Merged NY Rep Santos (merged from GOP elected that guy in WW84 and GOP are liars)

[ZiprHead]

Santos is accused of harassing prospective staffer in his D.C. office

A prospective staffer in the D.C. office of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Saturday that he was sexually harassed by the embattled congressman, who is facing calls to resign from both sides of the aisle after admitting to fabricating details about his biography.

Derek Myers made the allegation in a series of posts on Twitter, which included a complaint he said he filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics. A spokeswoman for Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee, confirmed that the congresswoman received the complaint.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Santos work as a charity seems to be extraordinarily criminal. It seems the main reason he won this race was he was using a modified name. Multiple frauds, multiple GoFundMe scams. Really, this is simple, one warrant to GoFundMe can take care of all of this Pet charity scamming. There are just too many people coming out... incredible how he is still in the House.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And it appears that Santos stole bred dogs.

 

[lpetrich]

Romney on Santos: ‘He’s a sick puppy. He shouldn’t have been there’ | The Hill

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told embattled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) he shouldn’t have attended the State of the Union address, much less positioned himself near the center of the House aisle to shake hands, slamming the New York Republican as “an embarrassment.”

Romney appeared to have a heated encounter with the disgraced first-term lawmaker as he walked down the aisle to take his seat for Biden’s address.

What he said afterward to reporters:

I don’t know the exact words I said. He shouldn’t have been there. Look, he’s a sick puppy. He shouldn’t have been there.

I don’t think he ought to be in Congress, and he certainly shouldn’t be in the aisle trying to shake the hand of the president of the United States and dignitaries coming in. It’s an embarrassment.

He says that he embellished his record. Look, embellishing is saying you get an A when you get an A-minus. Lying is saying you graduated from a college you didn’t even attend.

He shouldn’t be in Congress, and they’re going to go through the process and hopefully get him out. If he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there.

I agree with MR on that one. GS is a sleazeball.

His response:
George Santos on Twitter: "Hey @MittRomney just a reminder that you will NEVER be PRESIDENT!" / Twitter
noting
George Santos on Twitter: "Donald J. Trump will be the 47th POTUS." / Twitter

 

[lpetrich]

Mitt Romney said later:

Asked if he was disappointed that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has yet to call on Santos to resign, Romney responded: “Yes.”

Feds probing Santos’ role in service dog charity scheme - POLITICO

George Santos says Kyrsten Sinema told him to 'hang in there.' Her office says that’s a 'lie.'

Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., said in an interview on Thursday that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., consoled him after his tense exchange this week with Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, but Sinema's office says she never spoke to Santos.

Santos told Newsmax Thursday evening that after Romney lashed out at him ahead of Tuesday's State of the Union address, Sinema told the congressman to “hang in there, buddy” as she was walking by. He added that she "was very polite, very kindhearted," unlike Romney, who he claims has "always had prejudice towards minorities."

"She’s a good person, unlike Mr. Romney, who thinks he’s above it all. And his whole mighty white horse trying to talk to us down on morality," Santos said.

But that never happened, Sinema's spokesperson Hannah Hurley, told NBC News, calling Santos' comment "a lie." The two lawmakers never spoke, Hurley said, and Sinema was not aware of the exchange between Santos and Romney until the GOP senator filled her in afterward.

When I learned of that, I thought that GS might have asked KS about her fashion sense, for the next time GS goes out in drag.

 

[lpetrich]

George Santos' Press Secretary Pulls Back the Curtain On Job
It must be an awful job, cleaning up his boss's messes

 Pathological lying

• An internal motive for the behavior cannot be readily discerned clinically: e.g., long-lasting extortion or habitual spousal battery might cause a person to lie repeatedly, without the lying being a pathological symptom.[3]
• The stories told tend toward presenting the liar favorably. The liar "decorates their own person"[10][11] by telling stories that present them as the hero or the victim. For example, the person might be presented as being fantastically brave, as knowing or being related to many famous people, or as having great power, position, or wealth.

 George Santos mentions numerous falsehoods that he has stated, and many of them fit that profile very well, by making him and his family seem very successful and heroic.

Why did George Santos lie so much? Experts weigh in on his deception. - The Washington Post

But George Santos (a.k.a. Anthony Santos, Anthony Devolder, Anthony Zabrovsky, Kitara Ravache and more) falls at the far end of the spectrum that deception experts use to identify a pathological liar: Someone who lies even when there’s no apparent reason not to tell the truth, with the intent to manipulate others. They are creative storytellers and great performers who make themselves the hero or the victim of their tall tales, rarely nervous or hesitant while telling them. In short, they can be very charming and persuasive. (Santos’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Dissembling is just a part of it, says Christian Hart, a professor at Texas Woman’s University and the co-author of the upcoming book “Big Liars: What Psychological Science Tells Us About Lying and How You Can Avoid Being Duped.” “He’s not just lying, but he seems to have a long history of somewhat maliciously manipulating other people to live his life. This person isn’t just a liar, he’s a rule breaker, norm violator, risk taker, someone who seems to lack empathy and remorse on a more global scale.”

In Hart’s studies of people who lie excessively, he sees mixed motivations. “In one study, we found that low self-esteem was one of the strongest personality predictors of someone’s tendency to lie — and so this pervasive sense of being inadequate and worrying that you’re not going to measure up. … On the other hand, we conducted other research that suggested that having kind of a dark, manipulative personality also is associated with high levels of lying. These people see everyone is a pawn in their game, and they are happy to manipulate people to get exactly what they want.”

Then discussing fraudsters like Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, and Anna Sorokin, who pretended to be a German heiress.

 

[lpetrich]

More from the WaPo:

On Tuesday, Santos announced he was stepping down from his House committees but is otherwise unbowed. There’s a precedent for his bravado: According to The Washington Post Fact Checker, Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading statements during his four years as president — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. On Nov. 2, 2020 — the day before the presidential election — the number jumped to 503 as he desperately tried to win reelection.

For many loyal supporters, Trump’s dishonesty didn’t change their opinion of him, and they were forgiving of falsehoods as long as he didn’t deceive them. A wingman may chuckle at the lies his best friend uses to pick up women at the bar, but won’t tolerate that same friend lying to him.

The article mentioned  Illusory truth effect

The illusory truth effect (also known as the illusion of truth effect, validity effect, truth effect, or the reiteration effect) is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure

...
In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that familiarity can overpower rationality and that repetitively hearing that a certain statement is wrong can paradoxically cause it to feel right.

"Examples" had a lot of them:

Although the truth effect has been demonstrated scientifically only in recent years, it is a phenomenon with which people have been familiar for millennia. One study notes that the Roman statesman Cato closed each of his speeches with a call to destroy Carthage ("Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam"), knowing that the repetition would breed agreement. Napoleon reportedly "said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition", whereby a repeated affirmation fixes itself in the mind "in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated truth". Others who have taken advantage of the truth effect have included Quintilian, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,[12] Donald Trump,[13][14] and Marcus Antonius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.[10]

Advertising that repeats unfounded claims about a product may boost sales because some viewers may come to think that they heard the claims from an objective source.[6] The truth effect is also used in news media and is a staple of political propaganda.[4][5]

 

[lpetrich]

The WaPo article ended with

Hart says that other politicians have lied about their lives but that he’s never seen anything quite like the new congressman from Long Island: “Maybe there have been others in the past, and they just went undetected. But he might just be the first of his kind.”

Why was he caught? Earlier in that article,

Lies were harder to detect before the internet age, when personal information was more difficult to access. Santos had the hubris to run for elected office in an era when so many résumé embellishments are easier to debunk.

Why did he succeed with his lies?

Great con men are good at reading people and are skilled at saying what people want to hear. Santos looked the part — a rich, successful young Republican — and voters were smitten.

“What makes you such an easy target for lying is if the lie that you’re being told is something you’d like to believe,” says Paul Ekman, a retired research psychologist and author of “Telling Lies.” “So if I can figure that out, I have quite an advantage over you.”

Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex | WIRED - about the young men of Veles, North Macedonia who in 2016 ran social-media sites that ran fake news.

For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”

They found that Donald Trump's supporters were very gullible, something that they made a lot of money off of. So if they could fall for DT, they could fall for GS.

 

[Oleg]

I hope they make a movie about the guy. Catch Me If You Can meets Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

 

[lpetrich]

George Santos takes dig at 'career pathological liar' Biden in new interview apology: 'I've learned my lesson' | Fox News - Feb 1 - "Santos says it's 'categorically false' that he 'faked my way to Congress'"

On a Republican conference call Tuesday morning, Santos, who has also admitted to fabricating details about a college degree and a successful career at two Wall Street firms while running for office, reportedly said he would recuse himself from assignments to the Small Business and Science Committees. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has said Santos will be removed from Congress if an ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation determines he violated campaign finances laws.

...
"Just because the President of the United States is a 40-year career pathological liar doesn’t make it OK for anyone else to go out and do that. And that was a terrible comparison," Santos said after Sinclair confronted him over a past interview days after Christmas when news of the resume lies first broke.

So he's saying that President Biden is just like him?

 

[TomC]

I hope they make a movie about the guy. Catch Me If You Can meets Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Or, "Trump, The Sequel"
Tom

 

[lpetrich]

George Santos NY-03, meet fellow prevaricator Anna Paulina Luna FL-13.

Liz Goodwin on Twitter: "Rep Anna Paulina Luna said that her father was a “messianic Jew,” which some family members dispute, and that she has Ashkenazi heritage. Her grandfather appeared to have served in the Nazi army while a young man in Germany. ⁦@JaxAlemany⁩ " / Twitter

• Ashkenazi - Jews of northern, central, and eastern Europe
• Sephardi - Jews of the Iberian Peninsula: Spain, Portugal, Latin America
• Mizrahi - Jews of the Arab world
• Ethiopian - Jews of that African nation

The most familiar sort of Jewish identity to US people is Ashkenazi.

Messianic Jew: "Jew for Jesus"

Anna Paulina Luna rose to Congress on a compelling life story. It surprised some who knew her. - The Washington Post - "Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have surprised some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year."

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.

By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.” She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration. She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

That seems odd to some of her family members and friends.

Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records. “She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” said the roommate, Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service.

In her first week in Congress, she was one of the opponents of Kevin McCarthy's speaker bid.

Her accounts of her early life are a tangled mixture of fact and fiction.

At Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base, where Luna served as an airfield operations manager, some of her peers thought she came from a well-off family — she wore designer clothing and mentioned at times having nannies as a child, according to two former friends. They recalled her talking about her aspiration of being a Maxim magazine model.

According to a biography of Luna on the website of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit where she worked, she “modeled professionally as a means of paying for expenses that the GI bill did not cover.”

Luna — whose mother’s family is Mexican American and paternal grandmother was born in Hidalgo, Mexico — now describes herself as Hispanic and uses the Spanish pronunciation of her first name. But fellow service members say Luna did not publicly describe herself as Hispanic at the time and referred to herself using the English pronunciation.

...
When Luna first registered to vote in Okaloosa County, Fla., in 2015, she identified herself as “White, not of Hispanic origin.” But she marked her ethnicity as Hispanic when she updated her registration in 2019.

That same year, at age 29, she filed a petition in Washington state requesting to change her name to Luna. In the petition, which was reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times, Luna wrote that she wanted “to represent my Hispanic heritage and have the same last name as my mother.”

Her mother Monica Luna:

“Anna can check both boxes,” she added. “She’s bicultural and biracial. It’s not easy to figure out what box to choose.”

“I am extremely proud of Anna for not only remembering, but embracing and identifying with her cultural heritage. I hope she encourages others to do the same,” Monica Luna added. “It would have been a lot easier for her to deny it; she certainly has been attacked again, and again because of it.”

 

[lpetrich]

She is much like George Santos: "Jew...ish"

Luna also stated on the campaign trail and in an interview with Jewish Insider in November that while she identifies as Christian, she was “raised as a Messianic Jew by her father.” Messianic Jews identify as Jewish and say they believe that Jesus is the Messiah. “I am also a small fraction Ashkenazi,” she added, referring to Jews whose ancestors lived in Central or Eastern Europe.

Luna’s mother said her father was a “Christian that embraced the Messianic faith.”

“He eventually got clean and started attending a messianic Jewish church in Orange County. He brought Anna to services and she buried him to Jewish customs,” Monica Luna wrote in a text.

However, three members of Luna’s extended family said that her father was Catholic, and that they were not aware of him practicing any form of Judaism while Luna was growing up.

Her positions?

The new House Freedom Caucus member has compared Democrats’ approach to human trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border to human rights abuses in China, called on the United States to stop sending tanks to Ukraine and suggested criminalizing taxation.

Luna has also promised to tackle the issue of censorship, balance the budget and launch a veterans coalition, while sharing motivational messages about her journey to Washington along the way.

 

[lpetrich]

Santos’s Lies Were Known to Some Well-Connected Republicans - The New York Times - "George Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party, yet many Republicans looked the other way." - "Representative George Santos ignored advice that he drop out of the 2022 House race because of issues uncovered in a routine background check."

In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.

Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.

Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.

Uncovering things like:

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman.

Was it an immigration marriage? But the researchers could not find anything conclusive on that.

The Democrats?

Democrats then labored unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by higher-profile races, to dig into the troubling leads they did unearth. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small weekly newspaper on Long Island, which labeled Mr. Santos “a fake” — and a few opinion pieces in Newsday, New York’s media machine paid Mr. Santos scant attention.

Then about his run in 2020. Democrat Tom Suozzi never bothered to commission any opposition research on him, not thinking that it would be worth the trouble.

With a more competitive race expected in 2022, researchers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee did the first meaningful opposition research on Mr. Santos that summer, assembling an 87-page opposition research book. It extensively documents Mr. Santos’s past statements — including his extreme views on abortion rights and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Using public records, the committee’s researchers also turned up some red flags in Mr. Santos’s biography: multiple evictions; no I.R.S. registration for an animal charity he had claimed to have created; details about his involvement with Harbor City (Mr. Santos himself was not named in the Ponzi scheme allegations) and more recent suspicious business dealings; as well as apparent discrepancies in his financial disclosure forms that raised questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had lent his campaign.

But with orders to produce similar research books on dozens of other candidates across the country, the committee’s strained research team left stones unturned. At several points, researchers explicitly flagged the need for follow-up inquiries, such as to “determine whether Santos has a criminal record.” And their study failed to turn up key problems that prompted Mr. Santos’s own vendors to quit months earlier: his fabricated educational record, his marriage to a woman and questions about his residency.

 

[lpetrich]

Then about Robert Zimmerman's run against him. RZ was reluctant to do much on his own, despite him being a public-relations executive. Most news services did not do much, with one exception.

One outlet stood out, The North Shore Leader in Long Island, run by a Republican lawyer and former House candidate, Grant Lally. The paper published a pair of articles casting doubt on Mr. Santos’s claims that he owned extravagant cars and homes, and labeling him a “fabulist — a fake,” though it did not have other specifics that would later come out about his falsified résumé or his past.

None of the bigger outlets, including The Times, followed up with extensive stories examining his real address or his campaign’s questionable spending, focusing their coverage instead on Mr. Santos’s extreme policy views and the historic nature of a race between two openly gay candidates.

GS himself commissioned that vulnerability research, though he canceled the contract from what the researchers found.

Researchers found no evidence that Mr. Santos had earned degrees at Baruch College and New York University, as he had claimed. They turned up records showing his involvement with the company accused of a Ponzi scheme — a relationship he had played down. They found eviction records, business records and a suspended Florida driver’s license, which together raised questions about whether he was a legal New York resident and as rich as he claimed to be.

The report also said that Mr. Santos, who was openly gay and appeared to be living with a man at the time, had been married to a woman. The study missed other fabrications that The Times later uncovered, including false claims that he worked at Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Nor did it turn up records of fraud charges in Brazil years earlier.

How much were Republican leaders aware of all these problems with GS? That article does not say much.

 

[lpetrich]

Ron Filipkowski on Twitter: "George Santos II. New Rep. Andy Ogles claimed that he was a law enforcement officer who investigated international sex crimes, also that he was an economist, as well as a nationally recognized expert in health care and tax policy. It appears he was none of these. (vid link)" / Twitter
He's R-TN-05.

Economist, cop, sex crimes expert? The stories of Congressman Andy Ogles - "Congressman places block on confirmation of educational credentials, but NewsChannel 5 digs up an old résumé"

His congressional bio says he obtained a degree from Middle Tennessee State University, "where he studied policy and economics."

Yet, the school refused to confirm Ogles' degree, citing a provision of federal law that allows students to block the release of their educational credentials.

...
NewsChannel 5 Investigates checked and, back in 2002, Ogles' website claimed he had "studied foreign policy and the constitution" at Western Kentucky University and Middle Tennessee State.

There was no mention of economics.

Western Kentucky says when he was there from fall of 1990 to fall of 1993, Ogles actually majored in English and Allied Language Arts.

If that wasn't bad enough, he also bragged about his professional accomplishments.

The congressman's website also claims that "while working at the Laffer Center, Andy became a nationally recognized expert on tax policy and healthcare, having been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily."

But a search of those sites shows only three columns he wrote, in two cases with another person, when he was a lobbyist for the conservative Americans for Prosperity — nothing independently citing him as an expert.

All three were published before he went to work at the Laffer Center.

"It might be a bit more credible if a news organization had called him and quoted him on the basis that he was a national expert," said MTSU political science professor John Vile.

Also about what a cop he was.

Then, there are Ogles' claims to be a trained police officer and international sex crimes expert.

During one GOP debate, the candidate prefaced one answer "as a former member of law enforcement, worked in international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking...."

In another forum, he claimed, "You know, my midlife crisis, I went into law enforcement. I worked in human trafficking."

Interviewed on C-SPAN after he took office in Congress, Ogles spoke about human trafficking over the Southern border, claiming: "This is from firsthand experience of someone who worked in that space. I turned gray because of it."

Again, on the night of the State of the Union, he told C-SPAN, "You know, part of my career, I worked in human trafficking."

In fact, our investigation found Ogles was sworn in as a volunteer reserve deputy with the Williamson County Sheriff's Office in July 2009.

Records show he lost that position two years later for not meeting minimum standards, making no progress in field training and failure to attend required meetings.

 

[lpetrich]

Congressman Andy Ogles, graduate of respected business schools? Not really

New Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles has claimed to have done graduate work at highly respected business schools at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth universities, but is it true?

Not really.

...
But NewsChannel 5 Investigates obtained a resume showing the Tennessee Republican's degree was not in economics, but in international relations with minors in psychology and English.

...
Curiously, Ogles went through a contested Republican primary without his claims ever being challenged.

MTSU political science professor John Vile said that, just like the situation with New York Congressman George Santos, candidates can slip through because of declining media resources, as well as a decline in the power of political parties.

"Local media is somewhat hollowed out from what it used to be," Vile noted.

"One of the downsides of political parties was the notion of people meeting in smoke-filled rooms and coming to decisions, but one of the advantages was some of these sort of old timers had a better idea of, you know, people's reputation outside of the media."

George Santos, meet Andy Ogles and Anna Paulina Luna.

 

[lpetrich]

George Santos Married a Brazilian Woman. House Is Asked to Find Out Why. - The New York Times - "A letter to ethics watchdogs in the House of Representatives questioned if Mr. Santos’s seven-year marriage was a scheme to aid a woman’s immigration bid."

Ten years ago, when George Santos was 24, he got married.

That marriage, to a Brazilian woman, would last seven years. In that time, Mr. Santos began to lay the groundwork for a largely fictional life story, moving back and forth between New York and Florida, working sporadic jobs that he later falsely inflated into a successful Wall Street career, and navigating a handful of evictions. He would also date men — even proposing to one in 2014.

By 2019, Mr. Santos was divorced, not long before he launched his first congressional campaign. But the old relationship drew new scrutiny on Wednesday, via a letter filed with ethics watchdogs in the House of Representatives requesting an investigation into whether Mr. Santos has violated federal immigration laws.

Meaning that this marriage was an immigration marriage, a way for his wife to get US citizenship. She succeeded.

Mr. Lazin does not claim to have any firsthand knowledge or clear evidence that Mr. Santos’s marriage was a sham, instead appending a series of details from news reports that suggest that the couple lived separate lives, including the fact that Mr. Santos dated men during his marriage.

 

[lpetrich]

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: George Santos' on-camera explanation of swirling controversies - City & State New York

In an interview in December with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos suggested that he was not openly gay when he first married. “I did marry young, and I married a young woman at the time, and we pretty much were in love,” he said.

But, he continued, the relationship ended after he decided to come out. “I set myself free and I set her free,” he said, adding that the split had been somewhat contentious and preceded a long period before his divorce. He is now in a committed relationship with a man.

Still, friends, former roommates and co-workers said in interviews that Mr. Santos identified as gay for his entire adult life and that he was dating men during the period in which he was married to his ex-wife.

One of those men, Pedro Vilarva, recalled that Mr. Santos had proposed to him in 2014. He said that the couple lived together for several months but separated after Mr. Vilarva discovered that Mr. Santos was wanted by Brazilian authorities for check fraud.

 

[lpetrich]

Timeline:

• 2012: George Santos marries a Brazilian woman
• 2013: In May, one of the two tried to end the marriage, but in December, the attempt was dropped
• 2014 March: GS filed a family-based immigration petition. July: conditional permanent residence approved
• 2016 July: The required two years passed, and the woman requested removal of conditions
• 2017 October: the woman becomes a permanent resident
• 2022 August: the woman becomes a US citizen
• 2022 October: " she filed a petition to sponsor her new husband, who is also Brazilian, for a green card, according to the timeline. That matter is pending"

If officials were to find that Mr. Santos entered into the marriage in order to obtain citizenship for his wife he could face up to five years in prison, and his former wife could be deported.

Attempts to reach Mr. Santos’s ex-wife in New Jersey have been unsuccessful, and divorce cases in New York are sealed.

There is no indication that authorities noted anything out of the ordinary about Mr. Santos’s marriage during their initial review.

...
In the letter, Mr. Lazin wrote that Mr. Santos planned a party to celebrate his engagement to Mr. Vilarva while still married, as reported by The Daily Beast, and offered to marry another man to help him get a green card, as reported by ABC News. He requested that the House review Mr. Santos’s representations to authorities to assess whether he made false statements, a crime under federal law.