Who are these people?
Trumpism. MAGA. Not even GQP cult members would have predicted that making America great again meant turning it into a corrupt, third-world, white, Christian kleptocracy. (In the name of Jesus, amen.) But here we are.
Republicans, conservative Christians foremost, who elevated the Trump crime family to First Family helped elect an even bigger fraud to Congress on Long Island.
David Corn teases some of what we know (and don’t) about Brazilian-born Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.):
George Santos, the apparent GOP fabulist, went from $55K a year in 2020 to making between $3.5m-$11.5m in 2021 via a company he created that lasted less than a year—and he has put out vague/conflicting accounts of what this firm did. Apply the smell test.
Corn continues the tale at Mother Jones:
He had boasted of being an accomplished investor and financier who had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Yet each firm noted it had no record of his employment there. He had said he graduated from Baruch College. The school said he had not. His personal finances seemed odd as well, and he had worked at a Florida company called Harbor City Capital that was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021 of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Subsequently, he supposedly made at least $3.5 million from a mysterious company, called Devolder Organization LLC, that he started, that had no public profile, and that was dissolved soon after it was created. This marked a dramatic shift from his first run for Congress in 2020, when he reported earning $55,000 per year.
[…]
The Times article cast Santos as a modern-day Mr. Ripley who seemingly had manufactured a rags-to-riches public persona based on audacious lies. He was once arrested in Brazil for forging checks. He boasted he founded an animal rescue charity, but the outfit barely existed and was not registered with the IRS as a nonprofit. (The intended beneficiary of one of its events reported never receiving the funds from a fundraiser Santos’ group helped to organize.) Before the election, Santos said he owned a “Hamptons mansion” worth $10 million, but according to his financial disclosure filings he owned no real estate at the time. (He was then renting an apartment in Queens.) All the unsubstantiated claims have prompted questions about his financial and business dealings, including Devolder and his interactions with Harbor City and its principals.
Donald Trump built a career out of lies about being self-made (he “started out” with millions from Papa Fred), but give him credit, he’s got a knack for running decades worth of scams that are only lately beginning to catch up with him.
Santos? Not so skillful.
Corn offers much more about Santos’ involvement with Devolder and Harbor City. But the con does not end there. It begins with what he claims about his roots in Brazil.
“His whole life. Made up,” said incoming House Democratic leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, in calling Santos a “complete and utter fraud.”
Hours before Mr. Jeffries spoke, The Forward, a Jewish publication based in New York City, reported that Mr. Santos, a Republican, may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry, a claim he made on his website and in statements during his political campaign.
In his current biography, Mr. Santos says that his mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”
But according to The Forward — which cited information from myheritage.com, a genealogy website; Brazilian immigration cards; and databases of refugees — Ms. Devolder’s parents seemed to have been born in Brazil before World War II. CNN later published a similar report that also cited interviews with several genealogists.
Ms. Devolder died in 2016, according to an online obituary. Mr. Santos said in a 2020 interview that his family converted to Christianity in Brazil, and on Ms. Devolder’s Facebook page, which links to Mr. Santos’s, she regularly shared Christian imagery and had “liked” numerous Facebook pages associated with Brazil-based Christian organizations.
Mr. Santos’s campaign, his lawyer and a political consulting firm that had been fielding reporter inquiries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If, as it appears, Santos has perpetrated a massive fraud against voters in his district, none of it will likely keep him from taking office. What may get him in legal hot water are any fraudulent statements on his financial disclosure. At a minimum, he enters Congress under an ethics investigation.
Corn elaborates:
On the financial disclosure form Santos filed in September 2022, he characterized Devolder in yet another way, calling it a “Capital intro consulting company.” He stated that he had earned $750,000 in salary and between $1 million $5 million in dividend income from Devolder in 2021 and the same amounts in 2022. This means he claimed he pulled in between $3.5 million and $11.5 million from a firm that existed less than a year, that produced no public signs of any work, not even a website, and that he has not described consistently. Santos also stated on his 2022 form that he had a checking account worth between $100,000 and $250,000 and a savings account worth between $1 million and $5 million. His 2020 financial disclosure form listed no such accounts and no such assets.
Somehow Santos went from making $55,000 per year in 2020 to lending his campaign $700,000 in 2022. That’s some Trump-level financifying.
This week we are learning from the ex-president’s tax returns how well Donald learned financifying from Papa Fred. Including how to dodge gift taxes. The Joint Committee on Taxation immediately spotted “dozens of red flags that it believed required further investigation,” the New York Times reports:
One involved transactions with his children. According to the tax data, Mr. Trump annually received tens of thousands of dollars in interest income from three of his grown children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — money that stemmed from what his returns described as personal loans to them. The committee questioned whether the loans actually “were disguised gifts” to evade gift taxes and allow the children to write off interest payments to their father.
The 2018 Pulitzer-winnin investigation of the Trump Organization’s tax scheming shows where Donald learned it. In a few short years Donald has so infused the Republican Party with Himself that it seems to be incubating mini-Trumps like Santos.
Lies, fraud, and cheating are now de rigueur for the Republican Party, something to aspire to in a culture in which the only thing that matters is winning. It’s what Trump always meant by great.
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