Last month Republican George Santos won New York’s 3rd congressional district which is in Long Island. Santos had competed for the seat in 2020 but lost by about 12 points. This year, thanks to redistricting, he ran in a slightly different 3rd district against Democrat Robert Zimmerman and won by about 8 points. One of the things Santos had going for him was a sort of rags to riches immigrant biography. But yesterday the NY Times published a story suggesting much of that story isn’t true.

His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there.

When the paper sent questions to Santos about the discrepancies, he didn’t respond. His attorney sent a brief statement saying “no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at The New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”

The Times also uncovered a criminal record from time he spent in a suburb of Rio as a young man. Santos confessed to fraud but apparently never appeared in court which means the case is unresolved. And the charges in Brazil also call into question another part of his biography.

In 2008, when Mr. Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by The Times. Police and court records show that Mr. Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.

The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Mr. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.

That period in Brazil overlapped with when Mr. Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Mr. Santos — using multiple variations of his first, middle and last names — having graduated in 2010, as he has claimed.

Another online biography mentioned his attendance at NYU but the school said he didn’t attend there either. Did he go to college at all? Of course you don’t have to go to college to be elected to office but the problem here is that it appears he lied about his life story.

The Times also found evidence that two different landlords filed eviction paperwork against Santos in 2015 and 2017 yet in 2022 he seemed to be doing quite well and lent his campaign $700,000.

Yesterday afternoon, Santos released a defiant statement about the story which never quite gets around to denying the report.

pic.twitter.com/mn181XbqRR

— George Santos (@Santos4Congress) December 19, 2022

Some have also noted that the Winston Churchill quote used in the statement is something Churchill never said. All of this is obviously very embarrassing if it turns out to be true. But today NBC News published an opinion piece arguing that it’s Democrats who ought to be embarrassed.

And in the case of Santos, it appears that Democrats failed to look into not one but an entire range of allegedly dubious claims made by the congressman-elect. Even more astonishing — and indeed puzzling for Democrats — is the fact that this wasn’t Santos’ first rodeo. In 2020, he lost his bid for the same House seat to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who ended up trouncing Santos by double digits.

As an incumbent with what should have been a fairly sophisticated campaign operation, how did Suozzi’s team also fail to uncover the apparent Chicxulub-sized gaps in Santos’ résumé? (It seems entirely unlikely that Suozzi’s team knew about Santos’ seemingly spotty past and failed to share it with Zimmerman’s team or DCCC operatives.)

Moreover, what does all this say about Democrats’ overall political operation not only in New York state but nationwide? If a guy like Santos can win elections unchecked, it’s reasonable to ask how many other Republican candidates with similar fictional origin stories have been able to coast into positions of power over the years. It appears that Democrats, at least in this case, have been asleep at the wheel for some time. More broadly, it calls into question whether current Democratic Party leadership has committed more than just this single unforced error and whether they could have come even close to keeping control of the House. This Santos case should force some real self-examination on the part of Democrat’s political operations.

It’s early but you’d think if Santos had documents to confirm his employment or academic history he’d have offered those to someone by now. What happens next is anyone’s guess. There are calls for him to resign and threats of an ethics investigation but at the moment he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. A professor of public policy interviewed near the end of this local news story suggests it’s “extremely rare” for the House to expel anyone. Lying about your achievements is wrong obviously but fortunately for a lot of politicians in congress it’s not a crime.