Republican fraudster George Santos, whose Congressional profession famously collapsed below the staggering weight of his lies and felony schemes, will study Friday morning in a Lengthy Island courtroom how a lot time he’ll spend in jail.
Prosecutors are asking the disgraced Queens lawmaker get 87 months for a string of scams, together with stealing the identities of 11 individuals to falsely report tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in donations to his marketing campaign, utilizing his donors’ bank card data to purchase designer garments and pay private money owed, and tricking donors into giving to a nonprofit that led to his private checking account.
Santos, 36, turned a nationwide punchline inside weeks of his 2022 election to the Home of Representatives, when the New York Occasions began pulling on the threads of his private biography.
His quite a few fabrications together with claims that he graduated from Baruch Faculty and attended New York College, and that he was as soon as employed by Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. At one level he stated he was Jewish and that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, however that declare additionally fell aside below scrutiny.
Santos’s profile went from “SNL” punchline to felony in 2023, when federal prosecutors indicted him on a litany of expenses. From the beginning, authorized consultants described prosecutors’ case as a slam dunk.
The Home of Representatives expelled him in December 2023, and in August, Santos pleaded responsible to wire fraud and aggravated identification theft, three weeks earlier than he was set to go to trial.
In a letter to Lengthy Island Federal Court docket Decide Joanna Seybert, Santos’ legal professionals laid out a really completely different biography than the one he tried to promote to voters and marketing campaign donors.
“His father had ‘high drinking proclivities’ and his mother gambled frequently, his lawyers wrote, and the two divorced in 2000. He moved to Brazil with his mother and sister after fourth grade, and when he returned to New York, he attended William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens for just a month in 2004, before leaving because he “was being bullied by older students,” his legal professionals wrote. He obtained a highschool equivalency diploma in 2006.
His legal professionals additionally describe Santos’ battle with psychological sickness, together with a voluntary committal in 2013 or 2014, and contact on issues with alcohol consumption.
He’s asking for the obligatory minimal two years behind bars.
Federal prosecutors countered final week that Santos’s social media exercise reveals “he remains unrepentant for his crimes.”
They identified an April 4 submit on X the place he wrote, “No matter how hard the DOJ comes for me, they are mad because they will NEVER break my spirit.”
In one other submit, he denied utilizing marketing campaign money to purchase luxurious items from Hermes, though he didn’t object to that element being in a pre-sentencing report back to the courtroom.
In much more posts, he known as himself a “scapegoat” and stated Division of Justice officers “refuse to prosecute the cabal of pedophiles running around in every power structure in the world including the U.S. government.”
Santos tried to clarify himself in an over-the-top letter to the decide Saturday.
“Every sunrise since that plea has carried the same realization: I did this, me. I am responsible,” he wrote. “But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head.”
In one other florid passage, he writes, “The red, white, and blue runs through my veins long before the ink of any plea agreement. … So when I fire back, it isn’t vanity or defiance for sport; it’s my way of saluting the messy, glorious free-speech tradition that makes this country worth every bruise.”
