NEW YORK (AP) – U.S. Rep. George Santos, who faced outrage and ridicule for a litany of fabrications about his heritage, education and professional pedigree, has been charged with federal criminal offenses, they said two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.
The charges against Santos, filed in the Eastern District of New York, remain sealed.
The people could not publicly discuss specific details of the case until it is unsealed and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. The unsealing would occur when Santos appears in court, which could come as soon as Wednesday.
Reached Tuesday, Santos said, “This is news to me.”
“You’re the first person to call me about this,” he said in a brief phone interview.
A spokesman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment. The charges were first reported by CNN.
The New York Republican has admitted to lying about having Jewish ancestry, a Wall Street background, college degrees and a history as a star volleyball player. Serious questions also arose about his finances, including the source of what he claimed was a fortune quickly amassed despite recent financial problems, including evictions and owing thousands of dollars in back rent.
Santos has resisted calls to resign and recently announced he is running for re-election. He said his lies about his life history, which included telling people he had jobs at several global financial firms and a rich real estate portfolio, were harmless embellishments on his resume.
The pressure on him to quit, however, has been intense. Journalists and citizens chased him. He was mocked on social media and on late-night television. His fellow New York Republicans demanded his resignation, saying he had betrayed voters and his own party with his lies.
Nassau County prosecutors and the New York attorney general’s office had previously said they were investigating possible violations of the law.
In addition to questions about his life history, Santos’ campaign spending fueled scrutiny because of unusual payments for travel, lodging and other items.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission and urged regulators to investigate Santos. The “mountain of lies” Santos spread during the campaign about his life story and qualifications, the center said, should prompt the commission to “thoroughly investigate what appear to be equally blatant lies about how his campaign raised and spent money.”
In his statements to the FEC, Santos initially said he loaned his campaign and related political action committees more than $750,000, money he claimed came from a family business.
However, the wealth required to make these loans seems to have come out of nowhere. In a 2020 financial disclosure statement filed with the U.S. House Clerk, Santos said he had no assets and an annual income of $55,000.
His company, the Devolder Organization, was not incorporated until the spring of 2021. However, last September, Santos filed another financial disclosure form reporting that this new company, incorporated in Florida, had paid him a salary of $750,000 in each of the last two years, plus another $1 million to $5 million in dividends. In an interview, Santos described the Devolder Organization as a business that helped the wealthy buy things like yachts and airplanes.
Court records show Santos was the subject of three eviction proceedings in Queens between 2014 and 2017 for unpaid rent.
Some Republicans, including those in his district, have chastised Santos for his dishonesty. The Nassau County Republican Committee, which had supported his candidacy, said it would not endorse Santos for re-election.
Santos lost his first congressional race in 2020, but ran again in 2022 and won a district that includes suburban Long Island and part of Queens.
A local newspaper, The North Shore Leader, had raised questions about Santos’ background before the election, but it wasn’t until weeks after the election that the depth of his duplicity became public.
The New York Times reported that the companies where Santos claimed to have worked, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, had no record of him being an employee. Baruch College, where Santos claimed to have earned a degree in finance and economics, said he had not been a student.
Beyond his resume, Santos concocted a life story that has also been questioned, including claims that his grandparents “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and fled persecution again during the Second World War”.
During his campaign, he referred to himself as “a proud American Jew.”
Asked about that story, Santos, a Roman Catholic, said he never intended to claim Jewish heritage.
The Times also uncovered records in Brazil that show Santos, then 19, was the subject of a criminal investigation there in 2008 over allegations he used stolen checks to buy items at a clothing store in the city of Niteroi, near Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian authorities said they have reopened the case.
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Amiri reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak in New York and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed to this report.
