George Santos — the New York Republican Congressman who recently took office representing portions of Long Island and New York City — is now facing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission requesting an investigation into what the Campaign Legal Center alleges are numerous areas of serious concern.
Santos already garnered widespread scrutiny after expansive lies about his background were uncovered. That list includes basic facts about where he went to school and worked, in addition to questionable claims about his personal heritage. He contended grandparents of his were Holocaust survivors, despite no apparent evidence they were born in Europe. Confronted with questions about previous claims he was a Jew, he dismissed scrutiny by saying he’d characterized himself as “Jew-ish” as opposed to just Jewish, whatever that means. Now, there’s the matter of his campaign finances. Pointing to some of what led to the suspicion here, his 2022 campaign for Congress reported dozens of expenses just under $200, including some that were $199.99 — and it’s once reaching $200 that specific documentation of the expense like a receipt is required.
The complaint also questions where Santos actually got a lot of the money for his campaign, nearly three-quarters of a million dollars of which he said he personally loaned the effort — despite disclosures he himself made not long before putting his personal income in just the tens of thousands of dollars range. One possibility about which the Campaign Legal Center raised concerns is that funds provided to Santos’s company known as the Devolder Organization were meant as support for his campaign and given through the firm in an attempt to avoid federal limits on donations to campaigns. In addition, the Santos campaign reported paying rent for a residence where he himself lived, crediting some of the charges to “apartment rental for staff.” Using campaign funds for that kind of personal expense is prohibited.
The complaint from the Campaign Legal Center points to some of the deception in which Santos was already caught regarding his personal background. Biographies claimed he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, besides graduating from Baruch College and — per at least one ostensible recap of his life — New York University. He never did any of that, subsequent revelations confirmed. “Particularly in light of Santos’s mountain of lies about his life and qualifications for office, the Commission should thoroughly investigate what appear to be equally brazen lies about how his campaign raised and spent money,” the new federal complaint said.
Some of the individual campaign expenses about which the Campaign Legal Center was concerned were particularly glaring. The Santos campaign reported — among over three dozen expenses totaling exactly the same amount — a $199.99 charge for a hotel stay at a particular hotel in southern Florida where available information indicates the least expensive room for a comparable time is above $700. Also, why was Santos charging his campaign anything at all for a hotel stay in Florida? He wasn’t running in Florida. His single House district encompasses an area easily accessible in its entirety by car. Why would he need that hotel stay — or the tens of thousands of dollars in airline expenses his 2022 Congressional campaign also claimed?
