Bon voyage, George Santos!
George Santos is a fraud. Now, we know he’s a criminal fraud, and it just got worse. The prosecutor in Santos’ case filed a superseding indictment Tuesday, and yes, it’s even worse. The new indictment charges Santos with stealing the identities of family members and using donor credit cards to spend thousands of dollars. Lying about himself wasn’t enough.
Thanks to Nancy Marks, Santos’ former campaign treasurer, who pleaded guilty to fraud conspiracy, told the prosecutor about Santos’ activities in embellishing his campaign finance reports with a fake loan and fake donors. Santos now faces a total of 23 counts. He is also accused of defrauding his donors by using their money for his personal benefit, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to the U.S. House of Representatives, Like Trump, he has called the case a “witch hunt,” and the only difference between the two of them is that Trump didn’t steal credit cards. He has, however, defrauded his donors by using their campaign contributions to pay his legal fees. The U.S. Attorney who will be prosecuting Santos, Breon Peace, made a statement: “This office will relentlessly pursue criminal charges against anyone who uses the electoral process as an opportunity to defraud the public and our government institutions.” This is no “witch hunt;” it’s more of a comeuppance. You can’t do dirt-especially when you’re hurting others-and hope to slide through life.
Santos allegedly charged $44,800 to one donor’s credit card, who gave Santos his billing information on two cards for donations, and Santos took the information and ran. He didn’t charge all that money at once; he did it repeatedly, and the donor apparently never knew. I have fraud alerts on my credit cards and recently thwarted a would-be thief. It is amazing that someone with this type of credit didn’t better protect himself, but he likely never thought he would need protection from someone running for public office. That makes what Santos did even more egregious. Talk about violating the public trust.
Santos claimed in his paperwork that several people-including relatives-made the donations, yet $12,000 of the money ended up in his personal bank account. Santos is a shyster with no shame. He now borrows the line from Shaggy’s song: “It wasn’t me.” Of course it was him. Who would steal money and give it to Santos? He’s full of it. Not only has Santos said he won’t resign, but he’s running for reelection. He claims not to know who made the credit card transactions. Come on.
Santos thinks the prosecutor and the rest of us are stupid. He’s not going to get away with it now that his ex-treasurer is singing, and I mean singing. She has already told the judge that Santos did it to impress party leaders, which sounds about right, and she confessed that the donor list is full of fake people who did not give permission to use their names. Santos, like Trump, is going down.
Shirley is a former entertainment writer and has worked in the legal field for over 25 years