Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) is a serial fabulist who has compiled a long list of untruths about his education, work, religion and even his athletic ability. This past week, a growing number of New York Republicans and some GOP members of Congress have called for his resignation, but Santos has remained defiant, even suggesting he will run again in 2024. He has dismissed what Republicans call “deceit, lies, fabrication,” saying last month that “my sins here are embellishing my résumé.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is trying to manage a razor-thin majority, has rebuffed calls to take action against Santos, who faces a number of investigations.
Here is a look at Santos’s falsehoods:
During the 2020 campaign, Santos told a dramatic story about how Horace Mann Prep in the Bronx, a prestigious private school he said he attended, refused to help his financially struggling family before his graduation, forcing him to leave four months early.
Ed Adler, a spokesman for Horace Mann, told The Washington Post last month that the school had no record of Santos attending the institution. After the school was provided with several variations of Santos’s name that he has used in public, Adler wrote in an email, “George Santos or any of the aliases you [cite] never attended HM.”
On a résumé he submitted to the Nassau County GOP, Santos wrote that he graduated from Baruch College in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics/finance. Santos said he was an exceptional student, earning a 3.89 GPA, graduating summa cum laude and ranking in the top 1 percent of his class. He never attended Baruch.
Chairman Joseph G. Cairo Jr. of the Nassau County Republican Committee, who this past week called for Santos to resign, also said Santos told him that he was a star on the Baruch volleyball team.
“[He] told me, I remember specifically, that he was into sports a little bit — that he was a star on the Baruch volleyball team and they had won the league championship,” Cairo said at a news conference, prompting some laughter. “What can I tell ya?
Santos said he received an MBA in international business from New York University in 2013 after scoring an impressive 710 on his GMAT exam. He never got a degree from NYU.
“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé,” Santos said in an interview with the New York Post. “I own up to that. … We do stupid things in life.”
In June 2020, Santos wrote on Twitter that he is the “grandson of Holocaust refugees.” This month, Jewish Insider cast doubt on that claim, noting that the dates Santos cited for his grandparents’ departure from Belgium to Brazil do not line up, nor do immigration records support his version of his family’s history.
In March, Santos said in a podcast interview that he was “raised Catholic, born to a Jewish family — very, very confusing religious background.” More recently, 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.’”
Santos now says that he’s “clearly Catholic,” but he claims that his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism.
Santos said he worked for high-powered Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, according to the two-page resume submitted to the Nassau County GOP. He said he was an asset manager associate at Citigroup from February 2011 to January 2014. He said he was a project manager at Goldman Sachs, from January 2017 to August 2017, and cited revenue growth from $300 million to $600 million. Both companies told the New York Times in December that they had no record of Santos ever working there.
On the résumé, Santos also described, among his skills, “public speaking” and “currency and coin counter.”
He told Lara Trump in an interview this year: “I’m a business guy. I’ve done private equity for 11 years in New York.” He added that he “had the privilege of doing business” with the Trump Organization. He told another interviewer: “I’ve gone up the chains of Wall Street. I’ve developed many companies. I’ve opened my own business.”
Santos reported loaning his campaign more than $700,000 in the 2021-22 cycle despite having only $55,000 in earned income during his previous run for Congress in 2020, according to a financial disclosure. The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint this week with the Federal Election Commission, calling Santos’s claims of earning millions over the previous two years from the Devolder Organization “vague, uncorroborated, and noncredible in light of his many previous lies.”
Santos received payments as recently as April 2021 from a financial services company accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of a “classic Ponzi scheme,” according to a court-appointed lawyer reviewing the firm’s assets, The Washington Post reported this week.
Santos did not divulge any income from Florida-based company Harbor City Capital on a financial disclosure form required of all federal candidates. The payments the lawyer described to The Post, which have not been previously reported, indicate that Santos received money at least a month after he has said he left the firm — and mere weeks before registering a business called the Devolder Organization that he has claimed as the basis for his wealth. The lawyer, Katherine C. Donlon, declined to tell The Post the amount Santos was paid.
Santos claimed in a November 2020 interview that a company he had worked for “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. He changed his story in an interview last month with WABC in New York. He said the four were in the process of being hired. “We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said, never naming the company.
Where does Santos live on Long Island? Was he married? What will come of a probe in Brazil, where authorities are seeking to reinstate a 15-year-old fraud charge against Santos? The charge, first reported by the New York Times, stems from the alleged theft and use of a checkbook in Rio de Janeiro state in 2008, when Santos was 19.
Rio state prosecutors allege that Santos spent $700 at a small clothing store in the city of Niterói in 2008 using a stolen checkbook and a false name, court records show. Santos acknowledged the incident in a post on the social media platform Orkut, writing, “I know I screwed up, but I want to pay,” prosecutors said. The next year, they alleged, he told police he took the checkbook from a man for whom his mother worked.
