Within days after his historic expulsion from the House of Representatives, George Santos was mercilessly mocked on Saturday Night Live before slipping effortlessly into the role of D-list celebrity wannabe, hawking videos of himself delivering messages on demand on Cameo — holiday wishes, birthday greetings, gossip, or advice (!) for $200 a pop. For ten bucks, you can send Santos a message.
Santos’s superpower — a complete lack of shame — is what he is already cashing in on following his expulsion. It’s also the thing that made his case stand out, even on Capitol Hill — a place that has seen more than its share of sordid scandals.
“He’s certainly not the first sitting member of Congress to have gotten caught up in a corruption scandal. But the sheer brazenness of the grift, to be blunt, is something that I think many of us have not seen before,” Daniel Wiener, a former senior counsel at the Federal Election Commission, told me on the day the damning Ethics Committee report on Santos was released. “It really speaks to the sense that this was a person who just figured there weren’t really any rules that he needed to follow.”
That includes the informal rule that usually governs congressional scandal: When the game is over, it’s best to exit the public stage quickly and quietly. Not George Santos, who took to social media on the very night of his expulsion with rage in his heart and revenge on his mind — and once again made an embarrassing spectacle of himself.
“Monday I will be filling an official complaint with the Office of congressional Ethics against @NMalliotakis regarding her questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means committee this Congress,” he tweeted, apparently unaware that the Ethics Committee only accepts referrals from sitting members of Congress, not ordinary citizens — and certainly not disgruntled ex-members. Santos made similarly empty threats to file ethics complaints against New York Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota (two of the earliest lawmakers to call for his expulsion) and New Jersey Democratic representative Rob Menendez (the son of recently indicted Senator Robert Menendez).
Santos’s ignorance of basic procedure demonstrates how little value he will have in his self-appointed role of truth-telling whistleblower. “My community service will be to clean up Congress of it’s corrupt frauds in a Bipartisan way,” his grammatically challenged X bio says. “My road to redemption will be serving the American people!”
It’s unlikely he will ever fulfill that grandiose promise; Santos simply doesn’t have the goods. He was never accepted as a true insider and never acquired the connections and confidences where one finds the dark secrets that matter.
Santos is very late to the party, for instance, in noting that Nicole Malliotakis, like other members of Congress who worked on bank failures, made stock trades that seem suspiciously timed and were almost certainly based on insider information. On March 17 of this year, Malliotakis purchased between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of stock in New York Community Bank — just two days before state officials announced that a subsidiary of New York Community Bank would acquire the assets of bankrupt Signature Bank — a move that led to NYCB’s stock price popping by 32 percent the next day, delivering a tidy profit to Malliotakis and other shareholders.
Malliotakis is not alone. “One in three members of Congress buy and sell stocks. One in seven buy and sell stocks and don’t disclose it. So they’re actually violating the law we passed ten years ago,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told me recently. “We’ve estimated that in the 2019-to-2021 year, 3,700 or more stock trades reported by members of Congress likely are potential conflicts of interest. And here’s the kicker: 17.5 percent is the average amount by which members of Congress’s stock portfolios outperformed the S&P 500 in 2022.”
Gillibrand has introduced a bill that would ban federal lawmakers and senior executive-branch officials from owning stock. But until reform takes place, Malliotakis’s actions apparently will remain legal (therein lies the scandal) and have been duly disclosed in public records and reported by the Wall Street Journal and Staten Island Advance. Santos’s tweet adds zero to what was already known about a serious problem.
Much has been made of the fact that Santos is only the sixth member of Congress to be expelled by his colleagues, but that stat is misleading. Since 2010, New York State alone has averaged one congressional resignation every 24 months or so for a variety of sexual and financial misdeeds, some of which resemble, equal, or exceed Santos’s alleged offenses. The difference is that Santos’s predecessors had the good sense to quit and quietly exit the public stage rather than force their fellow members to expel them.
Back in 2010, for instance, Eric Massa, an upstate Democratic congressman, resigned after only 15 months in office amid ethics complaints. Accused of groping an employee, he, it turned out, was living in a townhouse in Washington with five male staffers. “Not only did I grope him; I tickled him ’til he couldn’t breathe and then four guys jumped on me. It was my 50th birthday,” Massa told a reporter. While Massa insisted the groping was “non-sexual,” he resigned the day after the Ethics Committee announced it was investigating his actions. “I wasn’t forced out; I forced myself out,” he said, describing himself as “a deeply flawed and imperfect person.” Congress quietly paid $100,000 to two staffers who had alleged harassment.
In 2011, Chris Lee, a two-term conservative Republican from western New York, abruptly resigned after a news report that the congressman, who was married, had emailed a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he’d met in the personals section of Craigslist, where he had described himself as a single lobbyist and “a very fit fun classy guy.” That same year, Democratic rising star Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress shortly after his first sexting scandal broke. Weiner later served a prison sentence for sending obscene texts and photos to a minor.
Staten Island’s Michael Grimm, an ex-Marine and former FBI agent, quit Congress in 2015 after pleading guilty to felony tax evasion in connection with a failed restaurant he co-owned; Grimm served less than a year behind bars and lost an effort to win back his seat in 2018. And upstate Republican Chris Collins resigned in 2019 shortly before pleading guilty to securities-fraud charges.
You probably don’t remember or never knew about some of New York’s scandal-scarred congressmen precisely because they threw in the towel and vanished. Santos, a different animal, seems determined to remain a player in whatever show that will have him, even if he’s destined to be cast in the role of the Fool.
