George Santos just gave something away about the money trail
When it comes to serial con artists, there’s only one reason they ever “come clean” about one of their lies: the thing they’re lying about is about to get even uglier for them, and they’re trying to get out ahead of it by putting the most mild spin on it possible.
In the case of House Republican George Santos, his lies are endless. But his most dangerous lies might be about how his congressional campaign was funded. That’s dangerous for him, because certain behaviors with regard to campaign financing are automatically a crime. For instance, Santos was paid a significant amount of money when he worked for an alleged Ponzi scheme in Florida. He appears to have then funneled that money into a sham company of his own, then paid it to himself, then “loaned” it to his campaign. Whether or not Santos goes to prison in the United States may largely come down to whether it can be proven that Santos used his campaign as a way to launder dirty money to himself.
Santos had claimed all along that the money he loaned his campaign was merely a personal loan, which is legal as long as that money is clean to begin with. But now Santos is admitting that the loan to his campaign wasn’t personal, which is a really weird thing to admit because that’s a crime. So what’s he doing?
It’s possible George Santos is simply so spun around by the chaos that has become his life, he’s lost track of his own con game and merely accidentally confessed to a campaign finance crime. Given this guy’s history of wall to wall lying, it’s possible he’s lying now, and it was in fact a personal loan. But there’s also the distinct possibility that Santos is admitting it wasn’t a personal loan, knowing he’s confessing to a crime, because the real story is somehow even uglier than that.
We’ll see where this goes. But the Department of Justice and the Long Island District Attorney are criminally investigating George Santos’ campaign funding, so wherever those massive loans to his campaign came from, it’s going to come out. If Santos had any sense he’d stop talking altogether. Instead, with the way he’s running his mouth about his campaign funding, he’s just making prosecutors’ jobs easier.
