The Other Heel Just Dropped on George Santos

Embattled Rep. George Santos. Photo: Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

With all the horror, political dysfunction, and high level crimes that have pervaded the news of late, it’s nice to read a heartwarming story about justice finally catching up in a major way to a serial fraudster and conman.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment against Rep. George Santos (aka Anthony Devolder aka Kitara Ravache) who is somehow still in Congress. The indictment levels 10 additional federal charges, bringing the total to 23. The Justice Department issued a statement about the charges, noting that

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….

In short, Santos is in a heap of trouble.

Reporters attempted to question Santos about the indictment, but he had just come out of a Republican conference where they had hoped to select a new Speaker, and Santos claimed he hadn’t heard the news and promptly shut the door on reporters.

Before we dive into the sordid specifics, a shout out to independent journalism. The investigative reporters at Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo, two outfits I follow closely for their thorough and detailed work, must be feeling quite vindicated today for their scoops back in January, which covered the gist of these new charges. I’ll use those stories as a baseline for my discussion of the superseding indictment, and then we’ll look at some curious questions raised by The Daily Beast in its excellent coverage of the fabulist finances of the untalented Mr. Santos.

Fakey McFakester and the fake family funding

For Noah Lanard and David Corn of Mother Jones, something just didn’t seem right about George Santos’s 2020 campaign finance reports. So they started to dig, and they published a blockbuster piece about it in January of this year.

They looked first at the names of the donors listed by the campaign, and things got weird quickly. Victoria and Jonathan Regor were two individuals listed as each having contributed the maximum amount to Santos’s first, unsuccessful bid for a House seat. But those names didn’t appear in any U.S. database, and there was no one by any name living at the address given, 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey. In fact, that wasn’t even a real address, because the numbers end in the 20s on that street.

They looked further. Another name, Stephen Berger, was listed as someone who gave $2,500, but at the address given, an entirely different person lived there and had done so for many years. That person had never given any money to Santos, nor did he know of anyone named Stephen Berger.

In sum, the Mother Jones reporters found that more than $30,000 from individual donors was of questionable origin. Sometimes the lies about the identities were both brazen and silly. One donor was supposedly named Rafael Da Silva—the same name as a Brazilian soccer star who had played where Santos had once lived in his youth. The listed address of 15 W. 57th Street was also fake, but it sure sounded a lot like the name Santos later chose for his company, the One57 Group, named after a luxury tower in New York City at 157 W. 57th Street.

They also uncovered large donations from relatives of Santos and his campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, who recently pled guilty to a federal felony and presumably is cooperating now. The job descriptions of these family members included mail handler, painter and student, but somehow these working class folks had each generously given the maximum amount of $5,800 to the Santos Campaign. When they interviewed these relatives, family members denied having made contributions. Marks’s two children, who were students aged 19 and 22, supposedly helped put the total from her extended family over $30,000. 

Those are some wealthy kids!

It has always been a bit of a mystery as to why Santos and Marks would claim donations that never happened. But in a very Trumpian way, it now makes perfect sense. The campaign needed to inflate its books and make it seem like it was “worth” far more than it actually was. Just as Trump inflated his property values to qualify for bank loans, the Santos Campaign inflated its books to deceive the Republican National Committee into qualifying for a special assistance program. The minimum level to get there was $250,000, money Santos never had.

As Mother Jones reported in a follow up on Tuesday, Santos was willing to commit fraud to get to that level. On January 31 of 2022, he texted Marks that he was “lost and desperate” and asked her “what did we figure out about the report.” Then, miraculously that same day, the campaign filed a report with the FEC that listed $53,200 in donations, including ones later identified by Mother Jones as fake.

The indictment now charges Santos with making false financial statements to the FEC. “Contrary to the representations made by Santos, none of the family members of [Santos] and Marks had made, or ever did make, the listed contributions.”

Crimey McCrimester and the credit card criming

When a big donor gives a campaign their credit card number to use to make a one-time donation, the donor naturally expects the card to be charged only the amount of the pledged contribution. What they don’t expect is for a campaign to continue to use the card as its own private piggy bank, charging up all manner of other expenses. What’s rather amazing is that George Santos believed he could simply do this and get away with it.

Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo took one look at Santos’s campaign reports to the FEC and knew there was something wrong. In their piece published in January, they noted “extensive irregularities” in the expense reports, including charges for “clothing and meals, cash totals that didn’t add up, improperly labeled contributions, and donations that went over the legal limit.”

Walker and Kovensky interviewed one donor who told a nightmare story of having their credit card charged repeatedly by the Santos Campaign for donations they had not authorized. Efforts to obtain refunds were arduous and confusing, and while that was still going on, yet new charges appeared. In total, the donor’s card was charged $9,400 by the Santos Campaign in the 2022 cycle, above the legal limit for contributions. 

Here’s an even stranger twist: Two charges that appeared for $2,900 on that card each went not to the Santos Campaign but to the campaign of Tina Forte, an extremist who ran a bizarre, symbolic campaign against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), to whom Forte lost by over 44 points. The donor had never heard of Forte, whose own campaign reports were also filled with irregularities including donations from individuals listed as “anonymous.” Forte’s campaign’s initial treasurer was DeVaughn Dames, one of Santos’s business associates when they worked together at Harbor City, which is accused by the SEC of running a “classic Ponzi scheme.”

The money trail with Dames and Forte may lead to other interesting places. According to TPM, Dames is linked to the Devolder Organization, where Santos claims his “family money” comes from. And Forte’s campaign paid $110,000 to a company called RED STRATEGIES USA, LLC that was controlled by shell companies that were in turn controlled by Santos, Dames, Nancy Marks and two other Harbor City executives. TPM has run an excellent series of stories about the too-coincidental financial links and various schemes related to these companies and political operations.

My bet is we haven’t seen the last of the indictments around this scheme or these individuals. For the moment, the superseding indictment now charges Santos with the credit card fraud scheme directly. In its follow up report on Tuesday, TPM notes that the indictment alleges Santos charged the credit cards of his contributors “repeatedly, without their authorization” before paying the money to himself, his campaign and other election operations. The brazenness of the scheme was laid bare in the charging document, with one donor’s card racking up over $44,800 in several months, of which at least $11,000 went to Santos’s personal bank account.

This appears to be a fairly open and shut case of credit card fraud, and Santos is almost certainly going to prison for it.

Shady McShadester and the shadowy shells

There’s still at least one mystery that the superseding indictment doesn’t yet answer. As Roger Sollenberger, who has been covering the Santos scandal since it broke, and his colleague Josh Fiallo wrote for The Daily Beast, the superseding indictment alleges that Santos faked a $500,000 loan. This is on top of the fake family funding and the credit card criming discussed above.

Santos’s former treasurer, Nancy Marks, already copped to this as part of her plea. She claimed that Santos lied about loaning the campaign half a million of his own dollars in order to boost his donor total.

That all tracks, and Santos simply couldn’t have made the loan himself because, as prosecutors noted, at the time he only had $8,000 in his personal and business bank accounts combined. As the Justice Department stated, 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.”

But as Sollenberger reported just hours before the superseding indictment landed, the $500,000 eventually somehow was repaid with real money, only “backfilled later.” If this is true, it raises a deeper mystery still: Where did that money come from? 

Sollenberger cites an unnamed source that claims the money did find its way into the campaign’s coffers, just later as part of the alleged $615,000 that Santos loaned his own campaign in four installments in September and October, as reflected in the campaign’s most recent filings.

There is an ever-shifting story here, surprise, surprise. In December of 2022, Santos claimed the money had come from his own company, the Devolder Organization, which itself is no more than a shell. But that doesn’t look like it was possible, given that there was never this much money in Santos’s business account. Was the $615,000 that came in recently to “cover” the loan simply a corporate pass through, or part of a straw donor scheme or corporate shell game?

If so, who gave George Santos $615,000 to “cover” that loan? Was it really Santos’s own money, or does Santos have some shadowy benefactors who are trying to help him cover his ass? 

Santos claims that his company, the Devolder Organization, brokered a yacht sale for $20 million between two rich clients. But even if that company made a huge commission from this alleged sale—say, north of $615,000—it still couldn’t simply turn around and loan the Santos campaign money. That would be an illegal corporate loan, the source of which remains hidden. Santos isn’t allowed to treat his business and his personal funds interchangeably.

Sollenberger interviewed Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who observed that the new “cover” loan “is just an additional level of lying and criminal exposure.”

“None of this seems remotely legal. What we were originally looking at is that Santos appeared to have loaned his campaign money that he didn’t actually have, because it was illegally being funneled through his business from individuals who weren’t by law allowed to make such large donations,” Libowitz noted. “The loans would have hidden where the money came from, so that’s an illegal pass-through corporate contribution or a donation in the name of another person.”

If there was ever any case where investigators need to keep following the money, this is it.