Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) needs Rep. George Santos’ (R-NY) vote more than ever. The rules demanded by the conservatives ended proxy voting, and Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) is covering at home after falling 25 feet from a ladder on his Sarasota property. As of yet, there is no timeline for his recovery. Unfortunately for McCarthy, discoveries continue to spill out, and Santos keeps lying about them.
Santos’ has deep ties with Andrew Intrater, the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg. Beyond heavily donating to Santos’ campaigns, Intrater invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos’ former employer, Harbor City, now investigated by the SEC for its Ponzi schemes, and Intrator’s investment firm, Columbus Nova, is connected to Vekselberg’s business interests. In 2020 Santos bragged that Columbus Nova was a “client” of his.
When Harbor City’s assets were frozen in 2021, Santos, with help from a former Harbor City employee, formed his company, the Devolder Organization, which paid him at least $3.5 million in the next two years. The business is also incorporated in Florida using the now-empty Melbourne offices of a Ob/Gyn practice as its address along with several companies tied to former Harbor City executives. Odette Daley, the doctor who formerly practiced here, is married to Devaughn Dames, former CFO of Harbor City. After the New York Times story about Santos and Harbor City, he moved the headquarters address to a Merritt Island penthouse, home of Harbor City’s former chief technology officer Jayson Benoit. A few weeks later, the business address shifted to a Fast Mail N More store in Melbourne, using the same box number as D&D International Investment Services Inc., listed as the registered agent for the Devolder Organization. In state records, Dames is president of D&D and Daley as vice president.
Intrator claims that Santos conned him and continued his support for Santos’ election because Santos said he was also a victim of Harbor City’s fraud.
After Santos lied about being a college volleyball player at Baruch College, he gilded the lily with false claims that his volleyball scholarship caused him to get bilateral knee replacements from Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, the #1 hospital for orthopedic surgery. He also expressed anger at “youth today” who are “sitting on their behinds” with the lie that he earned an MBA from New York University without going into debt. According to Santos, his parents couldn’t help him because they were going through bankruptcy. No records exist of Santos attending Baruch or NYU and his parents going through bankruptcy.
A homeless veteran said that Santos stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe page that Santos set up to help pay for surgery for the man’s dying service dog. A veterinarian tech suggested that Anthony Devolder, an alias for Santos, could help the veteran because Devolder ran a pet charity. Friends of Pets United has no record of registration with either the IRS or AG offices in either New York or New Jersey. The veteran discovered that Santos closed and deleted the fundraising page; Santos stopped answering the veteran’s texts and calls.
Another vet had been willing to do the life-saving surgery, but Santos/Devolder insisted the dog go to a different vet who refused to perform the surgery. The dog died six months later, and the veteran, who was out of work for over a year because of a broken leg, was forced to panhandle to pay for the dog’s euthanasia and cremation. Other people have reported that Santos scammed them. Last month, a woman reported that never received any funds from a 2017 fundraising event in which Santos charged $50 per person.
Earlier Santos lies:
- His grandparents fled the Holocaust.
- His mother died as a result of 9/11.
- He was mugged on the way to deliver a check for bank rant. (No record of this crime!)
- He “lost four employees” in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando where 49 people died.
Revisionist lying: Caught in his lie that his mother died in the Twin Towers on 9/11, he said she “was in her office in the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, when the horrific events of that day unfolded.” He added that she died a few years later from cancer. When she applied for a visa from Brazil in February 2003, she stated she hadn’t been in the U.S. since 1999.
Some Santos’ crimes:
- He stole a checkbook in Brazil from his mother’s patient and bought clothing. (The retail clerk had to pay for the items when the theft was discovered.)
- He wore a scarf at a “Stop the Steal” rally that he stole from a roommate.
- He spent exactly $199.99 on several campaign expenditures filed with the FEC, precisely exactly one-cent below the amount required for the FEC to keep receipts. (One was at a restaurant where he spent over $25,000 where that exact amount couldn’t be spent.)
- His staffer pretended to be McCarthy’s chief of staff for donations.
In an embarrassment for Republicans, Santos allegedly performed in drag in Brazil 15 years ago. Journalist Marisa Kabas has a photo of him as Kitara Revache dressed in drag with fellow drag queen Eula Rochard. Santos denounced drag shows and vigorously slammed gender-nonconforming people, describing their surgeries as “mutilations.” Trying to dodge GOP censure, Santos more quickly denied the drag queen story than the stealing money from a veteran and sick dog story. In 2011, Sandos, going by his Anthony Devolder, appeared to speak positively about his drag queen appearances, and a 2005 video from the Rio Pride parade shows him wearing a black dress and bragging to a Portuguese interviewer about his drag shows. (Photo of Santos from Brazilian drag performer Eula Rochard.) Yesterday, however, Santos admitted to dressing in drag but he’s no “drag queen.” He was “just having fun.”
In a 2011 Wiki bio, Anthony Devolder, aka George Santos, describes his successful Hollywood career after meeting with a producer of the 1996 blockbuster Independents [sic] Day. He name-dropped Steven Spielberg (misspelling it “Spilberg”) instead of director Roland Emmerich and claims to have starred in “a few T.V shows and DISNEY Channel shows such as ‘the suite life of Zack and Cody” and the hit “Hanna [sic] Montana.” He concluded by writing that, two years prior, he “taped his very first movie startting [sic] Uma Turman, [sic] Chris Odanald [sic], Melllisa [sic] George, and Alicia Silver Stone [sic] in the movie “THE INVASION.” The 2007 SF/thriller starts Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.
Vanessa Friedman writes about grifter Santos stereotypically dressing the part of the lies he tells—the blue blazer, intellectual glasses, etc.—to match his fabricated résumé. McCarthy just hopes that he can get away with keep Santos’ vote by expressing ignorance about anything connecting with Santos. The closest concern McCarthy showed was to say, “I never knew all about his resume or not, but I always had a few questions about it.”
Four years ago when McCarthy was House Minority Leader, he agreed with the decision to strip then-Rep. Steve King (R-IA) of committee assignments, saying his conference simply could not “tolerate” King’s racism any longer, and the Iowan was no longer a Republican member in good standing. King wasn’t convicted of any crime, and he had been elected for the position, two reasons McCarthy used to put Santos on committees. Yet four years ago, the GOP was the minority party in the House, and King was expendable.
The 21st century has been an embarrassment for House Republicans with scandals for Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Mark Foley as well as the revelation that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert from 1999 to 2007 had sexually molested boys as young as 14 when he was a high school wrestling coach. In 2010 when the Tea Party put the GOP back in the House majority, their leaders promised a “zero-tolerance policy” for members’ embarrassing controversies reflecting poorly on the party. GOP leaders got resignations from then-Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) who had an affair with a congressional staffer and then-Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY) who tried to meet women in Craiglist’s personals section. Then-Rep. Vance McAllister (R-LA) wouldn’t resign for kissing a staffer not his wife, but he lost his re-election within months. None of these people was charged with crimes or send them to the Ethics Committee.
Arithmetical problems representing the need for GOP votes controls the change in morality. Both Democratic and GOP House members have suffered censure and reprimands, but Republican leadership now rewards their members for violent threats toward other members and QAnon lies by giving them seats on plum committees.
Satire showing Santos’ medals during World War II showing how far he might go with his lies.
Last September, before the election, a small newpaper, The North Shore Leader, laid out Santos’ corrupt past to its largely Republican readership, but the information was largely ignored by the electorate and larger press. Suggestions for Democrats: vet the opposition and pay attention to all the press, not just the major media.
Meanwhile, Santos’ colleagues aren’t even sure what his name really is, but he has been put on House committees. The “Grand Old Party” stands for nothing.