Santos Indictment Leaves Many Lies, Mysteries, and Scandals Unaddressed

The story is still far from complete.

AP/Alex Brandon

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Thirteen criminal counts later, there’s still a lot we don’t know about George Santos. Where did the more than $700,000 he loaned his most recent campaign come from? Were some of the top donors to his 2020 congressional bid as fake as his volleyball career? Did Santos’ campaign treasurer know about his many schemes? These are some of the questions that aren’t answered by the indictment unsealed on Wednesday.

But federal prosecutors have already revealed more than enough to potentially send Santos to prison. He is now in custody at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York, and is expected to be arraigned this afternoon. The Justice Department has said that the top counts on the indictment carry a maximum sentence of 20 years.

The indictment can be divided into three sections. The first focuses on how Santos allegedly conned donors into giving money to a company he claimed was a super PAC supporting his campaign. That was not at all true, the indictment states. Santos allegedly pocketed the donations then used the money to buy luxury goods, make car payments, and pay off personal debts. The potential contours of this scheme were first revealed in a January report from the New York Times.  

The second section focuses on previously unknown unemployment insurance fraud. In 2020 and 2021, Santos worked as a regional director at Harbor City Capital, an investment firm that was shut down by the SEC for allegedly running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. According to the Justice Department, Santos received more than $24,000 of pandemic-era unemployment insurance between June 2020 and April 2021 after falsely claiming to be unemployed. The indictment states that he was making about $120,000 per year at the time while working at “Investment Firm #1,” an apparent reference to Harbor City. 

The final part of the indictment focuses on false statements Santos allegedly made in his 2020 and 2022 congressional financial disclosures. In 2020, Santos allegedly failed to report income from Harbor City, while overstating the money he earned from a different company. In a September 2022 disclosure, Santos reported earning $750,000 in salary, along with between $1 million and $5 million in dividends from the Devolder Organization, a company he controlled. Santos also reported having between $1 million and $5 million in a savings account. The claims about this suddenly acquired wealth were not true, according to the indictment.

This is where it gets murky. The Justice Department has not said how much in cash and assets Santos really had. Did Santos own a home in Rio de Janeiro worth up to $1 million, as he claimed in the 2022 disclosure? Did he make anywhere close to the amount that would have been needed to loan more than $700,000 to his 2022 campaign? If not, where did the money for the loans come from? How did he convince the cousin of a Russian oligarch to become one of his biggest financial backers? The indictment does not say.

In January, we reported that more than a dozen of the biggest donors to Santos’ 2020 campaign do not appear to exist. Some had names shared by nobody in the United States, according to public records. Others lived at fake addresses. In a follow up story, we reported that at least one of Santos’ relatives did not make the $5,800 donation attributed to them. These are all potential crimes that have yet to be addressed.

A name that is conspicuously absent from Wednesday’s indictment is Nancy Marks, Santos’ campaign treasurer in 2020 and 2022. As the treasurer, she likely knows more than anyone other than Santos about potential campaign finance law violations. As Mother Jones has reported, Marks also had an unusual business arraignment with Santos through a campaign consulting company called Red Strategies USA. It’s not clear from the indictment what, if anything, Marks may have told federal investigators. 

Marks signed off on many hard-to-believe transactions, including a series of $199.99 expenses just below the federal threshold required for maintaining records to verify the spending. She also claimed in FEC reports that her family members gave Santos more than $30,000 during the 2022 campaign. That included her two children, who were 19- and 22-years-old at the time, each giving Santos the legal maximum of $5,800. “It is awfully hard to believe that whoever compiled and formally submitted Santos’ FEC reports believed that they were true,” Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, told Mother Jones in January. “They are just, on their face, obviously false.”

These potential misrepresentations could pose legal problems for Marks. But like so much of the Santos story, prosecutors have left her out. At least for now.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate