One Republican who was just elected into a seat within Congress to represent New York is currently being forced to deal with a number of allegations claiming that he severely misrepresented himself while on the campaign trail.
Santos’ résumé sports claims about his employment history and his education that are seemingly not supported by evidence found or entirely contradicted by it, as explained in a report from The New York Times from Monday and additional reports that seemed to corroborate the report from other outlets.
Santos sits as the congressman-elect for New York’s third Congressional District, which covers the area from northern Long Island closest to New York City. He is expected to be sworn in officially on the 3rd of January when the new Congress officially convenes.
Santos made the claim that he earned a series of degrees in both economics and finance from Baruch College and New York University. Despite this, NYU and Baruch both expressed to CNN and to the Times that they had no records whatsoever of Santos being a student at their schools.
The congressman-elect also made the claim within his campaign biography that he has worked for the Wall Street firms Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Both of which expressed to CNN and the Times that they also had no record of the man ever working for them.
In another dubious claim, Santis stated that he founded and headed up a charity named “Friends of Pets United,” but the IRS database shows no record of the existence of such an organization.
The Times also found alleged still unresolved criminal charges slated against Santos in Brazil over check fraud. Reportedly, Santos elected to not give a response to an official summons from the court. Santos is the son of a pair of immigrants from Brazil.
The Times also discovered that Santos chose to omit some very important information from his personal financial disclosures. He officially reported a salary of $750,000 with over $1 million in dividends for his 2022 financial disclosure from the Devolder Organization in Florida in 2022 and 2021. The hang-up here, however, is that he did not report any of the clients he worked with while there. Additionally, the Devolder Organization failed to submit the required annual reports and so was made temporarily “inactive” for the state of Florida.
Joseph Murray, the attorney for Santos, hit back at the allegations in a release this past Monday, calling the allegations entirely “defamatory.”
“After four years in the public eye, and on the verge of being sworn in as a member of the Republican led 118th Congress, the New York Times launches this shotgun blast of attacks,” explained Murray in a release, which had sense been push to social media. “It is no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”
