Dishonest GOP Rep. George Santos has already begun spending money for his 2024 re-election campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The FEC sent Santos a letter on February 7 requiring him to either disavow his campaign’s recent spending or to announce his re-election campaign by March 14.
The letter states, “Devolder-Santos for Congress is filing reports of receipts and disbursements that appear to be for the 2024 election. A review of these reports indicates that your principal campaign committee has no debts from the previous election cycle, and has accepted contributions and/or made expenditures in support of your 2024 candidacy in excess of $5,000, this meeting the definition of ‘candidate’ per Federal Election Campaign laws.”
Santos has previously said that he would not run for re-election after he admitted that lying about extensive parts of his personal history. He admitted lying about graduating from Baruch College and New York University, working directly for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and owning 13 properties.
Santos was charged with theft in 2017 for allegedly writing $15,125 in bad checks to Amish dog breeders in Pennsylvania for a pet adoption event he organized for his seemingly unregistered charity Friends of Pets United.
When Pennsylvania issued an arrest warrant for Santos’s extradition in 2019, he went to attorney Tiffany Bogosian, a middle school friend for help. He told Bogosian that the checks bounced because he canceled the checks after someone stole his checkbook. The checks all had signatures that differed from Santos’s, Bogosian said.
“A week later, Santos went to Pennsylvania and met with prosecutors. According to Bogosian, he told them he ‘worked for the SEC [the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission]’ and got them to drop the charge. In November 2021, the charge was expunged without any reason given, according to court documents,” LGBTQ Nation reported.
It now seems that Santos also lied about being Jewish, his grandparents fleeing Nazi persecution in Ukraine (they were both born in Brazil), his mother becoming ‘the first female executive at a major financial institution’” (she worked as a cook and house cleaner), attending the Horace Mann preparatory school in the Bronx, having four previous employees who were killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and his mother having died in connection to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
Santos admitted to being a drag queen after initially denying it. He claimed he was the victim of an assassination attempt and that, in summer 2021, a robber took his shoes in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, one of New York City’s busiest streets. He has yet to produce a police report confirming this. He recently admitted that large amounts of money he claimed were “personal” loans to his campaign came from elsewhere. He has also been accused of check fraud in Brazil and of stealing money designated for the medical care of a veteran’s dying dog.
Six Republican congresspeople from New York and the Nassau County Republican Party have all called on Santos to resign.