Representative George Santos’s legal troubles just keep getting worse — but he insists it will take more than bipartisan condemnation and 23 federal charges to get him out of Congress.
On Tuesday evening, federal prosecutors unveiled a superseding indictment against the freshman New York congressman alleging that Santos personally committed identity theft and credit-card fraud by making unauthorized donations using donor information and that he conspired with his campaign accountant to submit fraudulent information about contributions to the Federal Election Commission.
The additional charges filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York include two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, two counts of making materially false statements to the FEC, two counts of falsifying records submitted to obstruct the FEC, two counts of aggravated identity theft, and one count of access-device fraud. These ten new charges come in addition to the 13 counts that have been pending against him since May.
“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign. Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace in a statement.
Prosecutors claim Santos defrauded donors by using their credit-card information to make additional campaign contributions without their knowledge. In one instance, a donor listed in the indictment as “Contributor #12” texted Santos billing information for two credit cards with the intent of making a donation. The indictment alleges that Santos took the information and used it to make $15,800 in contributions without the donor’s consent, an amount that far exceeded the limit on individual contributions.
To subvert that statute, Santos is believed to have attributed two of the donations as coming from his own family members. Prosecutors allege that Santos “repeatedly used the credit card billing information of Contributor #12 in attempts to make at least $44,800 in unauthorized charges” in others’ names and his own. He also reportedly used this same donor’s credit-card information to transfer about $12,000 through a Florida-based LLC to his personal bank account.
In addition, prosecutors allege that between December 2021 and November 2022, Santos and his campaign accountant, Nancy Marks, conspired to lie to the FEC by fraudulently inflating the amount of contributions the campaign had received in order to qualify for financial support from a Republican Party committee program. Per the indictment, Santos and Marks reported multiple fake donations under the names of the congressman’s family members to make it look as if the campaign had reached the $250,000 benchmark required for additional monetary and logistical support from the party committee.
At one point, Marks reportedly lied to the commission and the national party about Santos making a $500,000 loan to himself. Records from that time show the congressman actually had less than $8,000 in his business and personal bank accounts, meaning such a loan would have been impossible. Marks, who worked on Santos’s 2020 and 2022 campaigns, pleaded guilty last week to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with this investigation.
Santos, who is expected back in federal court on October 27, told reporters on Wednesday morning that he would neither accept a plea deal nor resign in light of the new charges.
“I’m going to continue to fight this as much as I’ve said in the past I did. Nothing changes,” Santos said per the New York Post. He also denied he was blaming Marks for the alleged crimes: “I’m not blaming that on her. I’m just saying it wasn’t me. I didn’t handle the finances.”
In May, House Republicans voted to refer the Santos matter to the House Ethics Committee rather than expelling him. The committee is still conducting its investigation. In response to the new charges, New York House Republicans Nick LaLota, Marc Molinaro, Mike Lawler, and Anthony D’Esposito reiterated their calls for Santos to resign.
“He’s a terrible human being,” said LaLota, whose Long Island district neighbors Santos’s. “He does not deserve to be in the House of Representatives. He deserves to be in a federal prison. And I think the issue of expulsion is going to be something that a lot of my colleagues are going to talk about.”
On Wednesday, D’Esposito announced on social media that he would be introducing a resolution to expel Santos backed by his New York Republican colleagues.
In turn, Santos railed against D’Esposito’s proposed expulsion resolution, calling it “anti American.”
There likely won’t be much movement on the resolution or any other House business until the chamber elects a new speaker, a task that has grown more contentious as the week has gone on. Such a delay might benefit Santos who has weighed in on the race himself, putting himself in opposition to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and declaring his support for Congressman Jim Jordan on social media.
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