Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty George Santos
A federal complaint filed Monday argues that “unknown individuals or corporations may have illegally funneled money” into the campaign of controversial Rep. George Santos who has in recent weeks been the subject of numerous headlines after admitting to lying about large portions of his past.
The complaint, filed by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and surfaced by The Washington Post, says Santos appears to have lied “about how his campaign raised and spent money,” along with lying about “virtually every aspect of his life.”
Many of Santos’ lies were uncovered during an investigation by The New York Times on Dec. 19, in which the outlet found that there were significant parts of his life that could not be verified.
RELATED: Tulsi Gabbard Criticizes GOP Rep.-Elect George Santos in Fox News Interview: ‘Do You Have No Shame?’
In an interview given days later to the New York Post, the new congressman said he lied about working at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, as he had previously asserted, and revealed that he had also embellished his education, noting that he did not attend Baruch College or New York University.
As to his religious heritage, Santos told the Post that he “never claimed to be Jewish. I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.'” He previously laid claim to Jewish heritage on his campaign website and throughout his campaign.
RELATED: Incoming Rep. George Santos Apologizes for ‘Embellishing My Resume’: ‘I Said I Was Jew-ish’
John Locher/AP Photo
But even as Santos admitted to some fabrications, many questions regarding his finances remain unanswered.
In 2020, when Santos launched his first run for the House, he stated in a financial disclosure that he had no assets and no earned income. But his financial situation appeared to have markedly improved by the time he decided to launch a second run for the House in 2022, with Federal Election Commission filings showing he lent at least $580,000 to his campaign, and $27,000 to his political action committee.
The Campaign Legal Center alleges in its new complaint that Santos “appears to have violated federal campaign finance laws by knowingly and willfully concealing the true sources of his campaign’s funding, misrepresenting how his campaign spent its money and illegally paying for personal expenses with campaign funds.”
The complaint further notes that Santos’ claims of earnings millions of dollars in 2021 and 2022 from a business he started in May 2021 are “vague, uncorroborated, and non-credible in light of his many previous lies.”
RELATED: U.S. Rep.-Elect George Santos Now Under Federal Investigation for Financial Disclosures: Report
The Campaign Legal Center alleges Santos engaged in a number of campaign finance violations, such as using campaign resources to cover personal expenses, like his rent, and falsifying its disclosure of day-to-day campaign expenses.
Citing campaign financial disclosures, the complaint says that Santos reported a number of “implausible” expenses, including “37 disbursements of exactly $199.99″ — just under the $200 threshold requiring a receipt.
One of those allegedly $199.99 expenses was a hotel stay at the W Hotel South Beach, where rooms routinely go for more than $700 per night. “Simply put, barring some type of private insider rate that would raise other serious violations of campaign finance law, the Santos campaign could not have paid $199.99 for a ‘Hotel Stay’ at the W Hotel South Beach,” the complaint says.
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The complaint claims that Santos acted as a “straw donor” for illegal contributions to his campaign, raising questions about who, exactly, made the contributions.
“The volume and timing of Santos’s dramatic increase in income and assets, the lack of a clear explanation of how he generated that income, his well-documented penchant for dishonesty, and the fact that he then used $705,000 from his sudden windfall to fund his subsequent congressional campaign strongly suggests that the rapid shift in Santos’s finances was not a mere coincidence, but a direct result of unknown persons directly and illegally, giving him money to run for federal office,” the complaint claims.
Santos is currently under federal investigation over questions about his finances, and the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office in New York recently announced that it, too, is investigating the incoming lawmaker.
Source: news.google.com
