Congressman who told a tissue of lies
Fake claims about college, Wall St jobs and family’s Holocaust ordeal – but he won’t quit
A NEWLY elected US congressman is due to be sworn in next Tuesday despite admitting he made a string of false claims about his personal life.
George Santos, a Republican, confessed that he fabricated his employment history and lied about attending a top university.
He also admitted that his grandparents never fled the Holocaust, as he claimed, insisting that he only said he was ‘Jew-ish’ rather than Jewish. Mr Santos admitted ‘embellishing’ his CV after an exposé by the New York Times, but is still set to represent the 3rd District of Long Island, New York, where he won election in November.
Republican leaders could force him to step down. So far, however, they have been silent, mindful of their slim majority in the House of Representatives.
Mr Santos, 34, beat Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat candidate, in the November midterm elections after claiming that as the gay son of Brazilian immigrants he was the ‘embodiment of the American dream’.
But the New York Times story and other reports found no record of him working at two high-profile Wall Street firms – Goldman Sachs and Citigroup – despite Mr Santos claiming he did. Baruch College in Manhattan had no record of him graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance as his campaign website said.
Mr Santos claimed his mother was born in Brazil to immigrants who ‘fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during WWII’. But CNN and Forward, a Jewish newspaper, checked genealogy records to show that his grandparents were actually born in Brazil.
Mr Santos told the New York Post: ‘My sins here are embellishing my resume. I’m sorry. We do stupid things in life.’
But he insisted: ‘I am not a criminal. This will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.’
On his family heritage, he said: ‘I never claimed to be Jewish, I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was “Jew-ish”.’
Mr Santos also confirmed he was married to a woman for five years, from 2012 until his divorce in 2017, but was now ‘very much gay’. Dan Goldman, a Democratic representative-elect for New York, called Mr Santos a ‘total fraud’.