George Santos Admits to Lying About College and Work History

The congressman-elect confirmed The New York Times’s findings that he had not graduated from college or worked at two major Wall Street firms, as he had claimed.

Ending a weeklong silence, Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to a sizable list of falsehoods about his professional background, educational history and property ownership. But he said he was determined to take the oath of office on Jan. 3 and join the House majority.

Mr. Santos, a New York Republican who was elected in November to represent parts of northern Long Island and northeast Queens, confirmed some of the key findings of a New York Times investigation into his background, but sought to minimize the misrepresentations.

“My sins here are embellishing my résumé,” Mr. Santos told The New York Post in one of several interviews he gave on Monday.

Mr. Santos admitted to lying about graduating from college and making misleading claims that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. He once said he had a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties; on Monday, he admitted he was not a landlord.

Mr. Santos, the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, also acknowledged owing thousands in unpaid rent and a yearslong marriage he had never disclosed.

“I dated women in the past. I married a woman. It’s personal stuff,” he said to The Post, adding that he was “OK with my sexuality. People change.”

The admissions by Mr. Santos added a new wrinkle to one of the more astonishing examples of an incoming congressman falsifying key biographical elements of his background — with Mr. Santos maintaining the falsehoods through two consecutive bids for Congress, the first of which he lost.

Mr. Santos acknowledged that a string of financial difficulties had left him owing thousands to landlords and creditors. But he failed to fully explain in the interviews how his fortunes reversed so significantly that, by 2022, he was able to lend $700,000 to his congressional campaign.

Mr. Santos also firmly denied committing a crime anywhere in the world, even though The Times had uncovered Brazilian court records showing that Mr. Santos had been charged with fraud as a young man after he was caught writing checks with a stolen checkbook.

“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he told The Post. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”

“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my résumé,” he said, later adding: “We do stupid things in life.”

He also admitted that he never worked directly for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, blaming a “poor choice of words” for creating the impression that he had.

Past statements of Mr. Santos are relatively clear however: An archived version of Mr. Santos’s former campaign website preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine says he “began working at Citigroup as an associate and quickly advanced to become an associate asset manager in the real asset division of the firm.”

Mr Santos also admitted that he was not, as he claimed last year on Twitter, a landlord who makes significant income from 13 properties owned by him and his family.

“George Santos does not own any properties,” he told The Post, even though a financial disclosure he filed with the House in September said he owned an apartment in Rio de Janeiro.

Of greater potential concern are questions about Mr. Santos’s financial disclosures, where he reported earning millions of dollars from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Mr. Santos disclosed little about the operations of his company, and The Times could find no public-facing assets or other property tied to the firm. Mr. Santos also did not list any clients on his disclosures, despite the requirement that candidates list any compensation over $5,000 from a single source.

Intentionally omitting or misrepresenting information on a congressional financial disclosure is considered a federal crime.

In a video interview with City & State, Mr. Santos asserted that his consulting practice at the Devolder Organization built upon the work he had done at his former firm, LinkBridge.

“I had the relationships and I started making a lot of money. And I fundamentally started building wealth, and I decided I’d invest in my race for Congress,” Mr. Santos said, adding: “There’s nothing wrong with that — no criminal conduct. No anything of the sort.”

I believe in justice and the Democrats should pursue him like they did when that woman claimed she was an Native Indian.

The one that Trump was called racist for pointing it out.

Bobby. wrote on Dec 27^th, 2022 at 10:33pm:


That he was an alleged child rapist who failed at every single thing he ever attempted in life.

Steampipe wrote on Dec 27^th, 2022 at 10:10pm:


Trump.