Things George Santos Is Accused Of Lying About (That We Know Of So Far)

Embattled Rep. George Santos (RN.Y.) received House committee assignments this week despite repeated calls to resign from Democrats and some Republicans over the way he, to put it mildly, misrepresented himself.

A representative of the new student admitted that he had “embellished” his resume but added that he had not committed a “criminal act”. While Republicans in his home district wanted him gone, the response on Capitol Hill was less decisive.

And so Santos — or the congressman known as George Santos — is now part of the Small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. He reportedly lobbied House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to put him on the finance committee, but top Republicans didn’t want him there, according to CNN.

Facing federal, state and international investigations, Santos has certainly had a difficult start to his two years. But so far he has resisted the idea of ​​backing down, even as each new day reveals another wild accusation about his past. He is participating in Congress for the second time, in 2020, so there are many years of interviews, appearances and campaign materials where Santos shares part of his background (shown).

It’s hard to do — which is why HuffPost put together a list of things Santos is accused of lying about.

The 34-year-old was reportedly left by “George Santos.” According to CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, aliases include Anthony Santos, George Devolder, Anthony Zabrovsky and George Anthony Santos-Devolder, among others. (Devolder was his mother’s name.)

Earlier this month, a video surfaced showing Santos introducing himself as Anthony Devolder at a 2019 event in support of President Donald Trump.

After winning the election in November, Santos spoke at the Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas, where he billed as Jewish Republic. He identified himself as a “proud American Jew” in campaign materials obtained by the Jewish news outlet Forward. But when his heritage was questioned, Santos told the New York Post that he never claimed to be Jewish. “I said I was ‘Jewish’,” he said.

They have claimed that Zabrovsky is of family origin, a Jewish last name. But a professional genealogist told CNN there was no indication of a name change in his lineage.

Santos told Fox News in 2021 that his grandfather “escaped socialism … communism and the Holocaust,” and he repeated that claim during the campaign. His grandfather was originally from Ukraine, Santos said, and fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis. But the Forward and CNN reported that records of Jewish genealogy and immigration did not support Santos’ story. However, the store found evidence that the grandfather was born in Brazil. The New York Times found the same.

Santos tweeted in 2021 that “9/11 claimed my mother’s life.” His campaign website states that his mother had been in the south tower of the World Trade Center and survived the attack, dying “a few years” later of cancer.

But records obtained by The New York Times show that Santos’ mother did not live in the country at the time — she was in Brazil. An obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Devolder, stated that he died in 2016.

In immigration documents reviewed by The New York Times, Santos’ mother said she worked as a housekeeper and housekeeper — not as “the first female executive of a major financial institution,” as the congressman claimed. People who knew Santos’ mother recalled that she made a living cleaning houses and selling food, according to the outlet.

He was also born in Brazil, and not Belgium, as Santos claimed, according to CNN.

Campaign finance disclosure forms show that Santos loaned the campaign $700,000, the Times said. He claimed that he received a $750,000 salary from a company called the Devolder Organization (more on that later).

The source of Santos’ wealth is uncertain. In his mid-to-late 20s, he apparently struggled with financial difficulties; The Times found that he was facing eviction twice in the Queens borough of New York City. But a few years later, during the 2022 campaign, Santos reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars on travel, restaurants and hotels in New York, Florida, Texas and California, the Times reported.

He raised so much money that he donated some to other Republican candidates.

A subsequent New York Times investigation uncovered questionable transactions by a political group that raised funds for Santos, RedStone Strategies. The Washington Post discovered the relationship with the Russian oligarch’s relatives approved.

Devolder’s organization is described on Santos’ campaign website as “his family business,” The New York Times reported. But information about the company, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is lacking, the Times said. Santos is reportedly an outfit that connects investment funds to wealthy investors, but it is unclear who the firm’s clients are. He told Semafor that he does services like helping rich people find yachts to buy.

He not only works for the supposed family business; Santos also worked at the Florida investment firm Harbor City Capital, where he was hired in 2020 under the name George Devolder. The company was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme and was shut down in 2021.

Despite claims to the contrary, The New York Times found no records of real estate owned by Santos or his immediate family in the U.S. (On forms required by the campaign, Santos only disclosed an apartment in Rio de Janeiro.)

At interview with WNYC, Santos said people who worked for him were killed during the 2016 attack on an Orlando gay nightclub. The New York Times found no connection to him or the various companies he worked for among the 49 people killed in Pulse.

Horace Mann told CNN he had no record of Santos ever attending. Private schools also check aliases.

Santos has claimed in a 2020 YouTube video that his parents lost money in the real estate market and he had to drop out four months before graduating, then getting his GED diploma.

“Unfortunately my parents fell on hard times, which was … what became known as the 2008 depression,” Santos said. “But we’ve hit it early by using real estate.”

Santos claims he graduated from Baruch College and New York University, but both institutions told several news outlets that they have no record of him.

He claimed on his resume that his GPA at Baruch was 3.89 and that he graduated summa cum laude.

He eventually told the New York Post that he did not graduate from college.

In 2020, Santos appeared on a morning radio show where he said he went to Baruch on a volleyball scholarship and “killed” teams from Harvard and Yale.

“I sacrificed both knees and got a knee replacement, a knee replacement from playing volleyball,” Santos said on air.

The New York Times reported that the Wall Street behemoth failed to make records of Santos’ work there, as it claimed. Santos later told the New York Post that the statement was a “poor choice of words,” as he did not work “directly” for the company. He also told Fox News that the claim was “not false” but “debatable.”

There is no record that Santos’ charity, Friends of Pets United, has existed as a legal tax-exempt organization, The New York Times reported after checking with the IRS and the attorney general’s offices in New York and New Jersey. The Times said he ran a tax-exempt pet charity for five years from 2013 – at the same time it faced financial problems.

Santos denied an alarming story from Navy veteran Richard Osthoff, who told a New Jersey outlet that he contacted Santos in 2016 to help finance surgery for his beloved dog, Sapphire. Osthoff said that at the time, he was living in a tent on the side of the highway, and there was no way he could afford stomach cancer treatment for his pit bull mix. A veterinary technician referred her to Friends of Pets United.

Santos, known to Osthoff as Anthony Devolder, allegedly helped him raise $3,000 through GoFundMe that summer, but the veteran said he never came across the money. She said Santos shut down fundraisers and stopped answering texts and calls. A GoFundMe spokesperson told The Washington Post that the fundraiser is real, and that the company has banned Santos’ email address from being used on the service.

Sapphire passed away in January 2017.

Santos told the New York Post that he is not a criminal, “not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.”

Speaking on a podcast with longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, he said he lives an “honest life.”

“I just pray for all of you, when it comes to you, you have the same strength that I have,” he said, as reported by NPR.

In 2008, Brazilian authorities accused him of stealing a checkbook and fraudulently spending $700. The investigation was hampered by an inability to locate Santos, according to The New York Times. But with his election to Congress, he said he is opening the case.

Santos said the suggestion that he was a drag performer was “absolutely false”.

“The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I work to produce results,” he said tweeted this week.

However, some journalists said they had obtained photos or videos from Santos performing as Kitaraprovided by a former friend from the gay community of Rio de Janeiro.