George Santos charged with 23 more counts of fraud, faces new calls to resign

U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is once again being urged to resign after a federal grand jury issued a superseding indictment on Tuesday charging him with multiple counts of fraud, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States.

“Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the [Federal Election Commission] and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press release announcing the new indictment. “Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen.”

Following the new indictment, Reps. Anthony D’Esposito, Mike LaLota, Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams, six of Santos’ New York Republican colleagues, said Wednesday they are introducing an expulsion resolution. D’Esposito announced the resolution “to rid the People’s House of fraudster, George Santos.”

“He’s a terrible human being first off, he does not deserve to be in the House of Representatives. He deserves to be in a federal prison,” LaLota said, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

All six Republicans had the chance to oust Santos in May, but voted against expulsion after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Santos deserved an investigation by the Ethics Committee first. If Santos resigned, it would narrow the GOP majority in the House to just four votes.

Five months later, the House Ethics Committee has not issued any findings about Santos.

In that time, however, the federal investigation into Santos’ behavior continued, resulting in 23 more charges on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors allege that Santos conspired with his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, to inflate his campaign’s fundraising numbers in order to mislead a Republican committee into providing more “financial and logistical support” to his campaign.

“Santos and Marks agreed to falsely report to the FEC that Santos had loaned the campaign significant sums of money, when, in fact, Santos had not made the reported loans and, at the time the loans were reported, did not have the funds necessary to make such loans,” the Department of Justice said in a news release. “These false reported loans included a $500,000 loan, when Santos had less than $8,000 in his personal and business bank accounts.”

Federal prosecutors also allege that Santos stole personal and financial information from donors to his campaign and used their credit card information to make tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of unauthorized purchases.

The new charges were filed on top of the 13 initial charges a grand jury handed down in May, which included money laundering, theft of public funds, wire fraud, and making false statements to the House of Representatives.

Santos initially faced calls to resign months before the initial indictment, after multiple reports surfaced that Santos had lied about numerous aspects of his background. Among the lies were that his mother was a Holocaust survivor, that he was Jewish, that he worked for multiple major financial institutions, and that his mother had died as a result of the terrorist attacks in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

Santos is adamant that he won’t leave willingly, telling reporters, according to CNN: “I think I’ve made it clear that I will fight this to prove my innocence. So yeah, I’m pretty much denying every last bit of charges.”

Santos represents a Long Island-based district that President Joe Biden won by 8 points in 2020. Inside Elections, the nonpartisan political analysis website, rates the race a toss-up.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.