Santos filings only add to turmoil

Rep. George Santos’ campaign and six affiliated political committees filed statements Wednesday indicating they were removing his longtime treasurer, Nancy Marks, who has been connected to nearly every Santos-related fund and one of Santos’ private business ventures.

But the move — as with so many things regarding Santos, who has admitted to falsehoods on the campaign trail and misleading statements about his background — was clouded by mystery and immediately provoked questions.

Shortly after the first new filings surfaced, Marks’ apparent replacement as treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, said through a representative that he had not agreed to the swap and suggested that the changes were made without his consent.

“On Monday, we informed the Santos campaign that Mr. Datwyler would not be taking over as treasurer,” Datwyler’s lawyer, Derek Ross, said. “And there appears to be some disconnect between that conversation and this filing.”

Santos, a Republican from New York, and his team provided no explanation. His lawyer, Joe Murray, said, “I have no response to any of that.” Marks did not immediately respond to an email or phone calls seeking comment.

But the change, whether sanctioned by Santos or not, added to the confusion surrounding his campaign filings, which may be under scrutiny by federal and local prosecutors.

On Tuesday, Santos’ campaign filed updated reports that raised new questions about the source of $705,000 that Santos lent his congressional campaign. The crux of the issue revolved around two unchecked boxes denoting whether two of the larger loans came from his personal funds.

Santos was already facing inquiries from federal and local investigators over his lies and financial dealings, after The New York Times reported that he had omitted key information from required financial disclosures, that his campaign had featured a pattern of unusual expenses and that a fund claiming to be raising money to support his candidacy had not been registered with the Federal Election Commission.

Earlier this month, the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, filed a complaint with the FEC asking it to investigate whether Santos improperly spent campaign money on per

sonal expenses or obscured the true sources of his campaign funding.

The complaint has put Marks, who has been a key member of Santos’ political circle since he first ran for office, under greater scrutiny. In addition to her work with Santos, she was the treasurer for former Rep. Lee Zeldin’s campaign for governor and has been tied to other companies that offered services to Republican candidates in New York.

Marks has not commented on the swirl of questions surrounding Santos’ campaign accounting, including an unusual number of expenses costing $199.99 — one cent below the threshold at which federal law requires receipts.

It was not clear why Santos’ campaign tried to obtain the services of Datwyler, a veteran campaign finance consultant who has worked with a number of Republican members of Congress. Datwyler and Santos’ chief of staff, Charles Lovett, worked for the failed Senate campaign of Josh Mandel, a Republican from Ohio.

▶ This article originally appeared in The New York Times.