Santos’ campaign expenditures as opaque as his past
Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., has spent his campaign money in plenty of conspicuous ways, from lavish hotel stays in Las Vegas, Nev., and Palm Beach, Fla., to an unusual slew of payments for $199.99 — 2 cents below the threshold where receipts would be required.
But deep within Santos’ campaign filings, The New York Times found another eye-catching number: $365,399.08 in unexplained spending, with no record of where it went or for what purpose.
The mysterious expenditures, which list no recipient and offer no receipts, account for nearly 12% of the Santos campaign’s total reported expenses — many times exceeding what is typical for congressional candidates. Fellow New York House members, for example, failed to itemize between 0% and 2% of their expenses this past cycle.
Without explanations for each expenditure in the reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, it’s impossible to determine if Santos spent campaign funds on legitimate election-related purposes. Election law experts said the $365,000 in unexplained expenses was not necessarily illegal but suggested a pattern of remarkable sloppiness, if not an attempt to cover up improper spending that violated campaign finance laws.
The unexplained spending is among a litany of irregularities found in nearly every aspect of how the Santos campaign handled its finances, the Times found.
Bill McGinley, a lawyer for one of the donors and a former general counsel to the National
Republican Senatorial Committee, examined some of Santos’ contribution reports and said they were “all over the place and do not make any sense.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.
Santos, a Republican elected in November, is facing several criminal and ethics inquiries after revelations he lied about his upbringing, education and work history. His fabrications have led to numerous calls for his resignation and suspicion over how he raised and spent his campaign money.
The unexplained $365,000 in his campaign disclosures is a vivid example.
Santos launched his second bid for a New York House seat in early 2021, just months after he lost to Rep. Thomas R. Suozzi.
From the beginning of his campaign, Santos spent extravagantly, traveling far outside his district to attend fundraisers and other events, though he had no declared primary challenger.
By late 2021, as Santos built his campaign war chest, his spending continued to pick up. He spent nearly $90,000 in December, making trips to Kansas and Michigan, according to reports filed in January 2022.
Those two trips were memorialized in several itemized expenditures dated to Dec. 19. The filings show that Santos spent $266.66 on five different Ubers and taxis, as well as $828.78 on stays at the Hyatt Regency in Wichita, Kan. He also itemized $140.54 he spent on food, including $60.54 at Tokyo Sushi and Grill in Auburn Hills, Mich.
But by April, Santos seemed to have adopted a new accounting strategy: He added more than $250,000 in more than 1,200 payments to “Anonymous,” nearly all for $199.99.
Santos also used the April filings to change some of his previously recorded expenses, retroactively raising the cost of some of them to $199.99. The cost of the five Uber and taxi rides from Dec. 19 rose to $445.22, and the Tokyo Sushi and Grill bill had gone up to $199.99. There were also three new expenses on that date, each for $199.99, paid out to “Anonymous.”
In May, Santos changed his reports again. He wiped out all the individual line items paid to Anonymous, as well as the meal at Tokyo Sushi, but the filing still included the $250,000 in spending, with no further details, dates or explanation.