been hard to track down exactly what is true about the congressman’s life story. Is he broke or rich? Is he Jewish or Catholic? Did his family members really die in the Holocaust or September 11?
Most often, it’s best to assume what the Republican from Long Island has said about his life is bogus, but in case you need to double-check, here is the guide to everything he has made up about himself — and the few things that actually appear to be true. (You can also follow all the live updates on George Santos’ arrest here.)
On Wednesday, May 10, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York unsealed an indictment charging Santos with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.
“This indictment seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations,” U.S. Attorney Peace said in a press release. “Taken together, the allegations in the indictment charge Santos with relying on repeated dishonesty and deception to ascend to the halls of Congress and enrich himself. He used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives.”
Santos, whose parents emigrated from Brazil, says he attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx during his first years of high school but had to leave the prestigious private academy in his senior year because “my parents fell on hard times, which was something that would later become known as the depression of 2008.” But a spokesperson for the school told CNN in December that there was no evidence he attended Horace Mann. Later, he obtained a high-school equivalency diploma.
Santos claims he graduated with a degree in economics and finance from Baruch College in 2010, which suggests he would have made it through a four-year program in just two years if he actually graduated from Horace Mann in 2008. But a Baruch representative told the Times there was no record of Santos being in the class of 2010. (Nor is there a record of Santos being a “star” on the Baruch volleyball team, as he claimed to Nassau County GOP chair Joseph Cairo.) A biography of Santos on the National Republican Congressional Committee states Santos also spent time at New York University, a claim NYU could not corroborate. Later, he told the New York Post that he “didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning.”
His campaign bio states he worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but representatives for both companies told the Times they had no record of his employment. The lies weren’t that hard to figure out: Santos said he worked in Citi’s real-estate wing in the 2010s, though the bank sold off its asset-management operations when he was in high school. After Santos was sworn into Congress, the Times obtained a copy of his inflated resumé claiming that he graduated in the top one percent of his class at Baruch, earned an M.B.A. at NYU, and was able to double the revenue on the project he worked on at Goldman:
You can read George Santos’s résumé for yourself, courtesy of reporting by the NYT:https://t.co/g5kCsz2brZ pic.twitter.com/XQlndmfk0M— Nicholas Fandos (@npfandos) January 11, 2023
Santos kept up the Goldman Sachs lie for years. According to court records obtained by Politico, he spoke at a 2017 trial in Seattle on behalf of a family friend accused of skimming credit card numbers from ATM machines.
“So what do you do for work?” the judge asked.
“I am an aspiring politician and I work for Goldman Sachs,” Santos replied.
“You work for Goldman Sachs in New York?” the judge asked.
“Yup,” Santos said.
In March, the friend came forward informing the feds that it was Santos who taught him how to skim cards. “Santos taught me how to skim card information and how to clone cards,” the declaration claims. “He gave me all the materials and taught me how to put skimming devices and cameras on ATM machines.” Santos denied the allegation
When Santos first ran for Congress in 2020, he filed a disclosure showing a salary of $55,000 working as a vice-president at a business-development company called LinkBridge Investors, where he says he introduced investors to hedge-fund managers, claiming once that he brought in $1 million in revenue in just six months on the job. Even there, however, he was inflating his value: Newsday reports that the company’s founder testified under oath in a 2019 lawsuit that Santos was just a “freelancer” who sold sponsorships for events and worked on commission.
Soon after that failed Congressional run, he started working at a Florida investment firm called Harbor City Capital. When he was employed there in 2020, Santos said he managed a $1.5 billion fund and bragged of “record returns” of 12 to 26 percent, depending on the type of investment. That year, according to CNN, a customer told Santos that the company’s promise that they had a full bank guarantee on investments was bogus: “Deutsche Bank claims [it] is a complete fraud and not signed by the bank officer on the document,” they wrote. Santos replied that they were “100% legitimate.”
But in April 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Harbor City of being a Ponzi scheme that stole $17 million from investors. The company’s assets are currently in mediation with an independent receiver appointed to manage them.
Santos wasn’t accused of wrongdoing by authorities, and the next month he incorporated his own company called Devolder. In an interview with Semafor, he said he helped rich people buy the expensive toys they wanted. If a client wanted to sell a plane or a boat, Santos would “go look out there within my Rolodex and be like: ‘Hey, are you looking for a plane?’ ‘Are you looking for a boat?’ I just put that feeler out there.” (A New York Times report describing how he brokered the sale of a $20 million yacht describes this type of work in detail.) Within six months, he claims to have “landed a couple of million-dollar contracts.” Financial disclosures from his 2022 congressional campaign show he claimed to have made between $3.5 million and $11 million from the company before it was dissolved last year.
Not everyone is buying the story that Santos earned his money how he says he did. As the Times notes, Devolder had no public website or LinkedIn page, and on his campaign financial disclosure, he did not list any clients. In a campaign bio, Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” and said it was managing $80 million in assets. At times, Santos would even go by the name Anthony Devolder.
“Where did that money come from?” asked Representative Dan Goldman of Brooklyn, referring to the $700,000 Santos lent his own campaign.
When asked about the money during an appearance on Stephen Bannon’s show “War Room,” Santos dodged the question, instead quipping, “Well, I’ll tell you where it didn’t come from. It didn’t come from China, Ukraine or Burisma.”
On January 24, Santos admitted in a new filing that $500,000 of that sum was not actually a personal loan, but he did not reveal the source of the money. Santos filed another amended report stating that a $125,000 loan Santos gave his campaign also was not a personal loan. “I have never been this confused looking at an F.E.C. filing,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told the New York Times.
There are other concerns about campaign donations, like the $25,000 Santos received from a group called RedStone Strategies — which never registered with the Federal Election Commission as a political group.
