Daniel Goldman, a Democrat who was recently elected to represent a portion of New York City in Congress, is calling for the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York to investigate what are reportedly extreme misrepresentations by George Santos, a Republican who was also elected to Congress in this year’s midterms.
Goldman raised the possibility of two offenses, including conspiring to defraud the United States and lying to the federal agency known as the Federal Election Commission, which deals with financial filings from federal candidates. Goldman described the potential conspiracy offense as “knowingly and intentionally interfering with a federal election through dissemination of misinformation.” “I therefore urge the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and the FBI to initiate an investigation into Santos’s apparent campaign lies,” Goldman added in prepared remarks.
Available evidence calls what seems like every major element of Santos’s background into question. Bios claimed he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company could find records of him doing so. A campaign bio said he worked at Citigroup in a field where the company didn’t even have operations when he claimed he was there. He said in financial disclosure forms filed with the House that he was making a salary of $750,000 a year from a company called the Devolder Organization, which ostensibly does work in financial services, but The New York Times couldn’t find a website or even a LinkedIn profile associated with the supposed company, and Santos didn’t include any individual clients in his disclosures — despite requirements individual sources of income providing more than $5,000 be identified. Leaving that information out — or a similar misrepresentation — could lead to federal criminal charges, assuming the offense is proved intentional.
He also claimed he previously ran an animal rescue charity that was a tax-exempt organization, but the IRS found no record of the barely evident organization ever holding such a status. And some of the apparent lies are just bizarre. Santos personally claimed in an interview in New York that four employees of his — at a company he didn’t identify — died in the mass shooting that took place in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, but it doesn’t appear that’s accurate. He also said on Twitter that he and his family owned over a dozen properties, but the Times couldn’t find any property records in either New York City or Nassau County, which includes portions of the adjacent Long Island, to support these contentions. Santos himself twice faced eviction proceedings on residences in the New York area.
If allegations are true (and Santos has not even denied them), there are at least two possible federal crimes at play:
1) conspiracy to defraud the US (same as Mueller with Russians in 16 and Trump in 20), and:
2) filing false statements to FEC. @EDNYnews should investigate. https://t.co/nYlggNLHBP
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) December 20, 2022
