George Santos Goin’ Down To Prison, Lawd, Lawd

What a long and terrible fall from grace it has been for famed inventor and three-time Wimbledon champion George Santos.

The not-even-one-full-term former New York congressman was sentenced on Friday to serve 87 months, or seven years and three months for the math-challenged, in federal prison. As a prisoner, not the warden, despite qualifications for that job that include being the former Attorney General in nine different states. Santos also was fined more than $373,000, which he was ordered to pay immediately, but we assume that will be no problem for one of the more prominent members of the Rothschild family.

Santos, a Republican obviously, was originally charged with 13 counts of money laundering, stealing public funds, and a whole bunch more stuff. Then the government found another 10 counts to throw at him after his campaign treasurer flipped on him. In the end, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of wire fraud and criminal dumbassery aggravated identity theft.

Santos reportedly wept as the judge pronounced sentence, presumably because he will spend the next few years wearing a jumpsuit instead of the designer clothing he bought with misappropriated campaign funds. But right up to the end, the beloved director of the last Star Wars trilogy had been behaving in a way that almost guaranteed the courts were going to throw the book at him instead of giving him the two years in the pokey that his own lawyers had asked for:

They had recommended he receive an 87-month sentence, in large part because, they argued, he wasn’t remorseful. In fact, after prosecutors submitted their sentencing memo, they provided an additional filing to the court highlighting Santos’ social media posts to demonstrate that he remains “unrepentant.”

In one post, he referred to himself as a “scapegoat,” and in another, he denied having used campaign contributions to shop at Hermès. “No matter how hard the DOJ comes for me,” he wrote in another post, “they are mad because they will NEVER break my spirit.”

Okay, Icarus. Watch out for that sun, it can get melty.

Santos had tried to explain himself in a letter to the court a few days before his sentencing. But even there he managed to sound ridiculously defiant. He blamed his treasurer, Nancy Marks, claiming she was just as culpable for his behavior as he was. He complained that other political figures sentenced for campaign finance crimes in federal courts had gotten much lighter sentences. (They also were not necessarily accused of as much malfeasance as Santos, but never mind.)

He also wallowed in self-pity:

The likelihood of returning to public service—or even securing ordinary employment—has dwindled to near zero. Legal fees have consumed the resources I managed to earn these past two years, and friendships that anchored my life have disappeared under the glare of national attention. I do not list these outcomes for sympathy—they are the predictable fallout of my own wrongdoing—but to give the Court an accurate picture of the penalties already in place before a single day of incarceration is added.

I’m not asking for sympathy, just saying that I’ve been punished enough. Yes, clearly that is the case.

We had honestly forgotten just how much insane stuff Santos did long before he was even indicted. But he really Walter Mitty-d himself into one hell of a comedic mess.

It started in December of 2022, when reporters looked deeply into his background, which is ideally something they should do before the election, but whatever, we probably needed 197 more New York Times stories questioning whether transgender people are real and if the Black woman who ran Harvard forgot a doctoral dissertation citation.

What reporters found was that Santos had lied about pretty much every qualification he had offered voters during the campaign. It turned out he had not been a high-level financial genius employee of either Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He had not been a volleyball star at Baruch College, and in fact does not seem to have even attended Baruch College.

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He also did not run a family financial services firm or own a real estate empire or lose four employees to the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and he was wanted for stealing the checkbook of an elderly man his mother cared for in Brazil.

And that all came out before he was even sworn in. From then on, the revelations came fast and furious. Yes, he had a fake charity called Friends of Pets United, which he claimed raised money to help people whose furry companions needed surgery. In reality, he took all the donations and spent them on clothes and restaurant meals and vacations for himself, leaving behind at least one heartbroken veteran who thought Santos was going to pay for lifesaving surgery for his dog. There was a weird thing with a man caught installing skimmers on ATMs that to this day nobody is sure where or how Santos was involved.

It was all so bad that Mitt Romney admonished him at the State of the Union address that he should quit the TV-camera-facing seat he had staked out, and also he should quit Congress altogether because he was such a huge embarrassment to the institution and especially the Republican Party. Mitt Romney! That dude is so non-confrontational, his fellow senators could have dumped a salad on his head in the Senate cafeteria, and he would have sat there smiling awkwardly before blurting out something weird like, “Well played, gentle fellows! I appreciate your lighthearted ribbing!”

Imagine that. The GOP’s House caucus at the time included the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar and Elise Stefanik and probably a couple of dozen other dumb-as-rocks lunatics whose names we can’t think of off the top of our head. And none of them was apparently as embarrassing to Mitt Romney as George Santos.

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Santos was also forced off whatever House committees he had joined a month into his term, which meant he was collecting a congressional paycheck to mostly wander onto the floor and try to get someone, anyone to talk to him. Eventually, after a couple of efforts, the House managed to vote to expel him, making him the third representative expelled from the house since the Civil War. Ironic, since Santos had led the Union to victory over the Confederacy in that conflict.

Santos’s expulsion came after the federal indictment on the charges that have now landed him in a federal prison for the next seven years and three months, when the scandal finally became too much for even the Republicans to ignore.

Most importantly, we cannot forget that Santos was a comedy gold mine during what has been a very dark decade for America. For that, and also for his bravery in making the first solo manned spaceflight to Mars, we will eternally remember him.

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[POLITICO]

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