Today we found out that George Santos could have saved us so much work. But then he also would have deprived us of so many laughs. It’s a pickle!
CBS reports that back in 2021 when he was contemplating a congressional run, Santos hired an outside firm to compile a “vulnerability report” documenting all the potential weak spots in his past or unorthodox-for-the-GOP political positions that an election opponent could exploit. And he got his money’s worth! Or whoever he scammed to pay for the report did.
The report found so many questionable claims and problems in Santos’s past that his aides told him he should drop out of the race. When he refused, several of them quit. Maybe one of them could have slipped a copy of the report to the media or the Democrats on their way out the door, and the whole “Ballad of George Santos” would have ended there.
But no, they stayed quiet, perhaps for some weird reason thinking a competent Democratic opponent would invest in similar opposition research, forgetting that this is the Democratic Party we’re talking about. The Democrats actually compiled an 87-page dossier on Santos on their own, but it relied on public reporting, and therefore missed a whole bunch of stuff.
Or maybe the Republicans could have stopped Santos themselves, if they weren’t either idiots or so desperate for a House majority that they figured a compromised George Santos flailing under scandal after scandal and, eventually, felony indictments for wire fraud and money laundering, that the report had red-flagged was still better than a Democrat holding the seat:
The report's conclusions ultimately circulated among campaign strategists for top House Republicans and led the Congressional Leadership Fund, the primary super PAC dedicated to electing House Republicans, to withhold its support of Santos, according to three sources familiar with the matter. A top House Republican, Elise Stefanik, campaigned with Santos well after the report was compiled.
We get it, we wouldn’t want to spend a moment of time or energy calling Elise Stefanik to warn her about an incoming asteroid, much less a scandal-riddled candidate she nevertheless planned to campaign with, but that is why God invented e-mail.
Anyway, what potential scandals did the report flag that then came out after the election? Let’s see, Green Card-married to a woman while living with a man? Check. Was threatened with eviction from multiple dwellings in Queens? Check. Worked for a company that the SEC later accused of being a Ponzi scheme? Check. Claiming to be a personal finance expert who makes wealth grow while not actually investing and making his wealth grow? Check.
(DEEP BREATH)
Owes thousands of dollars to creditors? Check. Lied about attending Horace Mann and Baruch College and the NYU business school? Check. Lied about being Jewish and having family who fled the Holocaust? Check. Claimed to work for big financial firms when he did not work for those big financial firms? Check.
And these were just a sample of the top problems bullet-pointed on the first four pages of the report. And the report is over 100 pages long.
Of course with the way this story has gone, there is a good likelihood Santos will tell us he’s been a woman named Frieda. Oh wait, he almost already did.
[CBS News]
We can assure you that we have not put George Santos in charge of collecting donations.
Leave this poor man alone!
His mother was killed at the Somme, on 9/11 and during the Battle of Agincourt. Hasn’t he suffered enough??
Having just watched that Mehdi Hassan interview of Vivek Ramaswamy, in which Ramaswamy clearly lies with every single breath, one understands that lying with every breath is exactly the qualification for being a Republican candidate so of course Santos is not a problem for them.