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The Department of Justice is seeking an 87-month sentence for former New York Rep. George Santos after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in August of last year.
“Santos’s history and characteristics are troubling in the extreme. Santos is a pathological liar and fraudster,” the 26-page sentencing memo from the department states. “For years, Santos manufactured and promoted a fictionalized biography, one that depicted himself as a highly educated, independently wealthy, successful businessman, all premised on a heap of lies.”
Santos, a Republican, was elected in the 2022 midterms by flipping a Democratic district covering parts of Long Island and Queens. However, his life story was quickly found to have been mostly fabricated. His claims that he worked at top firms on Wall Street and had attended a particular college were debunked, and the financing of his campaign faced questioning. Santos was expelled from Congress in December 2023, after only 11 months as a representative. He was only the sixth member to be expelled; the other five were members of the confederacy.
“The government’s investigation uncovered extensive evidence of Santos’s fabricated past,” the sentencing memo adds. “He falsely asserted associations with venerable institutions and organizations in a cynical effort to trade off their reputations to bolster his own.”
As he pleaded guilty in August, Santos admitted that he tricked voters and donors, and stole almost a dozen identities, including those of his own family, in order to make campaign donations to himself. He acknowledged that he stole credit card information for personal use and that he lied to the Federal Election Commission.
Santos said at the time that ambition had affected his judgment and that he was “flooded with deep regret.” In a deal with prosecutors, Santos agreed to pay almost $580,000 in fines.
“The volume of Santos’s lies and his extraordinary pattern of dishonesty speaks to his high likelihood of reoffending and the concomitant need to remove him from the community he has repeatedly victimized,” the sentencing memo says.
In January, Santos asked a New York judge to delay his sentencing on federal fraud charges until the summer to allow him to make more episodes of his podcast, Pants on Fire, to pay off the more than half a million dollars in fines. At the time, prosecutors said the title of the podcast was a “tone-deaf and unrepentant reference to the crimes he committed.”
In Friday’s sentencing memo, prosecutors said Santos was guilty of “craven efforts to leverage his lawbreaking as a springboard to celebrity and riches.”
Prosecutors argued in the memo that Santos worked to “monetize his criminal charges” by joining Cameo, the platform where you can buy personal videos from celebrities, from which they claimed that he has earned more than $350,000. The memo also notes that Santos has been paid at least $200,000 after contracting with a documentary filmmaker.
“Even when confronted with his lies and fraud, Santos continued to recidivate and escalate, his criminality growing bolder and more audacious over time,” the prosecutors argue in the sentencing memo.
The sentencing is set to take place on April 25.
