Should falsifying your entire resume’ as a politician be grounds for removal from office?

I think it should!

I think so, absolutely, as it calls into question (the nicest way I could put that) basic integrity, qualifications, etc. I really don’t want to have to start questioning the abilities of everyone I do business with. He is now apologizing and stating that he absolutely will keep his promises. Yeah, I’d trust that.

Oh gosh YES! This criteria should be applied to anyone but especially those in powerful positions. I would hope my teachers have experience in the subjects they’re teaching me.

Yes. He should not be allowed to be sworn in.

I’ve been following the story and it’s amazing that he seems to think this should be acceptable. I hope the higher ups in his party force him out, without much fanfare and cost to the taxpayers.

Thanks @jca2. I wondered what New Yorkers thought of this.

@jca2 If he’s forced out, what happens? Does Governor Hochul get to appoint someone? If she does, I’ll bet the Republicans will keep him in. They’re the party that backed Hershel Walker. (Not that the Dems might not do something similar if the boot was on the other foot.)

New York politicians on both sides want him out, so it’s not up to the pols who backed Walker.

I am not sure what would happen but it’s early enough that there may be another race. Good question. I am going to look at the NY Times and see what it says.

If I lie on my resume when applying for a job, I’d be fired just as soon as it came to light; so, YES, he should be tossed out on his ears!!!

@janbb There are no appointments to the House of Representatives. In some (but not all) states, the governor can appoint someone to complete the term for an empty Senate seat. But, this can’t happen for the House.

He should be given a severe reprimand once installed in office.
But removed from office?? All politicians pump up the jam on the things they say from time to time. How can you punish them all??

Credit: The New York Times:

Ending a weeklong silence, Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to a sizable list of falsehoods about his professional background, educational history and property ownership. But he said he was determined to take the oath of office on Jan. 3 and join the House majority.

Mr. Santos, a New York Republican who was elected in November to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, confirmed some of the key findings of a New York Times investigation into his background, but sought to minimize the misrepresentations.

“My sins here are embellishing my résumé,” Mr. Santos told The New York Post in one of several interviews he gave on Monday.

Mr. Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He once said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties; on Monday, he admitted he was not a landlord.

Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a yearslong marriage he had never disclosed.

“I dated women in the past. I married a woman. It’s personal stuff,” he said to The Post, adding that he was “OK with my sexuality. People change.”

The admissions by Mr. Santos added a new wrinkle to one of the more astonishing examples of an incoming congressman falsifying key biographical elements of his background — with Mr. Santos maintaining the falsehoods through two consecutive bids for Congress, the first of which he lost.

Mr. Santos acknowledged that a string of financial difficulties had left him owing thousands to landlords and creditors. But he failed to fully explain in the interviews how his fortunes reversed so significantly that, by 2022, he was able to lend $700,000 to his congressional campaign.

Mr. Santos also firmly denied committing a crime anywhere in the world, even though The Times had uncovered Brazilian court records showing that Mr. Santos had been charged with fraud as a young man after he was caught writing checks with a stolen checkbook.

“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”

The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Card 1 of 6
A moment of reflection. In the aftermath of the midterms, Democrats and Republicans face key questions about the future of their parties. With the House and Senate now decided, here’s where things stand:

Biden’s tough choice. President Biden, who had the best midterms of any president in 20 years as Democrats maintained a narrow hold on the Senate, feels buoyant after the results. But as he nears his 80th birthday, he confronts a decision on whether to run again.

Is Trump’s grip loosening? Ignoring Republicans’ concerns that he was to blame for the party’s weak midterms showing, Donald J. Trump announced his third bid for the presidency. But some of his staunchest allies are already inching away from him.

G.O.P leaders face dissent. After a poor midterms performance, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell faced threats to their power from an emboldened right flank. Will the divisions in the party’s ranks make the G.O.P.-controlled House an unmanageable mess?

A new era for House Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve in the post and the face of House Democrats for two decades, will not pursue a leadership post in the next Congress, paving the way for fresher faces at the top of the party.

Divided government. What does a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-run Senate mean for the next two years? Most likely a return to the gridlock and brinkmanship that have defined a divided federal government in recent years.

In the court file, Mr. Santos is identified by his full name and date of birth, as well as by the names of his mother and father. The documents show that Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was charged, but that the case remains unresolved because authorities were later unable to locate him.

In both interviews on Monday, Mr. Santos also denounced reporting by both CNN and The Forward, a Jewish publication, that he may have misled voters about his account of his Jewish ancestry, including that his maternal grandparents were born in Europe and emigrated to Brazil during the Holocaust.

“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Mr. Santos told The Post. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

Mr. Santos, who has repeatedly said he was religiously Catholic but has also identified as a nonobservant Jew, told The Post his grandmother had recounted how she converted from Judaism to Catholicism.

Mr. Santos, through representatives, has declined multiple requests to speak with The Times.

Over the course of his campaigns, Mr. Santos claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before working at Citigroup and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. A biography on the National Republican Congressional Committee website said he had attended both Baruch and New York University and received degrees in finance and economics.

But the colleges and companies could not locate records to verify his claims when contacted by The Times.

In Monday’s interview, Mr. Santos admitted to The Post that he had not graduated from Baruch College or any college.

“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé,” he said, later adding: “We do stupid things in life.”

He also admitted that he never worked directly for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, blaming a “poor choice of words” for creating the impression that he had.

Past statements of Mr. Santos are relatively clear however: An archived version of Mr. Santos’s former campaign website preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine says he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm.”

Instead, he told The Post on Monday, he dealt with both firms through his work at another company, LinkBridge Investors, which connects investors with potential clients. LinkBridge, he said, had “limited partnerships” with the two Wall Street firms.

The Times was able to confirm Mr. Santos’s employment at LinkBridge. But in a version of his campaign biography posted as recently as April, Mr. Santos suggested that he had started his career on Wall Street at Citigroup and that he was at Goldman Sachs briefly before his time at LinkBridge.

A spokeswoman for Citigroup declined to comment. Representatives for Goldman Sachs and LinkBridge did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

Mr. Santos has not fully accounted for his employment during the years that he had claimed that he was advancing on Wall Street. In a separate interview with WABC radio, he confirmed reporting by The Times that he had worked at a call center in Queens in late 2011 and early 2012.

Yet even as Mr. Santos, whose victory helped Republicans secure a narrow majority in the next House of Representatives, admitted to some fabrication, his actions will likely not prevent him from being seated in Congress.

Democrats — including the outgoing House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the next House Democratic minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York — have suggested Mr. Santos is unfit to serve in Congress. Top House Republican leaders, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have largely remained silent.

The House can only prevent candidates from taking office if they violate the Constitution’s age, citizenship and state residency requirements. Once he has been seated, however, Mr. Santos could face ethics investigations, legal experts have said.

Of greater potential concern are questions about Mr. Santos’s financial disclosures, where he reported earning millions of dollars from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Mr. Santos disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no public-facing assets or other property tied to the firm. Mr. Santos also did not list any clients on his disclosures, despite the requirement that candidates list any compensation over $5,000 from a single source.

Intentionally omitting or misrepresenting information on a congressional financial disclosure is considered a federal crime.

In a video interview with City & State, Mr. Santos asserted that his consulting practice at the Devolder Organization built upon the work he had done at his former firm, LinkBridge.

“I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress,” Mr. Santos said, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that — no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”

The WABC interview itself was something of a political curiosity. Mr. Santos was interviewed by John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate and a big Republican donor, and Anthony Weiner, the former Democratic congressman who resigned in disgrace in 2011.

Mr. Weiner asked Mr. Santos about his claim, made in an interview last month shortly after his election, that a company he had worked for “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. The Times reviewed news coverage and obituaries and found no evidence that could support the claim.

On Monday, Mr. Santos shifted his account slightly, telling Mr. Weiner that those four people were not yet employees but instead were in the process of being hired.

“We did lose four people that were going to be coming to work for the company that I was starting up in Orlando,” he said.

Mr. Santos did not name the company or provide additional information to support his statement. Public records show that Mr. Santos had a Florida driver’s license and was registered to vote in that state in 2016.

Mr. Santos was mostly recently registered to vote at a house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, but the house’s owner said he moved out months before the election.

In The Post’s interview, Mr. Santos confirmed The Times’s reporting that he was currently living in Huntington, N.Y, a town just outside his congressional district. (Members of Congress are only required to live in the state they represent, not the district.)

Mr. Santos also admitted that he was not, as he claimed last year on Twitter, a landlord who makes significant income from 13 properties owned by him and his family.

“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post, even though a financial disclosure he filed with the House in September said he owned an apartment in Rio de Janeiro.

Michael Gold is a reporter covering transit and politics in New York. @migold

Wow @jca2.

There’s no question that if this happened in private industry he would likely be fired. Nullifying the vote for this guy is a different issue. Should Warren be thrown out for lying about being Native American? Here are over 50 lies Biden has told per PolitiFact. So do we make it disqualifying due to the number of lies or the severity of the lies. This is a slippery slope that could tear us apart and we don’t know if the vote would have changed. I suppose we could impeach this guy but are we ready for flood of impeachments?

This seat is not going to change anything and we’ll know in 2 years what the voters want. If you are incensed that a politician would lie, you should be incensed by all of them.

^Oh, I certainly am incensed by all of them! It needs to stop. We need to hold politicians to the same level we hold everyone else in private sector.
As you said, most of us non political folks would be fired.
I don’t think this was “enhancing” his resume as @kritiper seems to imply. Read what @jca2 posted. It’s a bit long, but well worth the read.
I think we need to start making all politicians accountable for the things they say.
This isn’t just saying you were an A student when you were actually a B student. This is flat out lies.

This is not a simple lie like “things are improving” when data is not conclusive, this is outright multiple lies about jobs, degrees, colleges, family history and financial history. I have not seen anywhere that any current politician has lied to such an extent.

It’s really unbelievable to me how the local Democratic Party and not one local journalist found this out before Election Day. I’m not happy with how much digging is done into politicians’ personal life, but this isn’t marital affairs and smoking MJ in college. This is outright lies about education, work experience, and religion. WTH?!

Any other job he would be fired.

As a side note, my gaydar is ding ding dinging also.

^Do you think he’s also lying about being gay, because I actually thought that?

@chyna I don’t know if he’s lying about being gay (lying about everything else, it’s hard to not suspect that) but he could still be gay and only married a woman to appear straight (yet another lie) nonetheless, he should be unemployed!

Yes. I fear that if every congressman or senator who lied on their resume were to be removed, the number of people in the houses would fall by more than half.

So whoever was running against him didn’t know this? His ops research money went up someone’s nose!

Did Warren “lie” about being /native American??? I’ve seen NO proof that she knew any different. I was told by my family all my life that my grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee. Even our family doctor explained to me that was why I tanned so easy as I retained some of the Cherokee traits. My grandmother died before I was born, so I couldn’t ask her any pertinent questions. Since most of my family has since passed on, I’ve been doing a family tree & I’ve discovered that it wasn’t my grandmother who was full-bloodied Cherokee. It was my great grandmother & she was only 1/8. So, I have a minimal amount of Native American blood in me. Was I lying when I claimed to be Native American??? Nope…I just didn’t have all the facts!!! Had I created a whole life for myself that had absolutely NO basis of truth, I would be a liar!!!

He’s NOT gay!!! He just thought that claiming to be gay would get him some extra votes.

@LadyMarissa As he thought claiming to be Jewish would get him extra votes somehow.

@LadyMarissa I was critical of what Warren did too, but this is way beyond what Warren did. Being Native American or not is not a qualification for ability to do a job, although I do think it was dishonest and used to be possibly counted as a minority. It does seem like she honestly thought she was a smidge Native American, and race and ethnicity is always subjective unless trying to qualify for free education and other grants that are given to Native Americans, which she would never qualify for.

Did he claim to be gay? I didn’t know that. He surely looks gay. Just like Lindsey Graham and Jared Kushner.

He should be removed from office and made to eat his resume.

Once he is sworn in; he face criminal charges for financial shenanigans, mostly “mystery money” that is unaccounted for ! Never documented donations of over $5000 and where did his money come to donate to his candidacy ($700,000) Russia – - China—- North Korea ?

The fact he is an outright liar is not his only problem. Cooked books get you in trouble ask Trump and his organization .

@JLeslie Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a years long marriage he had never disclosed. Yes, he claims to be openly gay & says the Republican party has never discriminated against him because of it. He was married to a female for quite some time. I had said from the get go that he wasn’t gay. I don’t believe that the Rep Party wouldn’t discriminate against him UNLESS they thought it would get them the one House seat that they so desperately needed & even then, he would still be discriminated against just for general principles.

I think it’s grounds to fire the reporters/editors in his area who failed to figure any of this shit out until AFTER the election. Most of this could easily be discovered with a trivial amount of effort. Our media is supposed to hold the powerful accountable, instead they’re tools of the elite to maintain power. It’s pathetic.

@LadyMarissa Why don’t you think he’s gay? I spotted him gay the first photo I saw of him.

It’s astounding to me that he said he is a college graduate and he never went to any college.

@LadyMarissa if he is openly gay, he’s gay. It’s not uncommon for gay people to have been in a straight relationship and then come out as gay later on.

He’s being investigated now by the Nassau County DA’s office. The Nassau County DA is a Republican.

He’s also being investigated by the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

Cut and pasted from the NY Times:

By Michael Gold, Ed Shanahan, Brittany Kriegstein and Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Published Dec. 28, 2022
Updated Dec. 29, 2022, 12:04 a.m. ET
Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Representative-elect George Santos committed any crimes involving his finances and lies about his background on the campaign trail.

The federal investigation, which is being run by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, is focused at least in part on his financial dealings, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation was said to be in its early stages.

In a separate inquiry, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney’s office said it was looking into the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos” during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of Long Island and Queens.

It was unclear how far the Nassau County inquiry had progressed, but the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said in a statement that Mr. Santos’s fabrications “are nothing short of stunning.”

She added: “No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on Wednesday. The office’s interest in Mr. Santos was reported earlier by ABC News, and the Nassau County inquiry was first reported by Newsday.

Both investigations followed reporting in The New York Times that uncovered that Mr. Santos had made false claims about his educational and professional background, including whether he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. The Times also found that Mr. Santos had omitted key details about his business on required financial disclosures.

Questions remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.

The statement by Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January.

In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.

But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations.

Felestasia Mawere, who said she had voted for Mr. Santos and had given money to his campaign, insisted that he should not serve in Congress after admitting to having misled voters.

Felestasia Mawere, an accountant from Manhasset, N.Y., voted for Representative-elect George Santos. But now she said he should resign after lying to voters about his background

“He cheated,” Ms. Mawere, an accountant who lives in Manhasset, said. Of the falsehoods in his biography, she added, “He intentionally put that information knowing that it would persuade voters like me to vote for him.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Santos appeared to retain the support of many in his party, including those who are set to be his constituents.

Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican.

“When they don’t like someone, they really go after them,” Ms. Silver, a courier for Uber Eats and DoorDash, said, before echoing Mr. Santos’s primary defense: “Everyone fabricates their résumé. I’m not saying it’s correct.”

Others who made financial contributions to Mr. Santos’s campaign did not appear ready to cast him aside, although only a few of about three dozen donors contacted for comment responded.

Lee Mallett, a general contractor from Louisiana and the chairman of the state contractors’ board there, said Mr. Santos’s immediate task was straightforward.

“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.”

Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.

“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.

House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.

On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he “expected more than just a blanket apology” from Mr. Santos.

Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.

“Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,” Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should “cooperate fully” with any investigations.

The Nassau County district attorney, Anne Donnelly, wears a black suit jacket and mint green shirt while standing in the Republican headquarters in Long Island.
Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County district attorney, said the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with” Mr. Santos were “nothing short of stunning”

Mr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.

In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely “embellished” his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.

“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.

On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.

But a spokesman told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work with his company, the Devolder Organization, involved “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.

As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.

Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.

Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)

Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street. A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her “way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution” has also been expunged.

Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.

In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the “grunt work.” But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization.

The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.

Dana Rubinstein and Grace Ashford contributed reporting.

Michael Gold is a reporter covering transit and politics in New York. @migold

Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk. @edkshanahan

Rebecca Davis O’Brien covers law enforcement and courts in New York. She previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for stories about secret payoffs made on behalf of Donald Trump to two women.

What a shit stick!

It probably would have been a shorter story to say what was true on his resume and biography.
I hate that people aren’t even ashamed or embarrassed when caught lying.

The shortcoming of the system has always been that voters can be stupid. Unfortunately, being a liar is not a disqualification for office. The fact that he was elected legitimately by the people means he is a legitimate member of Congress. For some reason, there’s all kinds of evil shit a person can do, but documented lies or hypocrisy are like the only things people feel they can make stick. They mostly all lie, constantly, they just aren’t so dumb to run their lives like actual con artists (with at least one notable exception).

I think the legacy of this isn’t that he is going to ruin the house by being there, but that the Republican Party will continue to lose credibility, being full of suckers, and bereft of values. If this guy can go through their system, just wait till you see the next one.

@filmfann – and you aren’t kidding about oppo research lacking. A full 2 mil was spend on outside opposition to santos, plus the 3 mil Zimmerman raised, and they missed all this.

@chyna I agree, and how right away as he was being grilled about it he starts rattling off about Biden this and that. Trying to skirt the blame (somehow) of his lying onto Biden?! WTF?

I’m hoping they find he did something fraudulent and they prosecute him and he never sees a day in office. I’m glad his flippant attitude toward his blatant lies pissed off enough people who are looking into it.

Not to downplay this guy’s douchery, but at least he faces re-election a mere 19 months after swearing in. I expect that’s about as long as he can draw this thing out.

And to top it off, he claimed his mom died in the 9/11 bombings, but really died in 2015.
Here is article

Holy shit @chyna! The man’s unhinged!

I really think he is @Dutchess_III. He needs a mental health check up

George Santos apparently also lied about being the grandson of Ukrainian Holocaust survivors.

I don’t think his name is
.
.
.
George
.
.
’
.
.
or Santos !

^^^ @Tropical_Willie A couple of nights ago, I watched an MSNBC discussion of this onging, and evolving matter. One of the news analysts said what you posted—how do we know that this guy’s name really is George Santos?

I honestly don’t know what I think the right response here is. On one hand, Santos is a dick and should be in trouble. I’d like to see him impeached and removed from office and a special election held to replace him.

On the other hand, this looks an AWFUL LOT like a Pandora’s Box to me. Is it really a thing we want to encourage to have politicians remove other politicians for lies on the campaign trail? It’s easy to say yes when it’s someone of the OTHER party, but what if it was YOUR party’s representative that had lied? And who decides how big a lie is ‘big enough’? Partisan sentiment?

The real failure here is on the part of journalists. The Fourth Estate really is the institution that is supposed to uncover this stuff so that partisan politicians don’t have to. But modern journalists are bad at their jobs and getting worse every year. I feel like this guy’s resume would have been checked day 1 of the campaign 25 years ago. it would be the standard first move. But now? There’s no clickbait in ‘We confirmed his resume’, so it doesn’t get done.

@Entropy Plus, journalists aren’t paid well, I know I pay them, so they tend not to dig around. No excuse, I said the same as you way above, that it’s frustrating journalists didn’t uncover it all sooner. The people helping on the campaign for the Democrats certainly could have done some digging.

Maybe they sat on the info hoping he had no chance of winning.

A friend of mine says the only reason anyone said or did anything was because this will turn a blue seat red. I think she’s right.

The idea that Santos would take himself out now is ridiculous to me. I keep reading Democrats think he should bow out himself. Lol. Why would anyone who lies like that step down? That makes no sense to me.

@Entropy It will probably be his financial misdeeds, you can’t “cook the books” on your campaign finances !!

Where the money come from ?

Russian mafia, NRA, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers. . . . . $700,000 from his own accounts ! Ha-Ha-HA !

He also goes by the name Anthony Devolder when it suits his needs.

Did you see Brazil is now coming after him? I still say he’s probably a pathological liar. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/george-santos-fraud-brazil-charges-b2254899.html?amp&fbclid=IwAR2kgClmkPvKiCEmi0YbmWPFLvQj0026MEh12Y_O5utGukBuf19tU8f3HnE&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

And the hits against him just keep on coming.

I really doubt the Republicans will push him out. They won’t give up the seat. In the end it’s a nothing story unfortunately. I think it’s good he is exposed, and new revelations should be reported, but now I’m fine with the news and Democrats mostly ignoring him like he doesn’t matter. God forbid he becomes national news every time he moves like Marjorie Taylor Green or DeSantis. Let the locals worry about him.

@JLeslie In the grand scheme of things, it really is a nothing story. Just another lying politician. But I wish we could/would start standing up and making people accountable for their words, deeds and actions.

@chyna Agree, but timing matters. Did he have anyone running against him in the primary? That would have been the time. Although, if the other Republican was more reasonable and objectively qualified a lot of Democrats would have hoped for the crazier or less qualified candidate, hoping it helps Democrats in the end. I’ve always had a problem with that. A lot of people on both sides hope for a crappy candidate in the opposing party to be running.

Just as I suspected, he DID change his name. His real name is Anthony Devolder.
I can’t link from my phone, but will when I get home.

@chyna That’s fucking scary. This guy’s in office and he really wasn’t properly vetted, to where he has a criminal charge and now we really don’t know who he is/was.

Remember he is a member of GOP and may have attended Trump University !

^^ I think he got a PhD from there!

Santos other name

It is now reported that Santos told people he was a producer of the Broadway play Spiderman: Turn Off The Night.

@filmfann it just keeps getting better and better.

I did see a snippet of an interview with a news station One or something like that, and they asked him if he learned anything from this, and he said next time he’s going to check the accuracy of his answers before he answers. I was thinking what is there to check as far as knowing whether or not your mother died in 9/11? You should know without needing to check that information.