But When Will Those Ogles Drag Photos Come Out?
About a month ago we looked at a George Santos-type story developing in Nashville, where far right Republican Andy Ogles was caught lying about… his whole life. Today the Washington Post fact check guy, Glenn Kessler, updated it: Tennessee congressman Andrew Ogles’s résumé is too good to be true. Kessler dug up a quote from when Ogles was campaigning last July: “They want power and control so badly that they are willing to say and do anything to get there. If you don’t have the integrity to just be you and run on what you’ve done, then I don’t want you in Congress. And so that’s how I present myself to you.”
How did he have the nerve?
The local media soon started picking up on a very distinct pattern of lies and exaggerations— kind of the way it all started with Santos. For example, “When Ogles was one of the holdouts to approving McCarthy as House speaker, he claimed he was ‘an economist’— a claim he has made several times— along with other embellishments. But NewsChannel 5 in Nashville found that he had taken only one course in economics, at a community college, and received a C. Ogles first entered college in 1990 and did not get a degree until 2007.” Kessler has come up with more evidence of Ogles’ “résumé inflation.” So much for integrity and running on what you’ve done.
Furthermore, Kessler reported that Ogles has been lying his ass off for decades! “In a 2009 résumé submitted for a job, he claimed numerous roles with businesses and on boards of organizations that were exaggerated or could not be corroborated. A consulting firm he claimed to run from 2003 to 2010 cannot be found in Tennessee corporate records. Indeed, during his various bids for public office in this period, local newspapers described him as a restaurateur, not a business consultant. Ogles now tends to skip over this period of his past. His LinkedIn page lists job history starting only in 2011, when he was about 40. In a January C-SPAN interview, when asked what he did before he came to Congress, Ogles said: ‘I was an entrepreneur young in my career. Fast-forwarding to my midlife crisis, I was in law enforcement and international sex crimes.’ As NewsChannel 5 documented, Ogles was sworn in as a volunteer reserve deputy with the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office in July 2009 but lost that position two years later for not meeting minimum standards, making no progress in field training and failing to attend required meetings. The ‘international sex crimes’ referred to a part-time position as chief operating officer of an anti-trafficking group, Abolition International, that paid a total of $4,000 in 2011, according to the tax filing of the organization.”
Ogles’ 2009 résumé says he was vice president of another Nashville company, called Franklin Investment & Holding, from June 1995 to January 2002. The résumé says that the company had “varied investments in retail, restaurant, real estate, hotel, and apartment properties” and that Ogles “increased portfolio share” by 25 percent and achieved continued growth of 18 to 25 percent a year.
But Tennessee corporate records show the firm, formed with Ogles’s brother Justin and a third partner, was in existence only for a fraction of that time. It was created in August 2001 and then dissolved a year later.
Ogles did create a company called Ogles Enterprises Inc. in 1996. This was a short-lived travel agency that was part of Travel Professionals International. The company and Ogles were sued by a landlord in 1997, and the company was cited by a travel arbiter for having “failed to pay for dishonored sales drafts worth $7,123.” It was dissolved by the state the same year.
With his father-in-law co-signing a loan, Ogles bought a doughnut shop in 1997. Then, in 2001, he expanded it to serve three meals a day, with his brother Justin as full partner, according to a June 10, 2001, Tennessean article.
In 2002, before being dissolved, Franklin Investment received a business license to operate the Mason Jar Café in nearby Brentwood, Tenn. In April 2003, during Ogles’s first, unsuccessful run for Congress, the Ogles brothers’ Daylight Donuts was put up for sale, with owner financing offered. That same year, the state issued a tax lien on the business.
The LinkedIn page for Justin Ogles lists him as owner/operator of Daylight Donuts and Café from June 1998 to February 2010. Reached by phone to explain his brother’s role in the company, Justin Ogles demurred. “I’m not in politics or anything,” he said. “It’s best you take it up with my brother.”
…He earns Four Pinocchios.
My guess is that Santos would earn closer to 400 Pinocchios. His latest crash with Truth is a doozy. And, as with all his crooked dealings, he denies everything. The Secret Service— the latest of a long list of law enforcement organizations to launch an investigation into Santos— is reviewing a 2017 complaint against him involving ATM fraud. Thursday, Jacqueline Sweet broke the story about his ex-roommate has accused him of orchestrating a 2017 credit card skimming operation in Orlando and Seattle. The ex-roomie, Gustavo Ribeiro Trelha, who was convicted of the crime and deported to Brazil, wrote a sworn affidavit for the FBI putting all the blame on Santos, or whatever his name is.
“I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos / Anthony Devolder,” he wrote. “Santos taught me how to skim card information and how to clone cards. He gave me all the materials and taught me how to put skimming devices and cameras on ATM machines.”
Santos kept a warehouse on Kirkman Road in Orlando to store the skimming equipment, according to the declaration.
“He had a lot of material— parts, printers, blank ATM and credit cards to be painted and engraved with stolen account and personal information.
“Santos gave me at his warehouse, some of the parts to illegally skim credit card information. Right after he gave me the card skimming and cloning machines, he taught me how to use them,” Trelha wrote.
Trelha then flew out to Seattle where he was caught on a security camera removing a skimming device from a Chase ATM on Pike Street, according to law enforcement records. He was arrested on April 27.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle previously told Politico it’s not unusual for credit card thieves to go far from home to nab numbers so there’s less chance of the stolen numbers being traced back to the perpetrators.
…At the time of his arrest, Trelha had a fake Brazilian ID card and 10 suspected fraudulent cards in his hotel room, according to police documents. An empty FedEx package police found in his rental car was sent from the Winter Park unit he shared with Santos.
Trelha told federal authorities in the declaration Wednesday that his “deal with Santos was 50% for him and 50% for me.”
“We used a computer to be able to download the information on the pieces. We also used an external hard drive to save the filming, because the skimmer took the information from the card, and the camera took the password,” he wrote.
“It didn’t work out so well, because I was arrested,” he admitted.
Trelha said Santos visited him in jail in Seattle, but told him not to implicate him in the scheme.
“Santos threatened my friends in Florida that I must not say that he was my boss,” he wrote.
Trelha agreed to say he was working for someone in Brazil and not with Santos, because he was worried Santos would have his friends in Orlando deported, he said in a telephone interview last month. Trelha recalled Santos warning he could “make things worse for him” since he was already in jail and Santos was a U.S. citizen.
In an audio recording of Trelha’s May 15, 2017 arraignment in King County Superior Court, Santos tells the judge he’s a “family friend” who was there to secure a local Airbnb if the defendant was released on bail.
Santos also claimed to the judge he worked for Goldman Sachs in New York, a key part of his campaign biography he later admitted wasn’t true.
Trehla was unable to post the $75,000 bail. He pleaded guilty to felony access device fraud, served seven months in jail and was deported to Brazil in early 2018.
“Santos did not help me to get out of jail. He also stole the money that I had collected for my bail,” Trelha told federal investigators in the declaration.
Trelha told Politico that before flying to Seattle, Santos had traveled to Orlando to pick up $20,000 in cash he instructed Leide Oliveira Santos, another roommate, to give him from a safe. Santos had promised to hire El Chapo’s lawyer for Trelha, he said. A third roommate in the Winter Park apartment told Politico in a phone interview that Oliveira Santos told him Santos had come to get money for Trelha. The third roommate spoke on condition of anonymity because he was in the country as an undocumented immigrant.
But Trelha never heard from Santos after Santos visited him in Seattle, the third roommate said. He later learned from Oliveira Santos that her attempts to contact Santos over the next few months were futile.
Trelha realized he had been conned, he said, when no lawyer appeared— let alone El Chapo’s.
But he still didn’t want to name Santos as a co-conspirator, fearing retaliation against Oliveira Santos, who was also an undocumented immigrant, he said.
Trelha told the federal authorities in the declaration that he had witnesses to support his statements. Oliveira Santos declined to discuss the matter with Politico.
“I am available to speak with any American government investigator,” Trelha wrote before providing his email address and cellular phone number and attesting that he signed the declaration “willingly and truthfully.”
A federal prosecutor who handled Trelha’s case described the scheme as “sophisticated,” adding that the Seattle portion was only “the tip of the iceberg,” according to court records reported by CBS News. But a person close to the investigation who is not authorized to speak publicly said they saw no evidence that prosecutors did forensic reports on Trelha’s phone or seemed motivated to pursue international co-conspirators.