George Santos, the New York millionaire philanthropist and inventor whose rescue from Gilligan’s Island led to a successful run for Congress, was charged on 13 counts in federal court yesterday because he is the victim of the biggest witch hunt ever, like even worse than the one that falsely accused Donald Trump of all the crap he actually did. The indictments against him may really get in the way of his plans to fly his rocket car into the Eighth Dimension, because while he’s on bail, he’s been ordered to restrict his movements to New York City, Long Island, and Washington DC unless he gets specific permission from pretrial services or a written note from Jeff Goldblum. We really don’t understand the judicial system anymore.
Santos was charged by the Justice Department with seven counts of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering in a scheme where he told donors they were giving to his political campaign, but the money actually went straight to Santos, which is fraudy. He also caught two counts for making false statements to the House of Representatives, for lying on his financial disclosure statements. Finally, and hilariously, Santos was charged with “theft of public funds” for having collected unemployment payments during the pandemic, when he was also fully employed by one of the few real-life businesses he actually worked for.
At his arraignment in New York yesterday, Santos pleaded “not guilty” to everything and managed not to ask Judge Joanna Seybert if she’s interested in buying a time share vacation home which is surprisingly affordable. He was released on a half-million dollar bond that was put up partly by his father and partly by two other parties who want to remain anonymous, according to Santos’s lawyer, because they fear retaliation. Or perhaps embarrassment.
At a presser following the arraignment, Santos tried to shift to Trump Mode, claiming the indictment was a witch hunt and that it was simply unpossible that the DOJ could dredge up a bunch of criminal charges against him after just four months in office. As we’ll get to in a moment, most of the really fraudy stuff is amply documented in Santos’s own emails and financial records, so he really should take credit for helping the DOJ out — maybe he can claim to be a cooperating witness against himself.
Then Santos tried to whaddabout the Biden Crime Family, and everyone just booed and catcalled his piss-poor attempt to deflect.
NBC News translated the rightwing media arglebargle about the “nine [Biden] family members receiving money from foreign destinations into their bank accounts,” noting that it referred to Republicans’ very nonspecific claims this week, which Evan summarized yesterday as containing “Actual accusations against Bidens: Still jack-fucking-shit.”
In contrast, the federal criminal charges against Santos are very specific, complete with receipts. As a public service, the New York Times (gift link) walks us through the 20-page indictment so we can just read the parts highlighted in yellow and feel smart and well-informed. Let us summarize!
Wire Frauding and Monkey Laundering (Haven’t You Always Wanted A Clean Monkey?)
The liar’s share of the indictment involves an absolutely meatheaded scheme to defraud political donors by telling them they were giving money to a legitimate campaign account, when in fact the money went to “RedStone Strategies,” an LLC set up by Santos and an as-yet unidentified political consultant. The money that went to RedStone never went anywhere near the campaign; instead, the indictment says, Santos “converted most of those funds to his own personal benefit” and used them for nice (or at least expensive) designer clothes and to pay off credit card debts, and for the occasional cash withdrawal.
And yeah, there are receipts. The indictment accuses Santos of directing the consultant to tell Santos supporters that their money would go to a 501 (c)(4) “social welfare organization” that would supposedly buy TV ads and do campaign stuff. But Santos never actually went to the bother of even setting up one of those entities, even though they’re commonly used to funnel dark money into political operations.
Santos obligingly left quite a trail for prosecutors to follow, because he’s just a two-bit grifter; that’s all he’ll ever be. In addition to the bank records, the indictment details emails to specific donors, including one that said the campaign needed to “raise another $700,000 dollars to reach our goal of $1.5 million to invest in [Santos’] race.” Other emails to the same mark contributor claimed, falsely, that the contributions would go to “get our advertising up on TV” and “to purchase ads supporting George Santos.” That contributor soon wired $25,000 to RedStone.
Another contributor was wooed with the false claim that there were no federal campaign limits on contributions to RedStone, because “we are a 501c4 Independent Expenditure committee under federal campaign finance law and do not coordinate directly with the Santos campaign,” which 1) it wasn’t; it was an LLC directly controlled by Santos, and 2) even if it were, the funds couldn’t legally go to directly support the campaign. The second contributor also wired $25,000 to RedStone, and the indictment notes that the contributions were then transferred straight to accounts belonging to Santos, and thence were used for the nice things he wanted to get. And that’s about as literal as wire fraud gets.
In investigations like this, which arise from reports of financial misconduct and campaign finance shenanigans, bank records are often among the first places prosecutors and F.B.I. agents look to provide a roadmap for potential charges.
In a separate Times column on the indictment, David Firestone writes that Santos is simply really, really bad at all of this, and pretty much an embarrassment to those who really know how to benefit from our terribly weak campaign finance laws:
The scheme Mr. Santos is charged with is so flagrant, so spectacularly dumb in both conception and execution, that Justice clearly decided it had a no-brainer of a case. If Mr. Santos had structured an improper political money stream the way the grown-ups do every day, he might have gotten away with it.
Damn These Lazy Takers On Unemployment! (Your Check, Sir)
The other crazy scheme, even if it only garners one of the 13 charges, is that nutty unemployment scheme, in which Santos applied for and received a year’s worth of pandemic unemployment benefits from the state of New York while he was actually working — or at least employed — at Harbor City Capital in Florida, the firm that was shut down by the SEC as a Ponzi scheme, although Santos escaped charges in that debacle. Because he was innocent, surely! Santos is accused of lying in his weekly paperwork that said he was definitely jobless, every damn week between March 2020 through April 2021. We’ll just go with the Daily Beast’s summary of his chootzpah here:
He allegedly ended up earning a double salary, with an extra $24,744 in federal taxpayer funds and another $20,304 from New York.
Ironically, Santos has recently supported congressional bills that would make it easier for the feds to clamp down on these alleged crimes. In March, he co-sponsored a Republican bill that would incentivize states to more aggressively investigate COVID unemployment insurance fraud and double the statute of limitations for that crime, essentially doubling the time federal prosecutors have to charge people with the very thing for which Santos is accused.
And on top of all that, the indictment accuses Santos of covering up his actual income and assets in his required financial disclosure forms to Congress. In some cases, he under-reported what he was making, but on other forms, he appears to have just made up income and bank assets he never actually had, to the tune of millions of entirely imaginary dollars.
In conclusion, suck it George. You’re not even a competent fraudster, the end.
[NYT (gift link) / Daily Beast / Roll Call / NYT]
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