Out gay Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) has finally admitted to lying extensively about his biography, but refuses to resign, stating that he ran his campaign on contemporary issues rather than his past.
Last week, The New York Times reported on the many gaps in his life story, including his past alleged educational and career accomplishments. On Monday, the 34-year-old Republican politician addressed some of the falsehoods, but not all of them.
“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning,” he told the New York Post, even though he had previously said that he attended Baruch College and New York University, receiving degrees in finance and economics.
He also admitted that he never worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but instead claimed that he helped make “capital introductions” between clients and investors at the firms while working for a company called Link Bridge. Link Bridge hasn’t yet commented on his latest claim.
He blamed his grandmother’s stories on a seemingly false claim about his grandparents fleeing “Jewish persecution in Ukraine” during the Nazi Holocaust. The Forward discovered that his grandparents were actually born in Brazil.
He admitted that he never mentioned having an ex-wife from 2012 to 2017, though The Daily Beast found no record that he is married to the man who he currently calls his husband.
He admitted to not living at the Queens, New York address where he was registered to vote. Rather, he said he now resides at his sister’s place in Huntington on Long Island, New York.
Though he previously said he lost four employees in the 2016 shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida — a claim not backed up by any reports — he now says that the employees were in the process of being hired at his company. Santos didn’t elaborate with additional information to back up his new claim.
On Tuesday, Santos removed his campaign biography from his website.
He denied any wrongdoing despite Brazilian court records accusing him of trying to cash another person’s checks, didn’t back up claims that his mother was working in the World Trade Center on the day of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks nor did he explain why no records exist of his founding a charity called Friends of Pets.
Even though numerous Democrats have called on him to resign, he told the Post, “My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry. I am not a criminal… This [controversy] will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”