133. The Fabulist (George Santos)

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Speaker 5 And so in 1996, Tony and I started all over again and we started that magazine in the front room and we started over our next business, which became options at 50 Plus.

Speaker 5 And in six weeks, we put that magazine in the black. And anyone that's ever done magazine publishing will understand that most magazines, most publications lose money for many years or many months.

Speaker 2 Jonathan Paul Moroney had seen it all in his three decades as an entrepreneur. The triumphs, the failures, and everything in between.

Speaker 2 From selling his first business, a t-shirt company, to losing everything and filing for bankruptcy, to rebounding by launching his own magazine.

Speaker 2 Success, he would later say, was never guaranteed, but always within reach, if you kept striving. That became one of J.P.
Moroney's favorite lessons to teach his students. That's right.

Speaker 2 After acquiring all of that experience, there was only one thing left to do: share it.

Speaker 2 He evolved into one of the world's most insufferable archetypes, the self-anointed success guru, a man who claims to have unlocked the secret to wealth and wants nothing more than to sell it to you.

Speaker 2 The difference, at least according to JP, was that he had the resume to back it up. In 2000, J.P.

Speaker 2 Moroney took what he had learned in the advertising and marketing space and launched his own publishing and media consulting firm. And for the next decade, he made himself the product.

Speaker 2 Maroney toured the world as a keynote speaker, preaching the gospel of entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and strategy. At his peak, he was booking 150 seminars a year.

Speaker 2 When JP wasn't on stage, he kept the grind alive at home, hosting virtual webinars on topics like how to make money with webinars.

Speaker 5 So we're going to officially get started here with the webinar on how to make money with webinars. Isn't that kind of funny?

Speaker 2 By 2010, JP Moroney had authored more than 30 books, bought and sold dozens of companies across various industries, and served as a board member to corporate heavyweights such as Wells Fargo, Century 21, and Metric Property Management, a subsidiary of BlackRock.

Speaker 2 On paper, he had made it. But JP wanted something more.
He wanted to leverage his success for something meaningful, to inspire others to give back, to make a difference, to change the world.

Speaker 5 Hey, brothers and sisters, JP Moroney here, and I want to invite you to an opportunity to help me change the world. You go, oh, that sounds like a big idea, JP Moroney.

Speaker 2 It sure does, JP Moroney. The idea was Givertree, a crowdsourced fundraising non-profit designed to harness generosity at scale.
Actually, never mind.

Speaker 2 JP quickly lost interest in good deeds and abandoned the company. Because around that same time, he came up with an even better idea, one that he promised would make everyone rich.

Speaker 2 Maroney claims that in 2011, he saw a TV interview with a hedge fund manager who said something he just couldn't shake.

Speaker 2 To paraphrase, our fund considers an asset to be anything we can put a dollar into and get more than a dollar out. Later that evening, while walking his dog, JP says he had an epiphany.

Speaker 2 What if, like a hedge fund, he were to pull outside investor money, but instead of, you know, investing it, he would use it to create massive digital marketing campaigns to generate leads that he would sell to interested parties at a profit, which would then be returned to the original investors.

Speaker 2 JP Maroney bounced this idea off a friend. Let's say a group of investors gives me, JP Moroney, $10.

Speaker 2 I use that $10 to buy Facebook ads targeting people shopping for, I don't know, auto insurance. Those people click on the ads and fill out a form with all their contact information and voila.

Speaker 2 Now I have leads. I, JP Moroney, then sell those leads to insurance companies with whom I've already contracted with in advance on a cost per lead basis.

Speaker 2 The difference between between the campaign cost and the leads sold is pure profit. It's genius.

Speaker 2 So you just reinvented the lead generation industry? Yeah, no, you're not listening to me, JP Moroney. I will be using other people's money.

Speaker 2 And like any other financial instrument, those people will receive a return on their investment. You mean like a stockholder? Correct.
And everybody wins.

Speaker 2 Investors receive a completely passive income generating opportunity, and the companies purchasing the leads save money by securing a guaranteed return on their marketing investment rather than relying on uncertain outcomes.

Speaker 2 JP Maroney even had a name for this new strategy.

Speaker 9 So I coined the phrase digital marketing arbitrage.

Speaker 10 Sounds super sexy.

Speaker 2 Digital marketing arbitrage was the super sexy alternative investment and flagship product of JP's new company.

Speaker 2 Harbor City Capital, a nod to the nickname of Melbourne, Florida, where the native Texan had resettled. JP said Harbor City was the sum total of everything he had learned in business.

Speaker 2 Its leads, its client acquisition, its media, its marketing, its content. It was bullproof.
In times that are good, when money's running in the streets, lots of people are out there buying leads.

Speaker 2 When times get tough and people pull back, they're going to cut back on company vacations and retreats and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 12 But the one thing that they continue to invest in is customer acquisition.

Speaker 2 Harbor City proved its concept within weeks. Maroney claimed that early investors saw returns of more than 60% using his digital marketing arbitrage strategy.
This wasn't a fluke, he insisted.

Speaker 2 As long as companies needed customers, the profits would flow indefinitely. In fact, Maroney said, Harbor City didn't have enough capital to meet demand.
There was a backlog of orders for leads.

Speaker 2 Too much business, not enough money. That age-old predicament.
Eventually, the company expanded its team and evolved its pitch to make DMA even more appealing.

Speaker 2 Instead of tying returns to market performance like a volatile stock, Harbor City began offering bond-style fixed returns, promising investors 1% to 1.5%

Speaker 2 per month or up to 18% annually, with the return of their principal guaranteed at maturity.

Speaker 7 We are now coming up on the end of our third year of generating double-digit returns for investors. And I don't know anybody else that's been doing that.

Speaker 7 It's truly extraordinary.

Speaker 2 It was truly extraordinary and even more impressive. Completely risk-free.

Speaker 2 Thanks to what Harbor City described as a standby letter of credit from Deutsche Bank, supposedly large enough to repay every investor in the event that anything unforeseen might occur.

Speaker 5 So that if anything goes wrong, that money will get sucked up into a trust and paid out to the investors dollar for dollar, the principal that they invest in.

Speaker 5 And therefore, we've taken away that risk of losing your principal.

Speaker 2 Sounds good? I know it does. But if you have any further questions, please contact Betsy, Harbor City's VP of Client Relations.
Oh, actually, here she is now.

Speaker 14 I had somebody ask me the other day, is this fake? The other thing is, how do I know this is not a Ponzi scheme? How do I know you're not the next Bernie Mayo?

Speaker 2 All right, Betsy. Thank you.
Thank you. Appreciate that.

Speaker 2 She's a real character, that one.

Speaker 2 Anyway, one of the ways J.P.

Speaker 2 Moroney attracted new clients to Harbor City Capital was through his acquisition and utilization of top-tier talent, obviously, but also his supposed mastery of digital marketing.

Speaker 2 A devoted follower of Gary Boehnerchuck's post-100 Times a Day gospel, Maroney flooded the internet with a relentless stream of low-quality blogs, vlogs, newsletters, pop-up ads, podcasts, and short-form videos.

Speaker 2 Content that appears to be consumed almost exclusively by bots and sock accounts whose profile photos feature those familiar dead-eyed stares of stock image models. Yet Mr.
Monetizer persisted.

Speaker 2 That's what JP had started calling himself. He shared countless public appearances, interviews, and motivational clips of himself that he probably re-watched on a loop, alone in the dark.

Speaker 2 Sometimes Sometimes he dealt in clichés.

Speaker 5 You know, I often tell people it took me 20-something years to become an overnight success.

Speaker 2 Sometimes he was philosophical.

Speaker 5 I want to be the dumbest guy in the room, not the smartest guy.

Speaker 2 Sometimes he was downright prophetic.

Speaker 5 Your mind cannot tell the difference between a fantasy and reality.

Speaker 2 And other times, JP was even poetic.

Speaker 5 It's time to dream again.

Speaker 5 and pursue a worthwhile prize. It's time to dream again.

Speaker 5 Let the vision fill your eyes. It's time to dream again,

Speaker 5 to hope beyond today. It's time to dream again, for your dreams will find the way.
I want you to rediscover your dreams. Start dreaming again.

Speaker 7 I believe the most successful people in our world, the most successful business owners, are little children in older bodies.

Speaker 5 It's time to dream again. This is J.P.
Moroney, aka Mr. Monetizer, and I hope you enjoyed this.

Speaker 2 No, I don't think I did. And I'm not the only one who'd grown tired of J.P.
Maroney's shtick. On April 20th, 2021, the U.S.

Speaker 2 Securities and Exchange Commission filed an emergency civil enforcement action against Harbor City Capital and Mr. Monetizer to halt, as it alleged, a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 2 According to the SEC, Harbor City had been selling unregistered securities, and its glowing claims of success and guaranteed returns were entirely fabricated.

Speaker 2 From January 2017 to February 2021, the new company raised over $17 million for more than 100 investors across the nation.

Speaker 2 Of that, only about 449,000 went toward legitimate business expenses, like the digital advertisements that supposedly justified the company's existence. The rest was siphoned off.

Speaker 2 More than $6 million was misappropriated or misused, the SEC said, including nearly $4.5 million for Maroney's personal spending.

Speaker 2 He paid off more than $1.3 million in credit card bills, bought a $90,000 Mercedes-Benz, and purchased a 13,000-square-foot waterfront mansion in Cape Canaveral for $827,000, where he hosted a 2020 fundraiser for Donald Trump's re-election campaign, reportedly attended by Don Jr.

Speaker 2 and his fiancée, Kimberly the Face Guilfoyle. Another $6.5 million was paid out to investors as returns, but it wasn't profit at all.

Speaker 2 It was simply new money from new investors, recycled to maintain the illusion of success.

Speaker 2 Worst of all, the standby letter of credit and other so-called investor protections Harbor City had bragged about never existed. Their money was gone.
The SEC ordered an immediate freeze of J.P.

Speaker 2 Moroney's assets in a last-ditch effort to salvage whatever was left. Victims like 58-year-old Gregory Vincent, who had invested $400,000 with J.P.

Speaker 2 Moroney after seeing a Facebook ad promising 18% returns, was shocked to learn that that Harbor City Capital was too good to be true. He sounded like a wonderful guy, Vincent told the Washington Post.

Speaker 2 He was an excellent speaker. Al Kennard couldn't believe it either.

Speaker 2 He told the newspaper that after learning that he lost his entire $50,000 investment, he contacted JP Moroney via LinkedIn, seeking an explanation.

Speaker 2 JP wrote back, We had good intentions from the beginning, and were never out to scam anyone. I wish you the very best and, as I said, I remain committed to making you and others whole.

Speaker 2 Please accept my sincere apologies for the impact this has had on your life. JP Moroney was still waiting to learn how much his fraudulent scheme would ultimately impact his own life.

Speaker 2 In October 2022, JP, representing himself, was granted a stay in federal court in the SEC's lawsuit because he had been informed that he was currently the target in a related criminal investigation.

Speaker 2 That investigation dragged on. In the meantime, a court-appointed receiver was tasked with recovering Maroney's remaining assets on behalf of his creditors, including the investors he had defrauded.

Speaker 2 Then finally, nearly three years later, on May 1st, 2025, J.P. Moroney was indicted in the U.S.
District Court for the Middle District of Florida on five counts of wire fraud.

Speaker 2 He is currently awaiting trial. Nobody else on the Harbor City Capital team was ever charged.
They were free to move on, free to explore bigger and brighter opportunities, And one of them already had.

Speaker 16 Is this real?

Speaker 12 Can this really be true?

Speaker 2 No, Betsy, get out of here. I'm not talking about you.
I'm talking about this guy.

Speaker 9 Currently at Harbor City Capital, I manage a $1.5 billion fund, right? And I know how to manage it well.

Speaker 17 I give record returns. To anybody who watches this, they'll understand I'm giving, you know, a 12% fixed yield income return a year, which nobody in the market's giving for.

Speaker 9 And we're giving 12.

Speaker 2 That's the former regional regional director of Harbor City Capital's New York operations, Anthony DeVolder, sometimes known as George Anthony DeVolder, other times George Anthony DeVolder-Santos, but you might know him as Congressman George Santos.

Speaker 2 In 2020, he was working for the Ponzi scheme. At the same time, he was campaigning for a seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives, though Santos later insisted he had no idea Harbor City was a scam.

Speaker 2 And yet, in the years to come, George Santos would become the most infamous Harbor City employee of them all, but for reasons even J.P. Moroney couldn't have dreamed of.

Speaker 2 After its collapse, the former investment salesman did what he did best. He reinvented himself.

Speaker 2 At different times in his life, George had been a Wall Street financier, a philanthropist, an entrepreneur, a volleyball player, an actor, a patriot, and ultimately, a prisoner.

Speaker 2 But no matter how many roles he played, George could never truly escape from who he was at heart. An unabashed liar.

Speaker 2 From phony investments and fake resumes to dog charities and drag queens, this is the mostly true story of George Santos on this episode of Swindled.

Speaker 20 They bribed government officials to find accounting clear violations of the state law earlier in the unethical pay to billions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted.

Speaker 20 Dummied up

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Speaker 21 Shiraza that a thousand tales.

Speaker 13 But master, you and luck, cause up your sleeves. You got a brand of magic, never fails.

Speaker 21 You got some power in your corner now. You have some ammunition in your camp.

Speaker 13 You got some punch, pizza, Yahoo and how. All you gotta do is rub that lamp.

Speaker 21 And I'll say, Mr.

Speaker 13 Aladdin, sir, what will your pleasure be?

Speaker 21 Let me take your order, jolt it down. You ain't never had a friend like me.

Speaker 2 You ain't never had a friend like George Anthony de Volder-Santos. Or maybe you have.

Speaker 2 Back in 2015, the karaoke-loving, self-proclaimed Mama's Boy was just another garden variety Disney adult with a pop culture-obsessed personality. But by 2019, something changed.

Speaker 2 George's timeline shifted from discussions of pop divas and trashy reality TV to furious tirades about homegrown New York politicians such as Governor Andrew Cuomo and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Speaker 2 Nobody cared. He was just another angry voice shouting into the social media void, indistinguishable from the millions of others doing the exact same thing.

Speaker 2 Except George Santos had one characteristic that made him stand out, at least statistically. He was an openly gay Republican in a blue state.
The times, as they say, were changing.

Speaker 22 Not every gay person needs to be a Democrat. You can also be a conservative, because I'll tell you, it was a lot easier coming out gay than a Republican in this state.

Speaker 2 In March 2019, George Santos decided it was time to take action beyond just commenting from the sidelines. He attended his first pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Speaker 2 Photographs from the event show Santos proudly holding a rainbow-colored Gays for Trump sign. Video footage captures him genuinely surprised to find another attendee waving a Confederate flag.

Speaker 2 This isn't about you! Go home! Go home! Go home! This isn't about you!

Speaker 2 But that encounter didn't stop George from cozying up to the people Hillary Clinton had famously labeled a basket of deplorables during that election cycle. If anything, it only encouraged him.

Speaker 2 Santos started showing up to every Republican gathering he could find in Queens, shaking hands, collecting selfies, chasing clout.

Speaker 2 He documented all of it online, positioning himself as proof that minorities could and should see the light and join the MAGA movement.

Speaker 25 Donald Trump has awakened the populace and the common people to realize that their country was taken away from them many, many years ago, and he's giving it back to them.

Speaker 2 George Santos was truly inspired. He had already tried to get on the ballot for a minor party position in Queens, but failed after coming up short on signatures.
So he decided to skip the baby steps.

Speaker 2 In September 2019, Santos announced to friends and family that he was running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives.

Speaker 2 He declared his candidacy for New York's third congressional district, an affluent, largely suburban stretch covering northeastern Queens and the north shore of Long Island and Nassau County.

Speaker 2 No other Republican bothered to try. That district was safely Democratic territory held by well-liked incumbent Tom Swazi, and 2020 was a presidential election year, so yeah, good luck.

Speaker 15 Job-killing regulations, skyrocketing taxes, and a nationalized health care system where you have no say. All pipe dreams of the squad.
And Tom Swazi, he wants to be their next member.

Speaker 15 Listen for yourself.

Speaker 27 Today, I want to be an honorary member of the squad.

Speaker 15 Liberal pipe dreams will decimate our economy. That's what Tom Swazi supports.
We can't afford wannabe squad member Tom Swazi.

Speaker 2 George Santos' political platform was, if nothing else, predictable.

Speaker 2 As a self-branded outsider, he railed against what he called the Democrats' radical socialist agenda, accusing them of punishing Americans with higher taxes and soaring inflation instead of rewarding hard work and entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2 He championed Blue Lives Matter, blamed undocumented immigrants for New York City's out-of-control crime rate, and pointed fingers at career politicians like Tom Swazzi for enabling it through weak policies.

Speaker 25 Let's remember, we need to waken the beast in the country and bring out people to realization that the Democrats are out

Speaker 22 for us and they want to take all of our liberties away.

Speaker 2 Outside money wasn't exactly pouring into his unwinnable race. So in the lead up to the 2020 election, George Santos created his own spotlight.

Speaker 2 He launched a low-budget public access show in Queens called Talking GOP.

Speaker 2 Not what you would call must-see TV, but it did provide a platform for the district to learn more about their unknown candidate. And George was eager to share the story of his American dream.

Speaker 22 Little quick snippet here, not trying to claim Jewish heritage or anything, but my family is actually,

Speaker 22 my mother's father was Ukrainian. And

Speaker 22 I'm sorry, my mother's father's grand, my mother's grandfather was Ukrainian, had his kids in Ukraine. My grandfather grew up Jewish.

Speaker 22 My grandfather during the Soviet issues escaped to Belgium and that was a good move.

Speaker 28 It was a great move.

Speaker 2 According to George Santos, it all started in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 His Jewish maternal grandfather, last name Zabrovsky, grew up there before escaping Soviet persecution and resettling in Belgium, where he married George's grandmother. Then along came Hitler.

Speaker 2 The couple fled again, this time to Brazil, where they changed their names, converted to Catholicism, and started over. That's where George's mother, Fatima, was born.

Speaker 22 For a lot of people who are descendants of World War II refugees or survivors of the Holocaust, a lot of names and paperwork were changed in name of survival.

Speaker 22 So I don't carry the family last name that would have been Zabrovski.

Speaker 22 I carry my mother's maiden name was De Volder, which is the Dutch side of the family.

Speaker 2 Fatima De Volder, he claimed, fled socialist Brazil for the United States sometime in the 1980s.

Speaker 2 There she met George's father, Jercino Santos, another Brazilian immigrant with his own tale of escaping hardship in search of freedom. Their son, George Anthony De Volder-Santos, was born in 1988.

Speaker 2 He says his parents couldn't even agree on what to name him. That was only the beginning of his tumultuous early days.

Speaker 26 You know, here's the deal.

Speaker 9 I come from nothing, as I tell everybody, right?

Speaker 22 Like I said, I grew up in Jackson Heights.

Speaker 25 I was born in Elmhurst Hospital. From the hospital, my parents were really struggling.

Speaker 18 They lived in a basement.

Speaker 19 I lived in a basement until the age of six.

Speaker 2 But with a little hard work, the DeVolder-Santos family climbed out of that basement and into prosperity. George claimed his mother became the first female executive at a major financial institution.

Speaker 2 And that success supposedly lifted the family from food stamps to owning more than a dozen properties across New York.

Speaker 2 George and his younger sister, Tiffany, were enrolled in private schools, but the fairy tale was only temporary.

Speaker 2 On my senior year of prep school, unfortunately, my parents fell on hard times, which was creeping up something that would later become known as the Depression of 2008.

Speaker 22 But we were hit a little earlier on with the over-leveraging of real estate and the market started to implode.

Speaker 2 George says he tried to transition back into public school, but it just wasn't his scene. So he settled for a GED.
Not that it slowed him down, of course.

Speaker 2 By then, George claims, university scouts were already dazzled by his athletic prowess. He says he earned a full-ride volleyball scholarship to Baruch College in New York City.

Speaker 2 According to Santos, their team was number one in the country. But then, fate again forced a change in his trajectory by blowing out both of his knees.

Speaker 23 Look, I sacrificed both my knees and got very nice

Speaker 10 knee replacements from HSS playing volleyball.

Speaker 23 That's how serious I took the game.

Speaker 6 Well, that's how serious you're taking politics as well. Remember this name, folks.
George Santos.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, George Santos wasn't just a once-in-a-generation athlete. He was also an academic prodigy.

Speaker 2 He claimed to have graduated in 2010 from Baruch with a bachelor's in economics and finance, Summa Cum Laude, sporting a 3.89 GPA.

Speaker 2 That Sterling resume, he said, catapulted him to Wall Street, where he allegedly worked on high-profile deals at Citibank and Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 2 By his early 30s, he claimed to be one of the youngest vice presidents in the industry, thanks to a position at Link Bridge Investors, where he reportedly generated $1 million in revenue in his first six months, all while recovering from a brain tumor.

Speaker 2 And what did you do today?

Speaker 2 Exactly. That old-fashioned work ethic was something that was severely missing from today's youth.
32-year-old George Santos complained.

Speaker 2 By the time of his 2020 congressional campaign, Santos said he had leveled up even further. He now managed a one and a half billion dollar fund at Harbor City Capital.

Speaker 2 His career in finance plus his family's extensive real estate holdings were proof, he said, that George Santos was the right choice to help guide the American economy.

Speaker 22 I'm the regional director for Harbor City Capital. We're a

Speaker 22 fixed income shop.

Speaker 22 top we're within the Fortune 500 private equity firms globally. I manage all of our fixed income assets with arbitrage here in New York.

Speaker 2 But don't worry, it wasn't all cufflinks and balance sheets. George was also a devoted family man.

Speaker 2 He lived on Long Island with his husband, Matt, and their four dogs, several of which were named after Disney princesses, as one would expect. Animals, George said, were his true passion.

Speaker 2 He claimed to have spent years working with rescue groups before founding his own non-profit, Friends of Pets United.

Speaker 2 According to him, the organization saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats during its short history.

Speaker 17 I mean, we had a great organization. We were able to save animals, dogs, cats, horses.
I mean, at one point, I sucked in eight baby jumping goats in my car.

Speaker 2 So what would compel someone so young, successful, and seemingly well-rounded to dive into the political mud pit? According to George, the answer was simple.

Speaker 2 The American dream he and his family had achieved was a fleeting memory. America had lost its mind, he said, consumed by wokeness, Black Lives Matter riots, and general chaos.

Speaker 2 And so, George decided it was his duty to restore sanity.

Speaker 33 And when I see that in Congress we have this socialist takeover attempt, and that's going to kill the American dream, that really makes it hard for me to sit by idly and not do anything.

Speaker 2 As expected, George Santos's 2020 campaign failed to generate much enthusiasm.

Speaker 2 The most exposure he received came in February of that year, when he became one of the first people in New York City to contract COVID-19.

Speaker 2 In interviews, George described his harrowing two weeks of fever and delirium. One night, he said, he woke up screaming for his mother, who had died four years earlier.

Speaker 2 Unlike many of his political counterparts, Santos took the virus seriously, which limited his ability to campaign in person. But George did what he could.

Speaker 2 He moved his campaign online, giving virtual interviews to small-time podcasters and YouTube personalities, including one hosted by a retired NYPD detective.

Speaker 2 This seems a bit discomforting in retrospect.

Speaker 35 I'm impressed, man.

Speaker 6 I'm impressed.

Speaker 27 My art, and not only am I from here, but I was also a detective for 13 years.

Speaker 27 My art is sniffing through bullshit. And, you know, I could smell a bullshit artist a mile away.

Speaker 6 You're legit. You know you're stuck.

Speaker 2 As impressive as he might have been, funding for the Santos campaign had all but completely dried up. And even the conservative-leaning North Shore Leader newspaper endorsed his Democratic opponent.

Speaker 2 Nobody expected the race to be close. But on election night, November 3rd, 2020, when the polls closed, George Santos was surprisingly in the lead by a slim margin.

Speaker 2 However, mail-in and absentee ballots still needed to be be counted, and everyone assumed those would heavily favor Democrat Tom Swazi. Everyone, except George.

Speaker 2 In the days that followed, his Twitter feed radiated optimism. Team Santos is confident that we will maintain our margin of victory, he wrote.
A few days later, the tone shifted.

Speaker 2 Without offering any evidence whatsoever, George claimed his campaign was receiving reports of voter fraud, irregularities, and even dead people voting. Ballots just keep pouring in.

Speaker 2 The smell's smell's rotten. Democracy is dead, he tweeted.

Speaker 26 Two weeks after election day, Democrat Tom Swazi has won re-election representing New York's third congressional district. Swazi had 53%, Republican challenger George Santos 47%.

Speaker 26 Libertarian candidate Howard Rabbit took 1%. The third district represents parts of Queens and the North Shore of Long Island.

Speaker 2 By November 18th, the results were official. Incumbent Tom Swazi defeated George Santos by more than 40,000 votes.
Or did he?

Speaker 2 Hey, Washington.

Speaker 2 My name's George Santos.

Speaker 11 I'm from New York City.

Speaker 11 Who here's from New York?

Speaker 11 It's a lot of you.

Speaker 27 If you're from New York, you know what they did to me.

Speaker 11 They did to me what they did to Donald J.

Speaker 10 Trump.

Speaker 11 They stole my election.

Speaker 2 On January 5th, 2021, At a Stop the Steel rally in Washington, D.C., standing before a crowd of soon-to-be Capitol stormers, George Santos declared that his election had been stolen too.

Speaker 2 Once again, he offered no proof. Behind the scenes, he launched the DeVoter Santos for Congress Recount Committee, raising over $250,000 from donors nationwide to challenge the results.

Speaker 2 But there was no recount because no recount was needed. Santos had suffered a landslide defeat and eventually conceded.

Speaker 2 Still, he showed up the orientation for newly elected House members as though willing himself into office by sheer force of delusion or destiny.

Speaker 2 It might not have been meant to be this time around, but George promised that he'd run again in 2022. And he did.

Speaker 29 His family lived the American dream. But now George Santos has seen their dream become a nightmare.

Speaker 29 Joe Biden's limitless incompetence created record inflation, weaponized the IRS, unleashed deadly crime waves, and destroyed American businesses.

Speaker 29 But George Santos is fighting back, standing up to Biden to save his family's dream and lead New York forward. Our defender of the American dream, George Santos for Congress.

Speaker 22 I'm George Santos, and I approve this message.

Speaker 2 George Santos' 2022 run for New York's third district looked a lot like his first campaign, just louder, stranger, and far more extreme.

Speaker 2 He fully embraced election denialism, dismissed climate change as a hoax, started referring to COVID masks as face diapers, and rattled off claims that were effortlessly disproven, like his assertion that 300 drag queen performances were happening every day in New York public schools.

Speaker 2 He called for a nationwide ban on abortion and criminal charges for the doctors who performed them.

Speaker 2 He promoted conspiracy theories that Joe Biden was controlled by corporate elites suppressing a cure for AIDS, and that COVID-19 was a Chinese bioweapon designed to sabotage Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Of course, Santos also revived his alarmist rhetoric about the crime rate in New York City.

Speaker 2 This time, Santos announced he had been personally affected when he was mugged on Fifth Avenue and that the assailant stole the shoes off his feet.

Speaker 2 But one thing was different about the 2022 campaign, besides George's obviously cosmetically enhanced appearance, and that was his opponent.

Speaker 2 Tom Swazi had vacated the seat to run for governor, and Santos would face the winner of a long, drawn-out Democratic primary, which turned out to be 68-year-old Robert Zimmerman, a well-seasoned businessman and politician whom Santos warned would just be more of the same.

Speaker 25 My opponent supports and will be a rubber stamp for everybody in Washington, D.C. who has started to bring down chaos upon the American people from lawlessness, record inflation, and crime.

Speaker 2 The race was historic in the sense that it was the first time both major party candidates running for a U.S. House seat were openly gay.
But that's where the similarities ended.

Speaker 2 The extreme differences between George Santos and Robert Zimmerman set the stage for a series of spectacle-worthy debates.

Speaker 17 I've always advocated for exceptions on rape, incest, or life abortion.

Speaker 17 To the contrary, quite frankly, actually, that's an extreme position.

Speaker 13 Robert, you have that honesty.

Speaker 17 He compared abortion to slavery.

Speaker 28 He even said when you lost for Congress by 13%, the election was stolen from you too. Robert,

Speaker 27 I couldn't

Speaker 11 undermine our demand for the moment.

Speaker 27 How did I contend?

Speaker 27 George, do you have an honest moment inside of you ever?

Speaker 2 2022 offered George Santos even more opportunities to share stories from his Forrest Gump-style resume of coincidences, triumphs, and tragedies.

Speaker 2 For example, did you know that George helped produce the Broadway musical Spider-Man in 2011? Well, he did. Don't bother even looking it it up.

Speaker 2 On a more serious note, George also claimed he had a personal connection to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, the attack that left 49 people dead and 53 injured.

Speaker 34 At the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, which I happened to at the time have people that worked for me in the club.

Speaker 32 My company at the time, we lost four employees that worked, that were at Pulse Nightclub.

Speaker 2 Even sadder, George shared that his mother, Fatima, was at ground zero during 9-11.

Speaker 22 My mom was a 9-11 survivor. She was in the South Tower,

Speaker 22 and she made it out. She got caught up in the ash cloud.
My mom fought cancer till her death.

Speaker 2 George claimed his mother was so honest and self-reliant that despite suffering horrible health effects from the exposure, she refused financial assistance meant for victims of the 9-11 attacks.

Speaker 2 because he said she didn't want to take resources away from first responders. That spirit of rugged independence, George insisted, was the foundation of his campaign.

Speaker 2 Santos said his run for Congress was almost entirely self-funded, and for the first time, it seemed to be working.

Speaker 2 He positioned himself as a fresh, young voice in the modern Republican Party, and his campaign was gaining traction. But did he actually have a chance of winning? His odds were better than ever.

Speaker 36 Breaking news now, state Supreme Court Judge Patrick McAllister rejects New York's redistricting maps after finding them unconstitutional.

Speaker 36 A lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of the maps after they were approved last month.

Speaker 2 A redistricting of New York's congressional maps in the spring of 2022 reshaped the state's political landscape.

Speaker 2 What were once considered Democratic strongholds were now toss-ups, including District 3. Overnight, George Santos found himself in a winnable race, and on election night, he achieved his dream.

Speaker 34 On Long Island, New York's third congressional district, another flip to Red.

Speaker 34 GOP candidate George Santos won against Democrat Robert Zimmerman in a district that spans the north shore of Nassau County and also parts of Queens.

Speaker 34 And that right there is the seat that was previously held by Tom Swazi, a Democrat.

Speaker 37 And I want to thank my team, all of you.

Speaker 31 This campaign was never about me. It was always about the people.

Speaker 2 On November 8th, 2022, George Santos proved everyone wrong.

Speaker 2 He defied the pundits, the pollsters, and the press by winning nearly 54% of the vote and securing a seat in the 118th Congress of the United States.

Speaker 2 It was a position that would open the doors to a whole new world of power, prestige, and national attention.

Speaker 2 A whole new world that would come crashing down before he was even sworn in. A whole new world.

Speaker 8 a hundred thousand to see

Speaker 10 I'm like a shooting star, I've come so far.

Speaker 18 I can't go back to where I used to be, where I used to be

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Speaker 40 Thank you all. He won an historic race for New York's third congressional district last month, and next month he's expected to be sworn into Congress.

Speaker 40 But before that happens, many are demanding a dialogue with Republican Congressman-elect George Santos.

Speaker 40 An alarming article reported by the New York Times suggests the incoming House Representative may have misled the public on key aspects of his life, including his education and employment history, after no records of santos could be found

Speaker 2 who is representative elect george santos his resume may be largely fiction that was the headline splashed across the new york times on december 19th 2022 the article written by reporters grace ashford and michael gold was the result of weeks spent sifting through public records and court documents as well as tracking down sources in an effort to verify the numerous claims santos made on the campaign campaign trail.

Speaker 2 What they discovered was breathtaking in its audacity.

Speaker 2 Neither Citigroup nor Goldman Sachs had any record of George Santos having ever worked for them, despite his repeated rewriting of history.

Speaker 2 In fact, Citi told the reporters that the position Santos claimed to have held didn't even exist, and the division he said he worked in had been shut down since 2005.

Speaker 2 In reality, the only employment the New York Times could confirm was at Link Bridge Investors, where Santos' own financial disclosures from his first campaign reported a salary of $55,000 a year, and at Harbor City Capital, the firm exposed as a Ponzi scheme in 2021.

Speaker 2 And for the record, none of the 49 victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting worked at either of those places.

Speaker 2 Furthermore, Baruch College could find no record of George Santos ever graduating from the school. under any variation of his name.

Speaker 2 The Times reporters discovered that the years he claimed to have studied at Baruch actually overlapped with the time he was living in Brazil, where he had been caught stealing an elderly man's checkbook, which he had used to purchase clothes and shoes.

Speaker 2 And instead of facing the consequences, Santos fled the charges and returned to the United States, where his questionable antics continued.

Speaker 2 No IRS or state records indicated that Santos' purported animal charity, Friends of Pets United, had ever been registered as a non-profit.

Speaker 2 And despite his claims of managing a real estate empire comprising more than a dozen properties, there were no records to prove that Santos or his family owned any real estate at all.

Speaker 2 Quite the opposite, actually. Court documents showed that in recent years, George Santos had been evicted from at least two New York apartments for failing to pay rent.

Speaker 2 And yet, according to his campaign finance disclosures, Santos loaned his 2022 campaign more than $700,000 of his own money.

Speaker 2 In documents, he claimed the funds came from a salary of $750,000 and up to $1 $1 million in dividends from the Devolder organization, a company he described as his family firm, which allegedly managed $80 million in assets.

Speaker 2 But once again, there were no records to support that any of it was real.

Speaker 2 Florida state records showed the Devolder organization was only registered in 2021, had no listed clients, and had already been marked inactive for failing to file annual reports.

Speaker 2 This is Nassau County Legislator Josh Laffizon.

Speaker 42 There is a very real possibility that George Santos committed financial crimes. In 2020, he reported an income of $55,000.

Speaker 42 Yet two years later, he's wealthy enough to contribute $700,000 to his campaign. Where did George Santos make his money?

Speaker 2 Where did George Santos make his money? That was the question left hanging in the wake of the New York Times expose.

Speaker 2 And soon, reporters from CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, and dozens of other outlets began digging for answers. What they uncovered wasn't just a few exaggerations or resume padding.

Speaker 2 It was a tidal wave of lies, contradictions, and possible crimes that transformed George Santos from a political curiosity into a full-blown national scandal.

Speaker 34 Mother Jones found $5,800 worth of donations listed under the name and address of one of George Santos' relatives.

Speaker 17 But when a reporter tracked said relatives down, the relative told them, quote, I'm dumbfounded.

Speaker 25 It's all news to me, and I don't have that money to throw around.

Speaker 2 One of the most glaring red flags identified by reporters was the unusual spending patterns in George Santos' campaign filings.

Speaker 2 Nearly $40,000 in airfare, tens of thousands of dollars at an Italian restaurant, and dozens of charges listed at exactly $199.99.

Speaker 2 That number wasn't random. It was one cent below the $200 threshold that requires campaigns to keep and provide receipts to the Federal Election Commission.

Speaker 2 Even more curious, Santos' donors began to disappear under scrutiny. A Mother Jones investigation found that over $30,000 in contributions came from people who didn't seem to exist.

Speaker 2 Others were confirmed to be real people, but they claimed they had never made a donation. One relative listed as giving $5,800 told reporters, I don't have that money to throw around.

Speaker 2 In Florida, the Miami Herald uncovered more inconsistencies, more than $17,000 in expenses, including a $199.99 meal at a Miami diner, though according to the restaurant, no customer spent more than $127 that day.

Speaker 2 Something smelled fishy. As reporters continued to prod, the real George Santos, or rather the man he wasn't, started to come into focus.
His self-reported past was entirely make-believe.

Speaker 2 The status-obsessed young man never never attended a private school, never graduated from or even enrolled in college, and definitely didn't play volleyball. He rarely held steady employment.

Speaker 2 One of the only verified jobs George ever had was at a Dish Network call center in Queens, where he worked as a bilingual customer service agent.

Speaker 2 He stayed for 10 months, the longest stretch of legitimate employment on his record. but reportedly quit in 2012, around the same time he abruptly married a woman.

Speaker 2 The marriage raised eyebrows for several reasons.

Speaker 2 Santos was obviously and openly gay, and friends suspected the union may have been less about romance and more about paperwork, possibly a scheme to help his Brazilian wife obtain legal residency in exchange for money.

Speaker 2 It's never been proven, but people who knew George didn't find the theory far-fetched.

Speaker 2 Two years later, while still legally married, 26-year-old Santos announced he planned to propose to his 18-year-old boyfriend Pedro, who declined, reportedly because he suspected George had a complicated relationship with the truth.

Speaker 2 But nothing illustrated Congressman-elect Santos' double life more clearly than the gap between the lifestyle he described on the campaign trail and the one he actually lived.

Speaker 2 While he painted a picture of wealth, real estate investments, and upward mobility, the reality was far more modest.

Speaker 2 After his parents divorced, Santos lived with his mother, younger sister, and a rotating cast of roommates in a series of small shared apartments.

Speaker 2 As the New York Times had reported, the devoter Santos family had been evicted multiple times.

Speaker 2 WNYC later confirmed at least three evictions in three years and even uncovered audio of George representing the family in housing court.

Speaker 2 These court recordings are especially revealing because they appear to catch Santos lying to a judge in real time.

Speaker 2 In one hearing, he asked for access to the apartment he had been evicted from so he could feed his fish.

Speaker 2 But former roommates told WNYC that George did not, in fact, own an aquarium at the time.

Speaker 2 In another housing court hearing, George Santos told the judge he couldn't work because he was caring for his ailing mother. Fatima DeVolter did pass away from cancer a year later.

Speaker 2 a tragedy that George would later link to the toxic aftermath of 9-11. But that story too began to unravel.

Speaker 2 Immigration records revealed that Fatima wasn't even in the United States on September 11, 2001. She was in Brazil and didn't return until early 2003.

Speaker 2 And even if she had been in New York, there was no evidence she had any reason to be at the World Trade Center that day.

Speaker 2 Despite Santos' claims that his mother was a top financial executive, those who knew her said Fatima worked as a house cleaner. a perfectly respectable and demanding job.

Speaker 2 It's arguably a more inspirational story. A single mother raising two adult children on a cleaner's income, while at least one of them seemingly refused to make an honest living.

Speaker 2 Fatima left two children who were not working because she needed 24 hours of care, and now they need our help in this delicate moment, announced St.

Speaker 2 Rita's Catholic Church after the passing of their longtime congregant. A quote, significant amount of money was collected and handed directly to George Santos to pay for his mother's funeral.

Speaker 2 The funeral home that performed those services later confirmed that it had never been paid.

Speaker 2 It was just one more example of the kind of small-time, opportunistic griffs George Santos had allegedly been getting away with his entire life.

Speaker 2 There were accusations of him mooching off his relatives, stealing jewelry from his mother's friends, and even selling his boyfriend's cell phone and then claiming it was stolen to collect the insurance money.

Speaker 2 And then perhaps the most bizarre accusation of all, little Georgie was reportedly accused of stealing $15,000 worth of purebred puppies from Amish dog breeders and reselling them through his sham animal charity.

Speaker 43 He says, okay, we're going to take that puppy and that puppy. And his assistant grabs the two puppies, takes them out the door, and he pulls out a check.

Speaker 43 I was like, oh no, is this guy going to pay me with a check? By then, I was very suspicious.

Speaker 2 George was actually charged with theft by deception in connection with that case. But once again, he slithered out of accountability.

Speaker 2 His lawyer told Pennsylvania authorities in February 2020 that the checks used to buy the puppies had been stolen from him.

Speaker 2 Amazingly, that explanation worked, despite a remarkable coincidence that the stolen checks were used to procure the exact item tied to Santos' own weekend plans.

Speaker 2 That lawyer, Tiffany DeGozian, says she no longer believes him.

Speaker 44 He's definitely, you know, not qualified to be where he is in Congress, and he should really be in jail.

Speaker 2 Thinking back, I really do think he kind of got over on these Amish people, Santos' attorney, Tiffany Bogosian, later told the BBC.

Speaker 2 Bogosian said she knew George Santos from middle school and had happened to run into him at a Starbucks where he shared his predicament after learning she had become a personal injury attorney.

Speaker 2 I feel like an idiot, she admitted.

Speaker 2 Bogosian said alarm bells really started ringing when Santos pitched the Harbor City Capital investment opportunity to one of her recent millionaire personal injury clients.

Speaker 2 Santos, for his part, later denied, knowing that Harbor City was a Ponzi scheme. I'm as distraught and disturbed as everyone else, he told the Daily Beast.

Speaker 2 Are you?

Speaker 13 Well,

Speaker 2 wait until you hear this.

Speaker 24 When I first got out of the service, I was depressed. I was having nightmares.

Speaker 24 Bad, bad memories about some things that happened. Not war-related, but other things that the military does to you.

Speaker 24 I started drinking too much. I was doing reckless stuff.
My father even told me he thought I had a death wish at that point.

Speaker 24 And I probably did. I was very suicidal.

Speaker 2 Richard Ostoff says he owes his life to his pit bull, Sapphire. When he left the Navy in 2008, his mental health was in free fall.

Speaker 2 He was struggling to keep it together and cycling through psychiatric wards with a bipolar disorder diagnosis and PTSD.

Speaker 2 The darkness was smothering. Rich says he often considered ending his own life.
The only thing that stopped him was the adorable little puppy at his side.

Speaker 2 He couldn't stand the idea of leaving Sapphire behind.

Speaker 24 She knew when my moods were changing. She knew when I was depressed.
She knew when I was going manic.

Speaker 17 She would wake me up when I was having nightmares.

Speaker 2 But things got worse before they got better. And as the years passed, Rich Ostoff's increasingly unpredictable behavior isolated him from friends and family.

Speaker 2 Then, in 2016, he broke his ankle and was unable to work. With no income and nowhere to go, Rich found himself homeless, sleeping in an abandoned chicken coop off Route 9 in Howe, New Jersey.

Speaker 2 At least he still had Sapphire by his side. But even that felt uncertain.
Sapphire, now eight years old, had developed a golf ball-sized tumor on her left side.

Speaker 2 On May 1st, 2016, Rich took her to a local vet who delivered a mix of relief and dread. Yes, the tumor could be removed, but the surgery would cost around $3,000.

Speaker 24 I was homeless. I didn't have any means to pay for that at all.

Speaker 24 So one of the vet techs in the place said, hey, I know this guy.

Speaker 24 He runs a charity and he saves a lot of animals.

Speaker 24 And she was like, you want me to hook you up with him? So she took pictures of me and Sapphire. She sent them to Anthony DeVolder.

Speaker 2 Anthony DeVolder texted Rich back within minutes. He was happy to help.
Mr.

Speaker 2 DeVolder took it upon himself to create a GoFundMe fundraiser for the veteran and his dog, using an account under the name Anthony Zabrovsky.

Speaker 2 He promoted it to his network of charitable, animal-loving friends. Sapphire is a 10-year-old red-nosed pit bull that has been keeping this man company.

Speaker 2 She does not deserve to die because of this tumor. She deserves to be treated and cared for, he wrote in a Facebook post.
Will you help this baby and her daddy stay together for a few more years?

Speaker 2 Does he not deserve to have her? Let's all come together to help this family of two stay healthy. Within days, donations surpassed $900.

Speaker 2 By the end of June, the $3,000 goal had been met, primarily thanks to Rich's friends, family, and old Navy buddies, some of whom he hadn't heard from in years. This is amazing, Rich said.

Speaker 2 Sapphire could finally get the surgery she needed. Or so he thought.
But then things started to get weird.

Speaker 2 Anthony Devolder, who retained complete control of the purse strings, insisted that Rich and Sapphire see his preferred vet where he had credit.

Speaker 2 It would be cheaper and quicker for everybody, he said, communicating awkwardly through the vet tech who had introduced them. Days passed in this back and forth while Sapphire's condition worsened.

Speaker 2 Frustrated and running out of time, Rich finally messaged Devolder directly. My dog is going to die because of God knows what.
That fucking fatty deposit is benign.

Speaker 2 It needs removal, and I'm sick of being jerked around. I'll take her to another vet, but that cash was raised on her behalf.
It's fucking three times the size it was in April.

Speaker 2 Anthony De Volter told Rich to bring Sapphire to a vet in Queens.

Speaker 2 So Rich bummed a ride from a friend, paid for gas and tolls he couldn't afford, drove his sick dog across state lines, only to be told by the clinic that they couldn't operate.

Speaker 2 The tumor was too invasive. Rich begged Devolter just to let him take Sapphire back to the original vet who had already agreed to perform the surgery.
Anthony DeVolter refused to hand over the money.

Speaker 2 I'm starting to feel like I was mined for my family and friends' donations, Rich texted back angrily.

Speaker 24 And he told me that was the most offensive, horrible thing anybody had ever said to him.

Speaker 24 And that, I think, was the breaking point where he decided he was not going to give me the money or where he could actually break away from me.

Speaker 25 He knew I wasn't going to call him back anymore.

Speaker 17 He was off the hook.

Speaker 2 Anthony scoffed and boasted that he was very well off and didn't need the money. Then came a deal-breaker suggestion that made Rich's heart sink.

Speaker 2 Anthony wanted to take Sapphire to the vet without him. Rich refused.
That's when Anthony DeVolder announced the donations would be redirected to another animal in need.

Speaker 2 Even when the founder of a veterans charity stepped in to mediate, DeVolder wouldn't budge.

Speaker 2 Instead, he blocked Rich on Facebook, stopped answering calls and texts, and disappeared, along with the money meant to prolong Sapphire's life.

Speaker 24 He's He's heartless and he has no moral compass and uh

Speaker 24 no shame, no remorse.

Speaker 24 He's like a supervillain.

Speaker 2 To everyone who helped me and Sapphire raise the money for surgery, I'm sorry to say that we were scammed by Anthony DeVolder and Friends of Pets United through a series of bad veterinary contacts and subterfuge regarding payment.

Speaker 2 Rich Ostoff announced in a November 13th, 2016 Facebook post, Sapphire has not received veterinary care and her growth is three to four times bigger than it was when the campaign was fulfilled.

Speaker 2 She is facing euthanasia within months. Rich says the last few weeks of Sapphire's life were unbearable.
She could barely stand and there was nothing he could do but watch her suffer.

Speaker 2 By January 2017, he was out of options. He stood outside a Home Depot with a cardboard sign, Panhandling for enough money to give his 10-year-old companion a peaceful goodbye.

Speaker 2 On January 15th, he brought Sapphire to the vet. He laid her gently on the table, pressed his face to hers, and stayed like that as the injection was given.

Speaker 2 He counted her last two or three breaths, inhaling them into his own nose as the Vettex, eyes full of tears, stood silently beside him.

Speaker 2 Rich took her ashes home in a small urn. For weeks he slept next to it.
Sapphire was all he had in this cruel world, and now he was alone again.

Speaker 24 It was devastating to me. I would fall down on my knees crying in the shower.
And one man, one man, is responsible for that.

Speaker 24 For me, thinking about taking my own life and for losing my companion, my best friend, and my medication.

Speaker 2 Rich Ostoff eventually checked himself back into a VA hospital. With time, therapy, and support, he started to rebuild his life.
Later that year, he even adopted another dog, Ruby.

Speaker 2 But Sapphire was never far from his mind. Then, in December 2022, everything came flooding back.

Speaker 2 Rich was watching the news when a newly elected congressman flashed across the screen, George Santos, dodging reporters and refusing to answer questions. Something about his face felt familiar.

Speaker 2 And then a reporter shouted, What is your name today, George Santos or Anthony Devolder? Rich's jaw hit hit the floor. He couldn't believe it.
This motherfucker.

Speaker 24 I was devastated that my country would allow somebody that can ruin a veteran's heart and allow a dog to suffer before she died.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I'm shocked that somebody that has no heart was able to con that many people to vote for him.

Speaker 2 To the people of New York's 3rd District, I have my story to tell, and it will be told next week, George Santos tweeted on December 22nd, 2022, three days after the New York Times bombshell report.

Speaker 2 But a week went by with nothing. Radio silence, except for a statement from his attorney, Joseph Murray, who had previously been photographed at the U.S.
Capitol on January 6th.

Speaker 2 George Santos represents the kind of progress that the left is so threatened by.

Speaker 2 A gay, Latino, first-generation American and Republican who won a Biden district in overwhelming fashion, the statement read.

Speaker 2 It is no surprise that congressmen-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations. Then on December 27th, Santos resurfaced.

Speaker 2 He claimed he had taken time away to grieve on what would have been his mother's 60th birthday.

Speaker 2 And instead of addressing mainstream outlets, he went on a media tour of conservative-friendly platforms, WABC Radio, the New York Post, and even Piers Morgan, where at last he began to confront the growing scandal.

Speaker 2 To get down to the nit and gritty, I'm not a fraud.

Speaker 19 I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I've been around a long time.

Speaker 34 I mean, a lot of people know me.

Speaker 19 They know who I am.

Speaker 10 They've done business dealings with me.

Speaker 2 However, George did admit to a few embellishments. For example, he clarified that he never actually worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 2 Instead, he said he worked with them during his time at Link Bridge Investors, a distinction he chalked up to a poor choice of words, despite listing them as employers on his resume.

Speaker 2 He also walked back his claim that several of his employees were killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre.

Speaker 2 No, they didn't work directly for him, he conceded, but we did lose four people who were going to be coming to work for the company, he said.

Speaker 2 Santos also admitted he never graduated from college and didn't own any property, despite earlier claiming both.

Speaker 2 When asked why he lied about such basic, verifiable facts, George blamed insecurities and societal expectations.

Speaker 22 Expectation on society, the pressure, couldn't afford it, decided I wanted to run for office, although I had built a very credible business career, and I just didn't have that part of my biography.

Speaker 2 Even in his so-called mea culpa, George Santos still couldn't bring himself to tell the whole truth.

Speaker 2 He denied other allegations outright, like the claim he never attended the Elite Horseman Private School in the Bronx, which stated it had no record of him.

Speaker 2 According to Santos, the reporters must have looked under the wrong name. He also dismissed concerns about his campaign finances.
All of that was handled by a fiduciary, he insisted.

Speaker 2 He was simply the candidate and had no idea how the money was reported or spent. But when it came to his personal finances, he stood firm.
The Devolder organization was real, George said.

Speaker 2 He described it as a deal-making business. He connected wealthy buyers with sellers of luxury assets, such as airplanes, boats, or companies, and took a finder's fee.

Speaker 2 This story, however, didn't match anything journalists had uncovered about the company, which had no visible assets and no public footprint.

Speaker 2 Speaking of Devolter, George wanted to put to bed the rumors that he was involved in the death of a Navy veteran's dog. I've never met this man, he told Piers Morgan, who asked about Rich Ostoff.

Speaker 2 And most people who know me, who truly know me, knows that if he had met me, his dog would have received the surgery and he wouldn't be homeless.

Speaker 22 Look, I've helped throughout the years a number of animals, dogs. It's my passion.
I love helping animals. I'm an animal lover at heart, right?

Speaker 23 Whether it's an orca trapped at SeaWorld or whatever the case is, right?

Speaker 22 Just recently this week, an orca that we've all been trying to release from the Miami Sea Aquarium passed.

Speaker 22 So these are things that I'm passionate about, not to distract from this, but no, it didn't happen.

Speaker 2 What about your mother being in the World Trade Center on 9-11, George? Did that happen?

Speaker 22 My mother was in downtown Manhattan in the South Tower the day of 9-11, made it out.

Speaker 25 That is fact.

Speaker 17 And then all this stuff keeps coming up saying that it's not true.

Speaker 30 I have receipts to be able to prove that that's true.

Speaker 25 I mean,

Speaker 2 if you say so, but since we're already talking about her, do you have any proof your mom was of European descent?

Speaker 2 Because genealogy researchers uncovered records showing that both of her parents, your grandparents, were born in Brazil.

Speaker 2 They weren't Jewish, and there's no evidence they were Holocaust survivors, despite your claims to the contrary. So

Speaker 22 this is the one that I'll battle to my grave, to the point that I've already ordered those DNA test kits and I've done four of them so far and I'm just waiting for their return.

Speaker 2 The only thing I'm guilty of is embellishing my resume, George Santos said in interview after interview. Nothing serious, he argued, just what a lot of people do.

Speaker 2 It was such a bold defense that even Tulsi Gabbard, guest hosting for Tucker Carlson, couldn't let it slide.

Speaker 45 One little embellishment. These are blatant lies.

Speaker 45 My question is, do you have no shame? Do you have no shame in the people who are now you're asking to trust you to go and be their voice for them, their families, and their kids in Washington?

Speaker 17 Tulsi, I can say the same thing about the Democrats and the party.

Speaker 34 Look at Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 Oh, brother. Santos was steadfast.
He was not a fraud. He was not

Speaker 2 Jewish. And most importantly, he was not a criminal.
Federal prosecutors and the Nassau County District Attorney's Office weren't so sure.

Speaker 2 Both agencies began investigating whether George Santos' lies amounted to crimes.

Speaker 8 Mr. Santos, you're facing a federal investigation here.
This is very serious. Can you explain to your voters and your constituents what happened

Speaker 8 with this veteran,

Speaker 8 the conversations that you had with him?

Speaker 2 Mr. Santos.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Now that his whereabouts were publicly known, Brazilian authorities reopened the check fraud case Santos had left behind nearly 15 years earlier. With mounting scrutiny in the U.S.

Speaker 2 and pressure from abroad, he quietly struck a deal, agreeing to pay $5,000 in restitution, most of which would go to the store clerk he had once defrauded.

Speaker 2 That clerk, like Rich Ostoff, was stunned when he learned that the man who had written him bad checks was now in a position of power.

Speaker 2 He told CNN, quote, I saw his photo and I remembered clearly the pictures of him when he was 19. I said, how is it possible that a criminal, an embezzler, became a congressman?

Speaker 2 To me, that was unbelievable.

Speaker 2 It was a fair question. How did this happen? How did a man fabricating nearly every detail of his life make it all the way to Congress without being stopped?

Speaker 2 The reality is that someone did notice, just not enough people listened.

Speaker 2 During Santos' second campaign, the North Shore leader began publishing stories that questioned his finances and personal claims.

Speaker 2 In an October 2022 endorsement editorial, they openly refused to support him. They wrote, This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican for U.S.

Speaker 2 Congress and NY3, but the GOP nominee, George Santos, is so bizarre, unprincipled, and sketchy that we cannot.

Speaker 2 He brags about his wealth and his mansions in the Hamptons, but he really lives in a row house in Queens. He boasts like an insecure child, but he's most likely just a fabulist, a fake.

Speaker 2 Opposition research teams assumed Santos' far-right policy positions would be enough to tank his run, so they didn't dig much deeper.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, the only others who raised concerns were inside his own campaign.

Speaker 2 A vulnerability report uncovered many of his lies, but instead of going public or alerting party officials, several staffers quietly resigned.

Speaker 2 And now that some of the truth had been revealed, Republican leaders in New York were asking George George Santos to do the same.

Speaker 46 George Santos has essentially lied about every aspect of his life.

Speaker 46 He has essentially pretended to be a biracial Ukrainian, Belgian, Brazilian volleyball champion and brain cancer survivor whose mother died twice, including on 9-11.

Speaker 47 He has no place in the Nassau County Republican Committee, nor should he serve in public service. nor as an elected official.

Speaker 47 Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee, I I am calling for his immediate resignation.

Speaker 2 George Santos refused, and on January 7th, 2023, he was sworn in, giving the House Republicans a slum majority that they desperately desired.

Speaker 2 And not only did the fabulous officially become a member of Congress, he was also nominated to sit on the Small Business and the Science, Space, and Technology Committees, despite more revelations about his past surfacing.

Speaker 2 Congressman,

Speaker 11 were you ever a drag queen

Speaker 10 in Brazil?

Speaker 30 No, I was not a drag queen in Brazil, guys.

Speaker 22 I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life.

Speaker 2 There are multiple videos and photos of George Santos, aka Katara Hivashi dressed in drag in Brazil, including one where he's listing all the places where he performs as a drag queen in Brazil.

Speaker 2 Now, none of this would matter if not for the hypocrisy. Santos built a political persona on conservative values while publicly condemning the very communities he once claimed as his own.

Speaker 2 Instead of honesty, he chose denial. Even when the receipts surfaced, he dug in his diletto heels and refused to recognize that authenticity isn't a liability.
It's liberation.

Speaker 2 You don't have to be perfect, but you do have to be real. especially if your job is to represent a community.

Speaker 2 As for everything else, those expectations, those societal pressures, those insecurities, here's a little advice, George: just let it go. Let it go,

Speaker 2 let it go.

Speaker 2 Can't hold it back anymore.

Speaker 2 Let it go,

Speaker 2 let it go.

Speaker 2 Turn away and slander.

Speaker 2 I don't care what they're going to say.

Speaker 2 Let the storm rage on.

Speaker 2 Oh, never bothered me anyway.

Speaker 2 AI

Speaker 2 had the time of my life.

Speaker 3 AI never felt this way before.

Speaker 48 From building timelines to assigning the right people and even spotting risks across dozens of projects, Monday Sidekick knows your business, thinks ahead, and takes action.

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Speaker 3 And I owe it all to you.

Speaker 48 Try Monday Sidekicks, AI you'll love to use on Monday.com.

Speaker 18 You lied about your mom dying in 9-11.

Speaker 35 I think I said 7-11. No.

Speaker 23 No, you even lied about being Jewish.

Speaker 18 No, I said I was Jewish.

Speaker 28 George.

Speaker 26 People need to know who you are.

Speaker 35 Okay, well, I am George Santos, Miss Devalder, if you're nasty.

Speaker 18 I graduated on a volleyball scholarship from Baruchata Auto9 University.

Speaker 2 By the spring of 2023, George Santos had stopped running from the attention and started performing for it. He was being mocked weekly on Saturday night live and late-night television.

Speaker 2 He had voluntarily stepped down from his committee assignments. The House Ethics Committee had launched a formal investigation into his conduct and campaign finances, and still...

Speaker 2 He seemed to relish every second of the spotlight. Santos spoke on the House floor more than nearly any other freshman lawmaker.

Speaker 2 He left cupcakes and sandwiches for the reporters camped outside his office.

Speaker 2 And at President Joe Biden's State of the Union address in February, he managed to seat himself in one of the coveted center aisle spots, a location usually held by senior members, hoping to be seen shaking the president's hand.

Speaker 2 Republican Senator Mitt Romney noticed and took exception. Cameras captured him telling Santos that he didn't belong there.
George took offense.

Speaker 31 I mean, Mitt Romney, the man goes to the State of the Union of the United States wearing a Ukraine lapel pin, tells me, a Latino gay man, that I shouldn't sit in the front, that I should be in the back.

Speaker 31 Well, guess what? Rosa Parks didn't sit in the back, and neither am I going to sit in the back.

Speaker 2 Three months later, George Santos would find himself sitting in the back of a police cruiser. On May 10th, 2023, federal prosecutors unsealed a 13-count indictment against the 36-year-old congressman.

Speaker 2 The charges outlined three separate schemes. First, prosecutors said Santos solicited campaign donations, then not so quietly, diverted the money for personal use.

Speaker 2 Second, they accused him of lying on his house financial disclosure forms, vastly inflating his income and assets.

Speaker 2 The $750,000 salary and the millions in dividends from the devoter organization that served as the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars in self-loans.

Speaker 2 Federal prosecutors said those numbers simply didn't add up.

Speaker 2 And third, while earning a legitimate $120,000 salary from Harbor City Capital, Santos allegedly applied for and received more than $24,000 in pandemic unemployment benefits.

Speaker 2 It should be noted that George Santos co-sponsored a House bill aimed at helping states recover fraudulent COVID-19 unemployment payments. Santos pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bond.

Speaker 2 secured by his father and aunt. As he was leaving the courtroom, he held an impromptu press conference in which he vowed to fight back against the so-called witch hunt.

Speaker 18 Well, you're in front of me.

Speaker 18 All right.

Speaker 18 We have an indictment.

Speaker 17 We have all, we have the information that the government wants to come after me on.

Speaker 26 The reality is, is it's a witch hunt.

Speaker 50 Because

Speaker 50 it makes no sense that in four months. Four months, five months, I'm indicted.
You have Joe Biden's entire family receiving deposits from nine, nine family members receiving money from

Speaker 50 foreign destinations into their bank accounts. It's been years of exposing.
A lot of you here have reported on them, and yet no investigation is launched into them.

Speaker 50 I'm going to fight you.

Speaker 50 And I'm just going, I'm getting back to that. I'm going to fight my battle.
I'm going to deliver. I'm going to fight the witch hunt.
I'm going to take care of clearing my name.

Speaker 50 And I look forward to doing that.

Speaker 2 George Santos had become the perfect symbol of a broken political system. An obvious, shameless con man, humiliating himself, his party, and his country on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 And still, Republican leadership refused to cut him loose. Their majority in the House was only four votes.
Principles can wait.

Speaker 2 When Representative Robert Garcia of California attempted to force a vote to expel Santos, House Republicans balked. Only five members of Congress had ever been expelled in American history.

Speaker 2 Three were Confederates charged with treason during the Civil War, and the other two were convicted criminals. Expelling Santos before a conviction, they argued, would set a dangerous precedent.

Speaker 2 Better to let the legal process run its course.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, George Santos' legal problems were only getting worse.

Speaker 16 Nancy Marks, the obscure bookkeeper at the center of the George Santos fiasco, pleaded guilty to a felony in federal court. Her attorney says she was duped by the congressman.

Speaker 2 58-year-old Nancy Marks had been a fixture in Republican politics on Long Island for 30 years. She ran a one-stop shop for campaigns out of her home.

Speaker 2 The 58-year-old had provided fundraising, signprinting, consulting, and bookkeeping services for more than 150 campaigns, but she was reportedly exceptionally close. to George Santos.

Speaker 2 Although he had publicly distanced himself from his rogue fiduciary, the truth was that Nancy Marks had been by George's side the entire time. She wasn't some distant operator.

Speaker 2 She was his campaign treasurer, co-strategist, and in many ways, his financial architect. In 2021, they took their partnership a step further.

Speaker 2 Along with a former Harbor City colleague, they created Redstone Strategies, a political consulting firm that never disclosed Santos' involvement.

Speaker 2 The company claimed to help raise money and manage campaigns for other hopeful candidates. One of those clients was this charming young lady.

Speaker 51 AOC, I can't wait to fucking debate you. If you even have the balls, the balls, that's why I said balls.
What are you gonna do? Oh, she used the word balls. Watch out.

Speaker 51 If you have the balls to debate me, we can do it. I'll fuck a pay-per-view, bitch.

Speaker 27 Huh? How do you like that motherfucker?

Speaker 36 Fuck out of here.

Speaker 2 That's Tina Forte, the QAnon-friendly Republican who ran against the AOC in 2022. She paid over $100,000 to Redstone's strategies and still lost by more than 40 points.

Speaker 2 It's unclear how much of that money actually went toward her campaign.

Speaker 2 However, it would become clear that Santos used a significant portion of Redstone's funds for his own benefit, and his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, helped him hide it.

Speaker 2 Marks later admitted to falsifying campaign finance reports.

Speaker 2 She invented donations from both her own family and Santos' family to make it appear as though he had broad financial backing enough to qualify for significant financial and logistical support from the National Republican Party.

Speaker 2 She also fabricated a $500,000 loan Santos supposedly gave to his own campaign at a time when he reportedly had less than $8,000 in the bank.

Speaker 2 These fake loans didn't just make George Santos' campaign look more financially secure.

Speaker 2 They also created a mechanism for him to essentially launder money back to himself by issuing loan repayments on a debt that never existed.

Speaker 2 Nancy Marks was charged with four felony counts for her involvement. She pleaded guilty in October 2023.

Speaker 16 Marks admitted conspiracy to defraud the federal government, wire fraud, identity theft, and falsifying records, alongside Santos, she claims, to manipulate his financial benchmarks to qualify for funding from the National Republican Committee.

Speaker 2 Nancy Marks was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay $178,000 in restitution.

Speaker 2 She hasn't spoken publicly about the case, but her silence, along with multiple delays in her court hearings, fueled speculation that she was cooperating with prosecutors.

Speaker 2 That theory was effectively confirmed when less than a week after Marks' guilty plea, Federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against George Santos, adding 10 more wire fraud and identity theft charges for the fake family member donations and for using elderly donors' credit cards numerous times without their authorization to generate additional campaign contributions.

Speaker 2 Surely now, with his own treasurer pleading guilty and a fresh stack of federal charges, the House of Representatives would vote to expel him right.

Speaker 2 Wrong. On November 1, 2023, George Santos survived expulsion for a second time in six months.
However, within weeks, his support among his fellow Republicans would plummet.

Speaker 2 On November 16, 2023, the House Ethics Committee released a blistering report on George Santos after reviewing more than 170,000 pages of documents, bank records, and testimony from dozens of witnesses.

Speaker 2 The bipartisan subcommittee concluded there was substantial evidence that Santos lied to voters, violated federal law, and used his campaign as a personal cash machine.

Speaker 2 George Santos cannot be trusted, the report stated, adding that he repeatedly placed personal gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law, and basic ethics.

Speaker 2 The report confirmed and expanded upon many of the allegations in his federal indictment.

Speaker 2 Investigators uncovered previously unseen financial records showing that Santos was deeply in debt, had a poor credit score, and relied on a growing collection of high-interest credit cards to fund a lifestyle he could not afford.

Speaker 2 He blatantly stole from his campaign, the report said, and deceived donors into thinking they were funding a political movement when they were actually paying for his personal luxuries.

Speaker 2 The spending was remarkable. According to the report, Santos used tens of thousands of campaign and redstone strategies funds to pay for Botox, lip injections, and high-end clothing shopping sprees.

Speaker 2 He paid for his rent, casino trips to Atlantic City, and a honeymoon in Las Vegas. George even used campaign cash to buy OnlyFans subscriptions, which revealed another lie.

Speaker 2 In earlier interviews, Santos had pretended he had never heard of such a website.

Speaker 40 Is it true that you have an OnlyFans page and you can peel a banana with your feet?

Speaker 17 I don't have one. And it's, you know, I'll indulge you this.
I just discovered what OnlyFans was about three weeks ago when it was brought up in a discussion in my office.

Speaker 34 What do you think?

Speaker 18 And I was oblivious to the whole concept.

Speaker 2 George also pretended, in in public at least, that he had cooperated with the House Ethics Committee investigation, but in reality, he had refused to even lend a statement.

Speaker 2 Santos later said he had refused to participate because it was a disgusting, politicized smear and a miscarriage of justice.

Speaker 2 No matter what you called it, the bipartisan ethics report provided exactly the ammunition needed to convince two-thirds of the House to oust George Santos.

Speaker 2 In response to its findings, Ethics Committee Chairman Representative Michael Guest of Mississippi introduced a resolution to expel him, scheduling the vote for after the Thanksgiving recess.

Speaker 2 When Santos learned what was coming, he unleashed a tirade during a Twitter Spaces session hosted by conservative commentator Monica Matthews.

Speaker 12 It's not going to work. I will defend myself to the end of time.
I want to see Michael Guest, the chairman of ethics, put his resolution.

Speaker 12 As a matter of fact, I think he should be a man and stop being a pussy and call the privilege on this on the damn motion since he introduced it with no privileges because he thought that he was going to bully me out of Congress.

Speaker 12 It ain't going to be the dude from Mississippi that's going to kick me, a New Yorker, out of Congress.

Speaker 10 No offense to people from Mississippi.

Speaker 2 Santos went on to say that if he were expelled, he would wear it like a badge of honor.

Speaker 2 He then pointed out the hypocrisy of his misbehaving colleagues, who should be the subjects of their own ethics investigations.

Speaker 12 He said, I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they're going to screw and pretend like none of us know what's going on and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they're too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their cart out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them.

Speaker 12 This shit happens every single week. Where are the ethics investigations and that? That breaks house rules.

Speaker 2 All these efforts to expel him from Congress were just political theater, George said. It was bullying in hopes that he would just give up and resign.
Well, guess guess what?

Speaker 2 That just wasn't going to happen. I'm not leaving.

Speaker 10 I'm not.

Speaker 10 Come hell or high water.

Speaker 12 These people need to understand it's done when I say it's done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it.

Speaker 2 It was done on Friday, December 1st, 2023, by a vote of 311. to 114.

Speaker 2 George Santos, after serving only 11 months, became the sixth sitting member of the House of Representatives to be voted out by his peers. George had not stuck around for the vote.

Speaker 2 Why would I want to stay here? He asked a reported rhetorically as he was walking out the door for the last time. To hell with this place.

Speaker 2 Less than a week later, George Santos would have a new, even more lucrative, platform.

Speaker 11 Happy holiday!

Speaker 17 George Santos here wishing you the happiest of holidays.

Speaker 30 Joe and Julie would like you to please spend some money on yourselves from the gift this year.

Speaker 30 It could be anything from Botox to luxury goods of any kind, like a trip to her meds or makeup from Sephora or a subscription to OnlyFans.

Speaker 30 Whatever you do, please take this gift and have a wonderful year full of joy and happiness.

Speaker 25 Love Joe and Julie Khan and me George Santos.

Speaker 2 George signed up for Cameo, the digital retirement home where washed-up celebrities and infamous public figures try to squeeze a few last drops of profit from the dying breaths of their notoriety.

Speaker 2 And say what you want, but it worked. Initially, Santos was selling personalized videos for $75 each.
Then demand exploded. He hiked the price to $500 and people still lined up.

Speaker 2 Cameo's CEO said George raked in around $400,000 in under a month, shattering records in the process. But the novelty and the money didn't last long.

Speaker 2 By April 2024, the Cameo gold rush had dried up and George was once again searching for relevance. He was willing to try anything.

Speaker 2 First, he announced he was launching a non-sexual OnlyFans for $29.99 a month. That didn't work.
Then he floated the idea of running for Congress again in a different district.

Speaker 2 But even he eventually realized that that was a terrible idea. So finally, he settled in a space where all the other talentless losers flock when they're out of options.

Speaker 2 George Santos started a podcast.

Speaker 13 Well, hello, hello.

Speaker 25 It's George Santos.

Speaker 30 Yes, yours truly.

Speaker 35 This is the first ever Pants on Fire with George Santos.

Speaker 25 Anyway, so today's guest, folks, on Pants on Fire is going to be interesting because it's more of a self-analyzing episode about,

Speaker 18 well, meek.

Speaker 2 His podcast is every bit as unlistenable as you would expect. Still, every so often, George drops a few genuinely interesting nuggets about his legal battles.

Speaker 2 And dare I say, moments of actual honesty.

Speaker 2 Regret

Speaker 35 mixed with sadness,

Speaker 22 mixed with this sense of letting my loved ones down.

Speaker 22 It's just not

Speaker 23 a place at 36 I ever thought I'd be in, ever.

Speaker 22 And eventually it creeps up. And I know the trolls have a great time.
They like to do the TikTok and you kind of try to be the bigger person and just brush it off. And I'm that guy.

Speaker 17 I'm like, I'm not going to pay mind to these people.

Speaker 22 Like, don't feed into your haters. but at the end of the day you have to realize

Speaker 22 they might not be wrong

Speaker 52 a short time ago after years of telling lies former Congressman George Santos stood in the courthouse right behind me and finally under oath told the truth and that truth is he is a criminal

Speaker 52 Santos pled guilty to committing serious crimes involving fraud and identity theft.

Speaker 6 He also admitted to committing all other crimes he was charged with in the superseding indictment.

Speaker 52 As a result, he'll finally be held to account for his actions.

Speaker 6 He will go to prison for at least two years.

Speaker 52 He will be required to forfeit the money he made illegally, and he will be required to repay the victims that he swindled.

Speaker 2 On August 19th, 2024, George Santos pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud and identity theft. He told the judge he was committed to making amends and learning from this experience.

Speaker 2 Outside the courtroom, he echoed the same remorse, acknowledging how far he had fallen.

Speaker 2 It is clear to me now that I allowed ambition to cloud my judgment, leading me to make decisions that were unethical, he said.

Speaker 2 Pleading guilty is a step I never imagined I would take, but it is a necessary one, because it is the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 Reflecting on his time in Congress, Santos said he understood why his constituents felt betrayed.

Speaker 2 Representing you has been the proudest achievement of my life, and I believe I did so to the best of my abilities. But you also trusted me to serve with honor and uphold the values of our democracy.

Speaker 2 And in that regard, I failed you.

Speaker 46 I know that my actions have caused disappointment, frustration, and a loss of faith in me.

Speaker 17 And for that, I'm truly thankful.

Speaker 2 But that remorse didn't last long.

Speaker 2 Back at home, Santos reverted to form, launching into a familiar social media tirade, this time accusing the Department of Justice of targeting him while ignoring what he called a global cabal of pedophiles embedded in governments, including the United States.

Speaker 2 As his April 25th, 2025 sentencing date approached, prosecutors made it clear they weren't buying the act.

Speaker 2 In their filings, the Justice Department said Santos remained unrepentant for his crimes and was approaching sentencing with belligerence and an insatiable appetite for likes, blaming everyone but himself.

Speaker 2 They noted he was still denying conduct he had already admitted to under oath. To the government, these weren't the actions of a man seeking redemption, but of someone who didn't deserve leniency.

Speaker 2 U.S. District Judge Joanna Siebert ultimately agreed with prosecutors and handed George Santos the maximum sentence they requested, 87 months in federal prison.
Mr.

Speaker 2 Santos, words have consequences, she told him. You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.

Speaker 2 Under the terms of his plea deal, Santos was required to pay nearly $374,000 in restitution and forfeit more than $200,000 more.

Speaker 41 Reporters inside the courtroom today say Santos was sobbing during his sentencing, telling the judge he, quote, betrayed the confidence entrusted in me.

Speaker 41 I cannot rewrite the past, but I can control the road ahead. I have tried my best.

Speaker 2 The court granted George Santos three months before he was required to report to prison. July 25th, 2025 was marked on the calendars of everyone he had lied to, defrauded, or disappointed.

Speaker 2 It was an overdue date with accountability. The day this long and sordid saga finally reached its conclusion.

Speaker 25 And what a conclusion it is.

Speaker 53 George Santos spent his brief career in public service conning donors, misleading his constituents, and defrauding the government.

Speaker 53 He told lie after lie until it caught up with him, until we caught up with him, and exposed him for what he truly was, an opportunist and a fraud.

Speaker 53 George Santos was the polar opposite of what a public servant should be. He is without integrity, unconcerned with his constituents, and self-interested in every way.

Speaker 53 He had a responsibility to those people. They counted on him to deliver for them.
Instead, they got an empty man in an empty designer's suit, financed by fraud.

Speaker 2 Just hours later, George Santos was tweeting again.

Speaker 2 I believe that seven years is an over-the-top politically influenced sentence, and I implore President Trump to give me a chance to prove I'm more than the mistakes I've made, he wrote, effectively launching his campaign for a pardon.

Speaker 2 In an interview with Piers Morgan, he doubled down. I'll take a commutation, clemency, whatever the president is willing to give me.
But as the days ticked by, silence was all he got.

Speaker 2 No word from Donald Trump. No promises from the people who claimed to have his ear.
His good ear. Not the one that's somehow miraculously intact after surviving an AR-15 round.

Speaker 2 On May 25, 2025, Santos seemed to come to terms with reality. I will not spend the last 61 days I have left scrambling to get past a bunch of guard dogs, he wrote.

Speaker 2 The so-called friends who said they had helped should have just told me to go fuck myself, because that's what their actions have done. On his podcast, the usual bravado faded.

Speaker 2 With prison closing in, fear crept through the cracks. I just want to preserve as much of my bodily autonomy and dignity as humanly possible, he admitted.
That's very important to me.

Speaker 22 That's why I've even talked pretty openly. Like, I do not mind a solitary confinement situation if that means I go in and out the exact same with my body autonomy.

Speaker 25 That's what I'm mainly most concerned about.

Speaker 17 I'm a gay man. Let's just not bullshit and beat around the bush.

Speaker 2 The night before George Santos reported to prison, he posted a farewell message on Twitter. Well, darlings, the curtain falls, the spotlight dims, and the rhinestones are packed.

Speaker 2 From the halls of Congress to the chaos of cable news, what a ride it's been. Was it messy? Always.
Glamorous? Occasionally. Honest? I tried, most days.

Speaker 2 To my supporters, you made this political cabaret worth it. To my critics, thanks for the free press.
I may be leaving the stage for now, but trust me, legends never truly exit.

Speaker 2 George wasn't wrong about that. It wasn't a complete disappearance.

Speaker 2 He had already secured a column in the South Shore Press newspaper, a platform that would keep his voice alive, even from behind bars.

Speaker 2 One of George's first dispatches from prison was a laundry list of complaints about the conditions at FCI Fairton in New Jersey, where he had reported on Friday, July 25th.

Speaker 2 In September, George sent another update. He claimed he had been transferred to a special housing unit after his attorney alerted prison officials to death threats against him.

Speaker 2 Solitary confinement, just like he wanted. Except, as it turned out, it wasn't quite the safe, glamorous isolation George had envisioned.

Speaker 2 It's a slow-motion form of torture, George wrote in his column. I'm not asking for special treatment.
I am asking to be treated as a person.

Speaker 2 with attention, dignity, and the care any human deserves when in distress. I sometimes feel the life leaving my body, a slow leaking of hope.
I won't pretend otherwise, but I am not finished fighting.

Speaker 2 I will make it through this. And make no mistake, those who permitted, enabled, or ignored this neglect will be held accountable.

Speaker 2 And then out of nowhere, a glimmer of hope. Right now, there is a congressman sitting in prison for lying about his past during a campaign.

Speaker 2 President Trump posted the Truth Social on October 7th, 2025, completely oblivious to the facts, as usual.

Speaker 2 Well, those lies were nothing compared to those of Richard Dawnong Dick Blumenthal, perhaps the greatest phony in the history of the United States Senate.

Speaker 2 It was a reference to Senator Blumenthal's military exaggerations that were exposed 15 years earlier. George Santos wasted no time.
He jumped on the opportunity.

Speaker 2 In the October 13th edition of the South Shore Press, he published what can only be described as a desperate plea to Daddy Trump from prison. Mr.
President, I am not asking for sympathy.

Speaker 2 I am asking for fairness, for the chance to rebuild. I know I have made mistakes in my past.
I have faced my share of consequences, and I take full responsibility for my actions.

Speaker 2 But no man, no matter his flaws, deserves to be lost in the system, forgotten and unseen, enduring punishment far beyond what justice requires.

Speaker 2 Sir, I appeal to your sense of justice and humanity, the same qualities that have inspired millions of Americans to believe in you.

Speaker 2 I humbly ask that you consider the unusual pain and hardship of this environment and allow me the opportunity to return to my family, my friends, and my community.

Speaker 2 I want nothing more than to begin again, to contribute, to serve, and to rebuild my life from the ashes of my past. Mr.
President, I have nowhere else to turn, George wrote.

Speaker 2 You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.

Speaker 10 It was a surprise.

Speaker 22 It was just, it was a wild story from

Speaker 25 seeing the TV, calling my husband Matt, to him saying, I just spoke to the president. I'm like,

Speaker 10 you spoke to the president to, you're coming home.

Speaker 18 I'm on my way to pick you up.

Speaker 22 That happened within a spam of...

Speaker 24 30 minutes.

Speaker 2 George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and by all accounts has been horribly mistreated, Trump wrote on Truth Social on October 17th, 2025.

Speaker 2 Therefore, I just signed a commutation releasing George Santos from prison immediately. Good luck, George.
Have a great life.

Speaker 2 According to the Bureau of Prisons, George Santos wasn't supposed to walk free until September 2031.

Speaker 2 Instead, Thanks to President Trump's commutation, he was home after just 84 days behind bars, his restitution wiped clean.

Speaker 2 Two days later, George was back in the spotlight, making the rounds on cable news, making promises to do good with the second chance he'd been given.

Speaker 2 And in classic Republican fashion, the once law and order congressman, now personally affected by something he once supported, finally discovered empathy.

Speaker 23 I'd love it.

Speaker 23 I told this to the president that I'd love to be involved with prison reform and not in a partisan way, in a real human way, in a way that we affect it, that it helps society, it helps these individuals rebuild their lives, and we have a better system with less incarcerated people.

Speaker 23 America today has 250,000 federal inmates approximately, and I think it would be much nicer to look at reducing that number.

Speaker 23 And if I can be a part of helping that, I think that would be a great road to follow in the future.

Speaker 2 For his victims, George Santos' undeserved release was just another slap in the face.

Speaker 2 Rich Ostoff told the New York Times that he felt like he got personally stabbed in the gut by the president of the United States.

Speaker 41 If George Santos or the president are watching right now, would you tell him?

Speaker 13 What is wrong with you, both of you?

Speaker 35 This is horrible.

Speaker 24 I think I deserve an apology and I think all the veterans and military members deserve an apology for letting that guy out.

Speaker 24 After what he did to all of us, he did it to me, but he did it to everybody that ever wore a uniform. George is a horrible person, and Trump is more horrible for allowing him out of jail.

Speaker 24 He should have at least let him serve half of his sentence.

Speaker 24 This is a travesty of justice.

Speaker 2 Justice, huh? How imperfect. How compromised? How half-hearted.
How delayed. Justice rarely explodes in righteous glory, as we would like to believe.

Speaker 2 Instead, it limps along just enough to maintain the faith of the masses, like a cold and broken hallelujah. The faith was strong, but

Speaker 13 Hallelujah.

Speaker 13 Hallelujah.

Speaker 13 Hallelujah.

Speaker 2 Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka DeFormer, aka Mr. Monetizer.

Speaker 2 For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at SwindledPodcast. Or you can send us a postcard at P.O.

Speaker 2 Box2045, Austin, Texas, 78768. But please, no packages.
We do not trust you.

Speaker 2 Swindled is a completely independent production, which means no network, no investors, no bosses, no shadowy moneymen, no cameo accounts. And we plan to keep it that way, but we need your support.

Speaker 2 Become a valued listener on Patreon, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify at valued listener.com.

Speaker 2 For as little as five bucks a month, you will receive early access to new episodes and exclusive access to bonus episodes that you can't find anywhere else. and everything is 100% commercial free.

Speaker 2 Become a valued listener at valued listener.com.

Speaker 2 Or if you want to support the show and need something to wear to the new member orientation in Washington, D.C., consider buying something you don't need at swindledpodcast.com/slash shop.

Speaker 2 There are t-shirts, patches, hats, hoodies, posters, coffee mugs, and more. Swindledpodcast.com/slash shop.
And remember to use coupon code Capitalism to receive 10% off your order.

Speaker 2 If you don't want anything in return for your support, you can always simply donate using the form on the home page. That's it.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 Hello, my name is Corey Long from Hermiston, Oregon.

Speaker 54 Hi, my name is Lucinda. I'm from Brisbane, Australia.
Hi, my name is Olivia from Chicago, and I'm a concerned citizen and a valuable adventure.

Speaker 54 I hope I'm featured on the show and my ex-boyfriend hears my voice. Thanks.
Bye. Stay safe, everyone.

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Speaker 38 I thought it would be okay. I thought a quick glance at their content was enough.

Speaker 2 How was I supposed to know they posted that back in 2021?

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Speaker 1 Get safe, get secure.

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