George Santos is a Cheap Crook

So we finally have the indictment that the feds threw at George Santos, and while it doesn’t answer every question about the myriad of weird claims, lies, inconsistencies, and so on that have been swirling around Congressmen (for now) Santos for some time now, the topline is pretty clear: George Santos is a cheap crook.

The bulk of the indictment focuses on allegations that Mr. Santos directed an unnamed political consultant to solicit fraudulent political contributions to a company that he falsely claimed was a political fund. Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money for personal expenses, including buying designer clothing and making credit card payments.

The indictment also accuses Mr. Santos of fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits made available during the coronavirus pandemic. Federal prosecutors say that Mr. Santos received more than $24,000 in unemployment payments while he was actually working for a Florida-based investment firm that paid him $120,000 a year.

And prosecutors say that Mr. Santos knowingly made false statements on financial disclosure forms in 2020 and 2022 in order to mislead the House of Representatives and the public about his financial condition. In the indictment, they accuse Mr. Santos of falsely inflating his salary in 2020 and 2022, failing to disclose some income and lying about the amounts in his checking and savings accounts. Source: New York Times

There’s nothing novel or complicated or even particularly interesting about these crimes: in all these cases, Santos just lied to people about money and then when they gave him money, he took it and spent it. The campaign finance scheme is depressingly basic – rather than playing the usual (and these days pretty much legalized by the Supreme Court) game of using no-show “consultant” positions and the like to turn campaign finance dollars into personal funds, Santos just lied to people that a shell company was a 501(c)(4) independent expenditure organization, got them to wire money to that shell company, and then spent the money on himself.

The Unemployment Insurance fraud is both deeply ironic – Congressman Santos is a co-sponsor of a bill to crack down on UI fraud – and similarly unoriginal. Santos had a no-show job that paid him $125k a year and then lied to the Department of Labor and the state of New York in order to collect a comparatively piddling $24 grand. He couldn’t even manage to pull off a proper PPP scam like the cool kids in Congress. And if I can be permitted a slight digression: at a time when Republicans are pushing to claw back UI money from the states in the name of fraud prevention and balancing the budget, it is this kind of petty bullshit done by someone who’s already economically comfortable that is going to be blamed on poor people for whom that $24k would have made a huge difference in their lives.

And then there’s his false statements, which are just pathetic. That sudden mystery jump in his income between 2020 and 2022 where he suddenly went from making a relatively modest $55,000 a year to making $750,000 a year and having millions of dollars in dividends so that he could loan his campaign a half million bucks? It was just a sad lie to cover up the fact that he only made $28,000 and another $20,000 in Unemployment Insurance in 2022, and probably to try to gin up more fraudulent donations by pretending to be a successful businessman who could self-fund his campaign. As with so many of his lies about his academic and professional background, it was all puffery designed to make him look like a big shot rather than the reality, which is that he was a rather unsuccessful grifter up until he turned into a rather successful grifter indeed.