More on the George Santos story

Last week we learned that most of the major details of George Santos biography appear to be invented. Specifically, the claim that he attended Baruch college but the college has no record of it. He also claimed he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and they also have no record of it. Since then the story has only gotten worse. Yesterday, Forward reported that Santos claims about his Jewish grandparents fleeing persecution during WWII seems to be made up as well.

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The very first line of the “About George” page on his campaign website states: “George’s grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”

But the website myheritage.com lists Santos’ maternal grandparents as having both been born in Brazil before the Nazis rose to power — his grandfather, Paulo Horta Devolder, in 1918, and his grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, in Rio, in 1927. An online obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder, who died in 2016, says she was born in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, on Dec. 22, 1962, to Paul and Rosalina Devolder.

Forward took a look at his mother’s Facebook page and it offers no indication she was Jewish or from a Jewish family. On the contrary, it appears that she was Catholic. And then there’s the question of Santos’ sexuality. He says he’s gay but he apparently divorced a woman in 2019.

Santos, who claims he has “never experienced discrimination in the Republican Party,” broke barriers this year when he became the first openly gay non-incumbent GOP candidate elected to Congress.

But according to court records obtained by The Daily Beast, Santos appears to be the subject of a previously unacknowledged Sept. 2019 divorce with a woman in Queens County, New York. The divorce—which Santos has not discussed publicly—adds new uncertainty to his already shaky biographical and political claims…

Less than two weeks after his divorce was finalized, Santos filed the official paperwork to launch his 2020 campaign. And while his 2022 campaign bio mentions his husband, who according to Santos lives with him and their four dogs on Long Island, he’s kept this previous marriage out of the public eye entirely.

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Santos wouldn’t be the first gay man to have married a woman but the fact that he was married to one so recently does seem to add another wrinkle to his biography. Yesterday, Santos responded to the general confusion with a tweet promising to answer everyone’s questions next week. A guess a lot of crisis communications firms are off the week before Christmas.

The NY Times published a follow up story today which finds that when Santos was supposedly working at Citigroup he was actually a call center employee at Dish network.

The polite young customer service agent at the Dish Network call center in Queens could speak English and Portuguese, so when Brazilian immigrants had trouble with their billing or their satellite dish, their calls would be routed his way.

It was around 2012, and the man was George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who, more than a decade later, would win a crucial election to Congress.

But on the campaign trail, Mr. Santos told a different story about his life: that around the same time that Dish Network records show he was working there, he was rising through the ranks at Citigroup in the first step of an extensive and lucrative Wall Street career that also included a stint at Goldman Sachs.

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There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a call center employee for Dish network but it’s obviously not as prestigious as working for Goldman Sachs. People who knew him at the time said he bragged about his real estate holdings even as he lived in a small apartment in Queens. Even the people who knew him at the time suggest he was prone to lying about his own story.

Peter Hamilton met Mr. Santos near the start of 2014, he said. He recalled how Mr. Santos, who claimed to be an N.Y.U. graduate, had not recognized the name of the business school he said he had attended. Nonetheless, Mr. Hamilton found him charismatic and intelligent. “He seems to know what to say, and how to say it to people,” Mr. Hamilton recalled in an interview.

He did not hesitate when Mr. Santos said that he needed to borrow several thousand dollars to move in with his boyfriend, and lent him the money in September 2014, court documents show. Not long afterward, Mr. Hamilton said, Mr. Santos stopped responding to his texts and calls.

One of the remaining mysteries is where Santos and his husband currently live. Just two months ago he said that he was living in Whitestone Queens.

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He then suggested he was moving to Oyster Bay which is within his new district but it appears he actually lives a few miles away in Huntington, just outside his district.

As the Times points out, elected officials are required to live in the state they represent but not necessarily within the district. So there’s nothing illegal about where Santos lives it’s just another way in which his actual history is hard to pin down.

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David Strom 10:00 PM | November 13, 2024
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