Rep. George Santos (R-NY) pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges of wire fraud and money laundering in federal court in New York and was released on a $500,000 bond.
Federal prosecutors charged Santos with defrauding campaign donors by soliciting them to give money to support his campaign and converting those funds for personal use, including the purchase of designer clothing and paying off his credit card debt. Santos is also accused of unemployment fraud by receiving $24,000 in unemployment benefits at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic while he had a full-time job at an investment firm and lying about his income in documents filed with the clerk of the House of Representatives.
The federal charges come after Santos has faced a staggering number of scandals in his short political career. In November, the first-term Republican from Long Island won a swing district and, before he was sworn in in January, was exposed as a serial liar and fraudster. What started off as a series of revelations about how Santos had faked his entire resume, including fabricating his work history and education, turned into a barrage of allegations of fraud, ranging from campaign finance violations to writing bad checks to Amish dog breeders. Seemingly every day for weeks, there was a new revelation about his resume or his past, and they all were outlandish. As soon as one could grasp that Santos had falsely claimed to be the Jewish descendant of refugees from the Holocaust and then insisted that he only said he was “Jew-ish,” Santos was implicated in a 2017 scheme to skim debit card information from ATMs in Seattle.
The constant drip of scandal, along with the Mad Libs nature of what was alleged, turned Santos into an overnight national celebrity. Television crews staked out his office, and he was a staple of late-night monologues. It was an unprecedented rise to fame for an unknown first-term member of Congress. It was also an unprecedented headache for his colleagues,…
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