Less than 2½ years after George Santos rocketed from obscurity to being presented as the face of a young new GOP, the now-former Long Island con(gress)man has been sentenced to 87 months in federal prison for wide fraud and aggravated identity theft. It’s a pitiful end to a bizarre situation.
Everyone would’ve been better off if the Democrats and the press had exposed his total lies and had he lost that 2022 election. He never would’ve disgraced the Congress. He never would’ve been expelled, which violated all precedent and due process in the House, and he never would’ve been prosecuted and imprisoned.
The con man’s journey to convict began barely a month after his 2022 election, when the press belatedly revealed that he had lied about huge portions of his own biography, from his schooling, his employment and even his religion (his excuse on that one was that he claimed he was “Jew-ish”), which led to a cascade of questions around his identity and financial dealings.
For a period of months, it seemed like every week brought new revelations, that Santos had lied about his mom being at the World Trade Center during 9/11, that he’d been a volleyball star, and so on.
This pathetic saga exposed a couple of things about today’s press and politics; it showed that a person with no qualms about outright lying and fabrication could simply bluster his way to the United States Congress, and perhaps neither the political opposition nor a reduced local media apparatus would notice until it was too late.
The Nassau County GOP machine failed to screen Santos. The Democrats failed to check on Santos. And the press, the Daily News included, failed to expose Santos in time. We all missed it and we all paid the price of having this schnook in Congress.
Santos was expelled from Congress in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion and cast off to find for himself as prosecutors closed in. Santos made the grave error of not just lying about his background to voters — which while unethical and unsavory is not a crime — but embezzling donor funds for personal expenses and lying to Congress, among other things, which are chargeable offenses that have now resulted in his conviction.
Having pled guilty, Santos has no ability to appeal. He’d apparently been banking on some leniency from his tearful remorse act before the judge, but this strategy unsurprisingly did not pan out for the avowed liar who outside the courtroom kept up his boisterous public persona. It seems likely now that Santos may go the Bob Menendez route, publicly auditioning for a pardon from a president that has shown himself very willing to dole them out to political supporters who campaign ardently enough for his favor.
Needless to say, there should be no pardon. Santos is not just a con artist, but a con artist who betrayed the trust of his constituents and left them without effective representation for his entire time in office, and then the months after his expulsion. Everyone would have been better off had Santos never wormed his way into Congress, and letting him get off without consequences would just encourage more such brazen abuses of public trust.
