Santos Moaned That His Name Is No Longer Worth Clicks
Last month, George Santos was so desperate for attention that he called Grace Ashford, one of the NY Times reporters who ruined his life by putting his deceit under a public microscope, making him something on a household name— or at least a late night comedy punchline. And he’s still lying his ass off. He told her agents of the Chinese Communist Party kidnapped his 5 year old niece from a Queens playground (presumably because of his support for right-wing Chinese sociopath Guo Wengui). It turned out that the CCP didn’t kidnap or and, in fact, that she wasn’t kidnapped at all.
“By now,” she wrote yesterday, “the biographical fictions are well known: the jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs that he never had, the Baruch and N.Y.U. degrees he never obtained and the volleyball team he never played on. There were also unresolved fraud charges in Brazil— a precursor to what would soon follow. Santos now faces 23 felony counts— including 10 new ones added earlier this month— for a variety of financial schemes, many of which involve his campaign. He has pleaded not guilty. But even as I spent the better part of the past year covering every dimension of his campaign and criminal trial— poring over his campaign filings, watching every interview and ringing up his old colleagues, family members, lovers and friends— I had never had an actual conversation with the man.”
He had steadfastly refused to talk with her— until last month when he initiated a chat-fest spanning a dozen calls. He did make it “clear that he held me personally responsible for much of his misfortune, and was no fan of The Times… The conversations touched on his criminal case, his political beliefs, his preferred gift at a baby shower, both of our pets and the many, many people who have wronged him… I came to know something else as well: the peculiar experience of being confided in and lied to at the same time.”
“I think the reporting, on all ends, of every single journalist in this country has been bad,” he said, before launching into a list of what he considered the low points. There were the allegations that he had stolen a scarf, the accounts of his falsely telling people he was a journalist and the reports that he was being propped up by Russian or Chinese oligarchs. And, of course, his past as a supposed drag queen.
“I do drag for a freakin’ festival in Brazil, and now I have a career!” he exclaimed.
He was particularly preoccupied by the claim that he stole money meant to benefit a dying dog, repeatedly insisting that he had never met the man who accused him of the theft and claiming to have evidence that he was not reliable. (The Times has reviewed text messages which appear to show that at the very least, the two had been in contact.)
He went on to find fault with the people Michael [Gold] and I had spoken to for our initial article, which he said contained “a lot of factual and timeline errors.”
(When I requested specifics, he would only say that his team had requested numerous corrections, all of them ignored. Our standards team, which typically receives requests for corrections, found none from Santos or his representatives.)
He took aim at specific individuals in journalism and politics, who he said had slandered him with concocted tales that would live forever in print and online searches.
…In most of our conversations, Santos remained fiercely, even relentlessly, positive. But not all the time.
“I literally threw my entire life into the toilet and flushed it to get elected,” he told me, quickly adding that he would do it all over again.
Well, not all of it.
In his telling, he is guilty only of surrounding himself with the wrong people. He spreads the blame among back-stabbing consultants and unscrupulous campaign aides.
There was Samuel Miele, who was indicted in August on charges of impersonating a staffer of the former House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, as he made fund-raising calls on Santos’s behalf.
Santos has not been charged in that scheme and stresses that he fired Miele the “nanosecond” he found out.
He is more bitter about his now-soured relationship with his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks.
He maintains that she is to blame for any and all campaign finance issues. He maintains he was her victim, as the recipient of criminally negligent advice at best, embezzlement at worst.
“I was never even a signer on a single bank account,” he said once, using an expletive for emphasis. “I didn’t have the power, or card, to go in the bank and say, ‘Give me five bucks.’”
He insists that most of the federal charges against him are a collection of mistakes and misunderstandings, many of them caused by his treasurer’s dishonesty or incompetence.
“I am ready to prove my innocence,” he told me. “People think that I’m just going to get steamrolled. No, I’m going to prove my innocence.”
Marks has complicated that plan. Earlier this month, she pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, saying that she and Santos filed falsified campaign reports with fictional donations and a fake $500,000 personal loan from Santos to his campaign.
In one of our conversations, before her indictment and the second round of charges, I asked him outright about the loans and whether he was worried that she might testify against him.
“All the money is legitimate,” he assured me. “All the money came from me, period.”
In a subsequent conversation, he tried to clarify that only the timing was wrong. He said he made the $500,000 loan to his campaign in September and October 2022. Why campaign finance reports indicated the loan was made earlier, in March, only Marks knew, he said.
It sounded possible. Perhaps the loans, much like Schrödinger’s cat, might be both fake and real at the same time, if the money came in at some point after March 2022.
It was also possible that George was lying to my face.
He was strangely compelling in our conversations. But just as odd was the cognitive dissonance of being misled so brazenly.
I came to think of him a little like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff— able to keep from falling so long as his legs kept moving.
… Even if he was to resign, it is unlikely that his legal problems would go away. One of the newer charges, aggravated identity theft, carries a two-year mandatory minimum sentence. He is set to be arraigned on the new charges at the end of this month.
Resigning would also do little to ease the burden of being George Santos— his exploits serving as tabloid fodder, his name a punchline. Indeed, stepping away out of the spotlight would accomplish little for him— particularly if the spotlight is where he wants to remain.
“In office I actually have a platform,” he told me. “I have a voice.”
When I told George I would be writing a story about our conversations, he reacted angrily. I tried to assure him that we would be fair and that the article might actually serve his purpose: to get his authentic voice out there.
He said that he would never speak to me again.
