George Santos

Santos has made numerous dubious and false claims about his biography, work history, and financial status in public and private. Six weeks after the election, numerous news outlets began reporting that large parts of his self-reported biography appear to be fabricated, including claims about his ancestry, education, employment, charity work, property ownership, and crimes he claimed to be the victim of. Santos has admitted to lying and, as of early January 2023 is under investigation by federal, state, county, and Brazilian authorities.

In 2010, Santos confessed to police and was charged with check fraud, but did not respond to a 2013 court summons. After Brazilian authorities told The New York Times that the case remains unresolved, Santos said, "I am not a criminal here – not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world." On January 2, 2023, the Times reported that Rio de Janeiro state prosecutors were reviving the fraud charges because Santos's whereabouts had become known.

In December 2022, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) wrote to Santos's campaign treasurer about possible violations of federal campaign finance regulations it had identified in Santos's reports filed after the election. Three individual contributors appeared to have given more than the $2,900 per cycle limit during September and October; Representative Dan Meuser's campaign committee had also exceeded the limit with contributions just before and after the election. Other potential violations include contributions from apparent political organizations not registered with the FEC and insufficient disclosures regarding other contributions, such as the 48-hour notice required for contributions of more than $1,000 during the last 20 days before the election, after the last required report has been filed. The FEC also noted that Santos's disclosures regarding his loans to the campaign lacked required information such as their terms and any co-guarantors. The campaign has until January 24, 2023, to correct those violations by filing an amended report listing all required information and any corrective actions taken, such as returning the excess funds or applying them to a different candidate or cycle. Santos's attorney denied that the Santos campaign "engaged in any unlawful spending of campaign funds."

In January 2023, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC over the campaign's apparent violations. The complain alleged that Santos used campaign funds to pay personal expenses; concealed the source of $700,000 he had given his campaign, and falsified campaign expenditures. End Citizens United filed separate complaints with the FEC, Department of Justice, and Office of Congressional Ethics.

On January 3, 2023, Santos's first day in Congress, he supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker. The New York Times wrote that Santos joined the group trying to block McCarthy for speaker. It called Santos's first day in Congress "awkward", noting his apparent unfamiliarity with the layout of the Capitol and the distance other New York House Republicans kept from him. Santos spent part of one of his first days in a coat closet. Anthony D'Esposito, who represents the neighboring 4th district and had previously appeared with Santos in interviews, did not even greet him. Santos was also not included in a photo of the Republican members from southern New York with McCarthy that 2nd district Representative Andrew Garbarino posted on Twitter.

On December 19, 2022, after Santos won the 2022 election but before he was to take office in January 2023, The New York Times reported that he had apparently misrepresented many aspects of his life and career, including his education and employment history. The same day, Santos's lawyer wrote that Times was "attempting to smear [Santos's] good name with these defamatory allegations"; on December 22, Santos wrote on Twitter: "I have my story to tell and it will be told next week." Santos did not produce any documents to substantiate his claims, despite several requests.

Santos told Jewish Insider in November 2022 that "my mother's Jewish background beliefs ... are mine". In a 2022 campaign position paper his campaign sent to pro-Israel groups, Santos called himself a "a proud American Jew". CNN reported that during Santos's 2022 campaign appearances, he called himself an "American Jew" and a "Latino Jew" on multiple occasions. In December 2022, he told the New York Post, "I never claimed to be Jewish ... I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was 'Jew-ish'."

In December 2022, Santos told the Post: "I didn't graduate from any institution of higher learning. I'm embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé ... we do stupid things in life."

According to his financial disclosures, Santos was the sole owner and managing member of the Devolder Organization, which he said was a family-owned company that managed $80 million in assets. On financial disclosure forms, Santos called Devolder a "capital introduction consulting" firm. Although based in New York, the company was registered in Florida, where it was dissolved in 2022 for failing to file annual reports, which Santos said was because its accountant missed the annual filing deadline. During his 2022 congressional campaign, Santos lent his campaign more than $700,000, and reported receiving a salary of $750,000 and dividends of between $1 million and $5 million from Devolder, even though he also listed the company's estimated value as in the same range.

Despite the claims about the company's size, Santos's financial disclosure forms did not list any clients using the company's services; three experts in election law interviewed by the Times said that this omission "could be problematic if such clients exist". In July 2022, Dun & Bradstreet estimated Devolder's revenue at less than $50,000. On December 20, 2022, the day after the Times article was published, Santos re-registered the Devolder Organization in Florida. Josh Marshall reported on Talking Points Memo that Santos listed himself as the registered agent on the paperwork, which could only be done if he lived in Florida and not New York. He gave as the company's mailing address a Merritt Island apartment purchased by a couple in August.

Santos's landlord said he actually had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse in August 2022, leaving $17,000 in damages, but records showed he was still registered at the address when he voted that November. He continued to receive mail there after the election, including the certificate of his election victory, according to the landlord, who had disposed of most of it. Santos told reporters that he planned to move to Oyster Bay, but he and his partner apparently moved into a house in Huntington, outside his congressional district's boundaries, in August 2022. He told the Post that the house was his sister's, but the Times later found that she lived in Elmhurst.

In a 2020 interview, Santos said he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and received radiation treatment. As of December 30, 2022, neither he nor his campaign has clarified details or answered questions about that claim.

On December 26, 2022, Santos admitted to lying about his educational and employment history in interviews with WABC radio and the Post. He told WABC radio: "I'm not a fraud. I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress." Santos told the Post that the controversy "will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good ... I intend to deliver on the promises I made during the campaign."

In 2022, Santos again ran for Congress in the 3rd district, although the district borders were redrawn after the 2020 redistricting cycle. Suozzi chose to retire and instead run for governor; Santos ran against Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman. Santos and Zimmerman are both openly gay, making this the first instance of two openly LGBTQ candidates competing against one another in a general election for a seat in Congress. The district covers a portion of northern Long Island (in Nassau County), along with a small portion of northeast Queens. The Long Island portion of the district includes Oyster Bay and North Hempstead, while the Queens portion includes the neighborhoods of Whitestone, Bayside, Little Neck, and Queens Village.

Questions about Santos's background emerged in September 2022 in The North Shore Leader, a weekly newspaper serving the affluent suburban area of that name that has historically been the core of the 3rd district. No other media outlet reported on the matter until after the election. In October 2022, the Leader, whose publisher, Grant Lally, a longtime Republican activist who had himself been the party's candidate for the 3rd district in the past, wrote that it "would like to endorse a Republican" in the race, but Santos "is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot ... he’s most likely just a fabulist – a fake", so the Leader endorsed Zimmerman.

Santos defeated Zimmerman in the November 2022 election by around eight percentage points, flipping the district (in what observers saw as a "mild upset") and helping Republicans retake control of the House by a narrow margin.

In a December 2022 email, Santos offered a bus trip to Washington that included an opportunity to attend his swearing-in ceremony and a campaign-led tour of the "Capitol grounds" for a donation ranging from $100 to $500. Charging for tours of the U.S. Capitol is a violation of Congressional ethics rules. It is unclear whether charging for tours of outdoor public space is a violation of ethics rules. Politico called Santos's move "unusual", writing that invitations to swearing-in ceremonies are generally reserved for close friends and family.

Santos has aligned himself with Donald Trump. He has called police brutality a "made-up concept". In a 2022 speech to the Whitestone Republican Club in Whitestone, Queens, Santos called abortion "barbaric" and compared it to slavery.

In July 2021, Santos wrote on Twitter that "9/11 claimed my mothers [sic] life"; in an October 2021 interview, he said his mother was "caught up in the ash cloud" during 9/11 but "never applied for relief" because the family could afford the medical bills; in December 2021, he wrote on Twitter that his mother had died five years earlier; in December 2022, he claimed that both of his parents survived being "down there" at the World Trade Center during 9/11.

The day before Santos was set to take office, the New York Daily News reported that in July 2021 he had loaned GADS PAC $25,000, five times what it had on hand at the time; the next day, the PAC donated the same amount to the campaign of Lee Zeldin, a Republican congressman also from Long Island who became the party's gubernatorial nominee in 2022. Starting in April 2022, GADS PAC, by then flush with donations from Santos's supporters, repaid him in four installments over the next two months. Effectively, Santos had arranged for his campaign contributors to repay the loan.

Shortly after his loss to Suozzi, Santos formed GADS PAC, a Leadership PAC, and began raising money to run again. By January 2021, he had raised more than $5,000, enough to require that he file a personal financial disclosure form with the House listing all assets and liabilities. He did not do so at the time.

On January 6, 2021, Santos attended Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. Santos later said that Trump "was energized", gave "a great speech", and was "at his full awesomeness" that day. After the speech, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, disrupting the counting of the electoral votes that formalized Trump's loss in the 2020 United States presidential election. Santos later said he was "never on Capitol grounds" on January 6, called it a "sad and dark day", and acknowledged that Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. He was later captured on video saying that he had written a "nice check to a law firm" to bail January 6 arrestees out of jail, saying: "Don't want to publicize it, but pretty adamant about that. Imagine breaking into your own house and being charged for trespassing."

In August 2021, Santos called President Joe Biden a "pathological liar".

Santos has said that he is currently married to a man, a claim apparently confirmed by a Brazilian newspaper in November 2020. He claims to suffer from an immunodeficiency and acute chronic bronchitis.

Santos has offered conflicting accounts of his residence. During his 2020 campaign, he listed his home as being in Elmhurst, Queens, outside the boundaries of the district in which Santos was then seeking office. Santos and his partner later moved to a rowhouse in Whitestone, Queens; its owner said they had moved there in July 2020. In January 2021, Santos claimed the couple had found stones and eggs thrown at the apartment after they returned to it from a party at Mar-a-Lago. The owner, who lived in the building's lower unit, did not recall any such incident and the Times found no relevant police report. In March 2022, Santos told Newsday that he had moved out of the Whitestone rowhouse because of the vandalism, but seven months later he said he still lived in the Whitestone home. He was registered to vote at the Whitestone address during his congressional campaigns, but did not appear to live there.

Santos filed personal financial disclosure forms the House requires of congressional candidates in early September, 20 months past the due date, when he had raised $5,000 in campaign funds. The Leader took note of the contrast between them and similar forms he had filed for the 2020 elections. In 2020, he had given a net worth of $5,000 and claimed his only income was his $50,000 Harbor Hill salary. By 2022, he said he was worth between $2.5 and $11 million, including $1–5 million in personal bank accounts, a Rio condominium valued between half a million and a million dollars, and business interests accounting for the rest. He reported no real property in the U.S., at odds with past claims that he owned two mansions on Long Island, one of which, in the Hamptons, he had reportedly told fellow Republicans he was selling for around $10 million because he rarely used it (the Leader reported that at the time, someone with no connection to Santos owned it, and it was valued at $2 million).

Suozzi later recalled that he had no doubt he would defeat Santos in 2020 since he was an underfinanced unknown who did not at the time live in the district, and that "during our few joint campaign appearances, all virtual, he came across as a phony."

By 2019, Santos was working for LinkBridge Investors, eventually becoming a vice president, according to his campaign disclosure form and a company document. While running for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to become a regional director at Harbor City Capital, a Florida firm the Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently accused of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Santos was not personally named in the lawsuit, nor were other colleagues of his, and he publicly denied any knowledge of the fraud.

Santos claimed in 2019 and 2020 to have attended the Horace Mann School, an elite preparatory school, before withdrawing because of family hardship. The school reports it has no record of Santos. Santos holds a high school equivalency diploma.

For most of 2016, Santos moved to central Florida, where he was setting up a local office of HotelsPro, a travel technology company owned by MetGlobal, of which he was a vice president. In a November 2022 interview, Santos discussed the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that year, saying, "I happened to, at the time, have people that worked for me in the club ... my company at the time, we lost four employees that were at Pulse." None of the 49 victims killed in the attack appears to have a connection to any of the companies named in Santos's biography. In a December 2022 interview, Santos changed his account, saying, "We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando".

Santos has said that he "was born and raised in abject poverty". A priest at the family's Catholic church reported that Santos had told him the family could not afford a funeral when Santos's mother died in 2016. The priest recalled that a collection at a memorial Mass raised a "significant" amount for the family, which he gave to Santos; he also had a friend set up a GoFundMe. Santos later went skiing in the Poconos Mountains, a trip his friend believes was paid for with the GoFundMe proceeds.

Santos remained in the house through November of that year, owing a month and a half's rent. His landlady filed for eviction, and he agreed to leave by December 24 and pay her $2,250 in back rent. In mid-January 2016, he told Queens Housing Court, in a statement signed under oath, that he was robbed of the money on his way to pay the back rent, and that police were unable to take a report at the time, telling him to return later. There is no record he ever did. The next month, after the eviction became final, Santos registered to vote in Florida, where he was working for HotelsPro. He voted in that year's election in November, and then re-registered again in New York six days later, The Intercept reported.

Santos claimed to hold a bachelor's degree in finance and economics from Baruch College, but Baruch has no record of this, and the period Santos said he was there overlaps with his time in Brazil. Friends of his recall times when he claimed to be taking classes there, but that he never seemed to study. He also claimed to hold a master of business administration from New York University (NYU), which also has no record of his attendance. An acquaintance who lent Santos money in 2014 recalled this claim and said that Santos seemed unaware that NYU's business school is named the Stern School of Business.

After that eviction, in September 2014 Santos signed a one-year lease on a single-family house in Whitestone, around the time he asked a friend for the money to move in with his boyfriend, that resulted in the judgment against Santos that he had not paid off as of 2022. In 2023, the boyfriend told the Times that he had dated Santos for several months before they moved in together. Santos claimed that he would get money from an investment he had done with Citigroup, so the boyfriend paid most of the bills. "One day it's one thing, one day it's another thing. He never ever actually went to work", the boyfriend recalled. The relationship soured in early 2015 over a surprise gift of plane tickets to Hawaii from Santos that turned out to be illusory. After the boyfriend came to believe Santos had taken his cell phone to pawn it, he searched the Internet for Santos's name and found the 2013 Brazilian charges against him, leading him to move out.

A 2013 Rio de Janeiro court notice of embezzlement charges against Santos describes him as an "American teacher", 25 years old, and single. In September 2014, an acquaintance lent Santos several thousand dollars he said he needed to move in with his boyfriend. Santos refused to pay the money back; a judge later rejected his claim that the money had been a gift and ordered Santos to repay it with interest, which he had not done as of 2022.

Santos said he founded a charity for rescue animals called Friends of Pets United in 2013 and ran it until 2018. He said the group was a tax-exempt charity, but the Internal Revenue Service has no record that the group was registered as a nonprofit organization. Friends of Pets United held a 2017 fundraiser event for a New Jersey animal rescue group, but the organizer of the rescue group said that Santos never gave it any of the proceeds.

Santos married a woman in 2012; they divorced in 2019, 12 days before his first congressional campaign. In 2014, he began dating a man; the two lived together until the man moved out early the next year. In October 2022, Santos told the media: "I am openly gay, have never had an issue with my sexual identity in the past decade". Santos did not publicly acknowledge his first marriage until after it was reported in December 2022; he told the Post in December 2022: "I dated women in the past. I married a woman", adding that he was "OK with my sexuality. People change."

From October 2011 to July 2012, Santos worked as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens.

While working as a customer service representative at a call center for Dish Network in College Point, Queens from October 2011 to July 2012, Santos reportedly told acquaintances and coworkers that his family was wealthy and had extensive real estate holdings in the U.S. and Brazil. He repeated this claim during his 2022 congressional campaign, saying that he and his family owned 13 rental properties in New York. No such properties were listed on his campaign's financial disclosure forms or in public records. Santos admitted to the Post that the claim was false and he owned no properties as of the end of 2022.

Three times in the mid-2010s, Santos was evicted from rented Queens properties (in Jackson Heights, Whitestone, and Sunnyside) due to failure to pay rent. A Queens court entered a civil judgment of $12,208 against him in the second eviction. Santos told the Post that his mother's illness had forced his family into debt at the time; as of December 2022 he had yet to pay the rent he owed, as he "completely forgot about it".

There have been several judgments against Santos in eviction and personal debt cases in the United States, involving thousands of dollars. In 2008, he confessed to check fraud charges in Brazil but failed to appear in court, leaving the case unresolved; Brazilian authorities revived the case in late 2022.

After obtaining his high school equivalency diploma, Santos spent time in Brazil. In 2008, he forged checks, stolen from a man his mother was caring for, to buy R$‎1,313 (about US$700) worth of clothing. When writing the checks, Santos presented identification bearing his photo but the check owner's name. The store owner became suspicious when the signatures on two checks did not match. Santos later admitted the theft to the store clerk (who had been liable to the store accepting the checks) in an Orkut post: "It was always my intention to pay, but I messed up", he wrote, and promised he would do so.

Santos called himself a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" and said he had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company has any record of him. His campaign website stated that he "began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm", but Citigroup sold its asset management division in 2005. On a 2022 podcast, Santos claimed that while employed at Goldman he attended the SALT private equity conference seven years earlier where, on a panel, he criticized his employer for investing in renewable energy, calling it a taxpayer-subsidized scam. Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the conference, said there is no record of Santos having attended any SALT conference.

George Anthony Devolder Santos (/ˈsæntoʊs/, /ˈsɑːntoʊs/; born July 22, 1988) is the United States representative for New York's 3rd congressional district, covering part of northern Nassau County on Long Island and northeast Queens. A member of the Republican Party, after unsuccessfully running for Congress in 2020 against incumbent Thomas Suozzi, Santos was elected to the open seat in 2022. For the seven years before his election, Santos worked in finance in New York and Florida.

Santos was born on July 22, 1988, to Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder and Gercino Antonio dos Santos Jr., both of whom were born in Brazil. Santos has claimed to both a coworker and Brazilian police to have dual citizenship in the United States and Brazil through his parents; in 2013, a Brazilian court described him as an American national. He has a sister, Tiffany Lee Devolder Santos. His maternal great-grandfather was born in Belgium and immigrated to Brazil in 1884. Santos claims to have attended Intermediate School 125 (also known as I.S. 125 Thomas J. McCann Woodside Intermediate School) in Woodside, Queens, as well as Primary School 122 (also known as P.S.122 The Mamie Fay School) in Astoria, Queens.

Santos ran as a Republican for the United States House of Representatives in New York's 3rd congressional district against Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi. He lost to Suozzi, 55.9% to 43.4%, a margin of about 46,000 votes.