Congressman George Santos can’t stop, won’t stop lying.
Earlier this month, the representative from New York added 10 criminal counts to the 13 he was originally charged with in May, with federal prosecutors alleging that he stole donor identities, used their credit cards to make more than $44,000 in charges, and wired some of the money to his personal bank account and campaign coffers.
Santos is facing the very real prospect of prison time — if convicted, a minimum of two years for aggravated identity theft and a maximum of 20 years for the other counts — and the equally real prospect of losing his seat in the House. That is, if he’s not booted by his own colleagues first.
Obviously, this is a lot to handle. But is Santos allowing the stress of it all to stop him from doing what he loves, i.e., telling completely absurd lies for sport? No, he is not!
Santos, speaking to The New York Times, claimed he had a “story that nobody talks about,” that his niece was kidnapped, likely in retaliation for his public comments about the Chinese Communist Party.
“You think it was China?” asked reporter Grace Ashford, trying to nail him down.
“Look, I don’t want to go into like, conspiracy theory,” Santos said. “But you know, if the shoe fits, right?”
According to Ashford, she subsequently got in touch with a high-ranking member of law enforcement, who told her that the matter had been looked into — and that there was no evidence of any kidnapping or, really, any connection to the Chinese Communist Party. “We found nothing at all to suggest it’s true,” the official told Ashford. “I’d lean into, ‘He made it up.’”
“He made it up,” is, of course, a phrase that could be applied to a significant number of Santos’s claims, including those about working at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, having grandparents who fled the Holocaust, and a mother who was in the South Tower on 9/11.
It’s those lies (and all the others), plus the actual criminal allegations, which Santos insists he did not commit, that have led a number of his GOP colleagues to announce they’ll be introducing a resolution to expel him from the House.
If that doesn’t work? As Politico reported on Tuesday, between Republicans and Democrats, there are approximately 30 candidates gunning for his seat. That’s right, folks: He’s still running!
This story originally appeared in Vanity Fair.
