Photo courtesy of CNN

George Santos, a recently former congressman from New York, was voted out of office with a majority of 311 to 114. Santos, sworn in not even a year ago, had been under public scrutiny since his election. From the beginning, there have been questionable details about his background.

AP News reported in December 2022 that Santos had claimed to be a Baruch College graduate and was an Associate Asset Manager at Citigroup. However, both statements were refuted: “In a detailed biography formerly posted on his campaign website, Santos said he graduated from Baruch College in 2010 with an economics and finance degree. Baruch, however, said it could find no records indicating that a person with Santos’ name and birthdate had ever graduated…[additionally] a Citigroup spokesperson, Danielle Romero Apsilos, said the company had no records indicating Santos had ever been an employee.” This is just the start of his objectionable actions.

Throughout his campaign, Santos made many statements that were later determined false. Some of the most notable ones include: claiming his mother was in New York on 9/11, being a Jewish person, and losing employees in the deadly 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, along with the embellishments and outright lies on his resume. There is no record of there being a Pulse nightclub victim who worked at any of the places Santos did. Additionally, Santos is Catholic, not Jewish. In November 2022, he claimed to be “a proud American Jew.” However, a single month later, when Santos was called out on this claim, he stated, “I never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish’,” according to a timeline of Santos’ controversial statements from NBC.

Additionally, CBS has compiled a list of accusations against Santos:

“In total, Santos is charged with:

• one count of conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States
• two counts of wire fraud
• two counts of making materially false statements to the Federal Election Commission
• two counts of falsifying records submitted to obstruct the FEC
• two counts of aggravated identity theft
• one count of access device fraud
• seven counts of wire fraud
• three counts of money laundering
• one count of theft of public funds
• two counts of making materially false statements to the United States House of Representatives”

Overall, Santos currently has a 23-count indictment. The House of Ethics wrote a Committee Report in November 2023, stating that “…the ISC [the Interagency Security Committee] expeditiously compiled a voluminous record consisting of over 170,000 pages of documents and testimony from dozens of witnesses, including financial statements, contemporaneous communications, and other materials. That record demonstrated the breadth of Representative Santos’ misconduct.” 

The House Committee Report went on to plainly–yet scathingly–state: “Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” Essentially, the reason he ran as a congressman was to earn money, instead of a desire to make the nation a better place. According to the Justice Department, “To qualify for the program, Santos had to demonstrate, among other things, that his congressional campaign had raised at least $250,000 from third-party contributors in a single quarter. To create the public appearance that his campaign had met that financial benchmark and was otherwise financially viable, Santos and Marks agreed to falsely report to the FEC that at least 10 family members of Santos and Marks had made significant financial contributions to the campaign when Santos and Marks both knew that these individuals had neither made the reported contributions nor given authorization for their personal information to be included in such false public reports.” In other words, one needs to collect a certain amount of money from donors interested in the campaign in order to continue in the race. Santos didn’t make enough money, but he worked with his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, to make it seem like he did. 

But wait, it gets worse. George Santos is not only a pathological liar, he’s also a hypocrite. As an openly gay (former) member of the Republican Party in Congress, he has supported issues regarding restricting his own community. One of the most notable bills he supported was the “Don’t Say Gay” law that went into effect in March 2023. Reuters stated, “He has backed Florida’s controversial “Parental Rights in Education” law, which prohibits classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, leading critics to call it the “don’t say gay” law.” In other words, Santos is part of the LGBTQ+ community, yet is working against it to approve bills that negatively impact the entire queer population of the United States. This is especially hypocritical due to the high number of proposed bills in Congress at the moment regarding transgender youth and their rights involving their bodies, names, sports teams, and bathrooms, such as SB 254. 

Santos himself has a history of cross-dressing, but is supporting a party trying to shut that down? In 2005, George Santos competed to be Miss Gay Rio de Janeiro, according to someone who competed with him, Eula Rochard. He used the stage name Kitara Ravache. While this was many years ago, it’s important to note, since he is currently trying to prevent younger generations from performing, even though he used to. Of course, he sees no issues with this, according to NBC: “In a September interview, Santos said he sees no contradiction between his sexual orientation and his party’s politics. ‘As a lifelong Republican, I have never experienced discrimination in the Republican Party,’ he said at the time. ‘I am an openly gay candidate.’” For someone who has supposedly never faced discrimination in his party, he’s certainly creating more across the country.

Photo courtesy of Back2Stonewall