Incredibly, Santos went into even greater detail than that, saying in a 2020 radio interview that he:
– Attended Baruch on a volleyball scholarship
– Was part of the team that “slayed” Yale and Harvard
– Could have played basketball but went with volleyball because “it was easier”
– “Sacrificed both…knees” and “got very nice knee replacements…from playing volleyball” because “that’s how serious I took the game”
During the same interview, he also told the host: “We were champions across the entire Northeast Corridor. Every school that came up against us, they were shaking at the time. And it’s funny. I was the smallest guy and I’m 6 [feet] 2.” Naturally, according to the New York Post, the Baruch men’s volleyball team “never played Yale during the period Santos claimed to have attended school there.”
That Ponzi scheme
Santos’s employment history—which, no, did not actually see him working at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup—included time at a financial firm called Harbor City, which the Securities and Exchange Commission accused of running a Ponzi scheme and was later shut down. According to CNN, he insisted to a prospective investor that it was “100% legitimate,” despite having reportedly been told the firm had been accused of circulating fraudulent documents.
Alleged crimes committed in Brazil
In 2008, Santos was charged with fraud by Brazilian prosecutors for stealing the checkbook of a man his mother was working for and then spending nearly $700 using a stolen checkbook and a fake name. He admitted to this in 2009 and then again in 2010. Then, he moved to the United States and reportedly stopped responding to authorities, who didn’t know his whereabouts. In an interview after many of his lies came to light, Santos insisted: “I am not a criminal here—not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.” Prosecutors in Brazil have said they plan to re-charge him with fraud.
Allegedly stolen scarves
Ex-roommates of Santos—who know him as Anthony Devolder, the middle name he was going by as recently as 2019—have said he stole numerous items from them, including a Burberry scarf that he then wore to a “Stop the Steal” rally, where he claimed his unsuccessful 2020 bid for office had been “stolen” from him, just as the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump.
Mugged on the way to delivering his rent check
Santos has claimed—in a sworn statement!—that he was mugged while attempting to deliver a check for back rent owed to his Queens landlord. Shockingly, there is no record of this happening.
All those $199.99 charges
There’s absolutely nothing shady about the fact that Santos’s campaign spent exactly $199.99 on 37 different campaign expenditures filed with the Federal Election Commission, which is incidentally exactly one cent below the dollar threshold above which the FEC requires campaigns to keep receipts. Not shady at all.
Per CNN
The expenditures, and particularly the $199.99 payments to Uber, Walgreens, Walmart, Best Buy, Delta Airlines, Il Bacco Restaurante and more, “definitely stood out to me,” said campaign finance expert Paul S. Ryan, the deputy executive director of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation. He said the payments could reflect an effort to skirt FEC requirements for campaigns to keep receipts for expenditures over $200. The FEC encourages candidates to keep receipts below that threshold, but only mandates them for payments over $200.
However, Ryan said, the consistent appearance of $199.99 charges effectively shows that Santos knew about the threshold he was attempting to skirt—potentially inviting Justice Department scrutiny and criminal penalties. “My view is a bunch of expenditures right below legal requirement for the committee to keep receipts is evidence that he knew what he was doing,” Ryan said. “If in fact he did misuse campaign funds, this was a blatant effort to evade detection.”
In related Santos campaign finance news, the Italian restaurant where he spent a whopping $25,640.26 in campaign funds—in $199.99 increments on at least seven occasions—is owned by the brother of a guy who pleaded guilty to human smuggling after, per Slate, “the Coast Guard intercepted a yacht that [he] was sailing from the Bahamas to Florida [on which] Customs and Border Patrol found 14 undocumented Chinese immigrants aboard the boat, a Bahamian national, and $200,000 in cash socked away in the vessel’s walls.” That guy is named Rocco, and he donated $500 to Santos’s campaign, a contribution the Daily Beast reported was “almost certainly illegal.”
One New York Republican has called for the Justice Department and FEC to freeze Santos’s campaign funds.
Bilking a homeless veteran out of money raised to save his dying dog
On Tuesday, Patch reported that in 2016, Santos—then going by Devolder—connected with a homeless veteran whose service dog had developed a life-threatening tumor and needed surgery that cost $3,000. According to the vet, Santos/Devolder set up a GoFundMe for the dog and, appealing to donors, wrote: “Dear all, When a veteran reaches out to ask for help, how can you say no […].” The necessary funds were raised and then Santos allegedly “disappeared” with the money and the dog died in January 2017. (Santos and his attorney did not respond to emails from Patch.)
Veteran. Homeless. Dying service dog. Yes, it really hits all the “Wow, this guy is a true piece of s–t” notes.
Pulse shooting
In an interview with WNYC following his successful bid for Congress, Santos claimed that he’d “lost four employees” in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Does it surprise you to hear that is not actually true, and that, according to the Times not one of the 49 victims appear to have worked at any of the companies Santos has worked for? It shouldn’t!
The Kevin McCarthy impersonator
Earlier this month, the Post reported that a staffer working for Santos’s election bid would call rich donors and pretend to be Representative Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff to raise money. Seemingly confirming that this crazy story did actually happen, McCarthy’s attorney told the outlet, “When this issue came to our attention last year, I raised it with the Santos campaign and felt it was resolved to our satisfaction.” While it’s unclear if Santos knew about this trickery at the time, it’s hard to believe he didn’t, given, uh, everything.
Report: Trump Is Begging Facebook to Bring Him Back
January 6, 2021, was undoubtedly one of the worst days in the history of the United States, but the one bright spot that came out of it was that it resulted in Donald Trump’s banning and suspensions from Twitter and Facebook, which he’d previously used to both terrorize the nation on an hourly basis and win the 2016 election. Unfortunately, that two-year reprieve may not last much longer.
While Twitter boss Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account back in November—thanks to the new owner’s laissez-faire approach to hate speech and history of doing terrible things—Facebook parent company Meta had suspended the ex-president for two years, after which it would review the situation. That two-year period was up on January 7, 2023, and the former guy is, not surprisingly, getting antsy.
NBC News reports that Trump’s 2024 campaign sent a letter to Meta on Tuesday in which it wrote: “We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse.” It reportedly went on to talk about free speech—conservatives’ favorite topic that they don’t actually understand—and request a “meeting to discuss President Trump’s prompt reinstatement to the platform.”
The day Facebook suspended Trump’s account, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” adding that Trump’s “decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world.” Zuckerberg also said the company “removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect—and likely their intent—would be to provoke further violence.”
And while there’s no reason to believe Trump has changed in any way—and wouldn’t use Facebook to do the exact same thing should he lose in 2024—an adviser told NBC that the campaign expects Facebook will lift the two-year ban and reinstate the ex-president. (A Meta spokesperson said the company “will announce a decision in the coming weeks in line with the process we laid out.”) And if Trump isn’t let back on? His lackeys in Congress are prepared to go to battle on his behalf.
As for Trump’s return to Twitter, which is complicated by the fact that he owns a crappier version of the site called Truth Social, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News, “Trump is probably coming back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when.” Another said the former guy has been soliciting “input for weeks about hopping back on Twitter,” adding that “his campaign advisers have also workshopped ideas for his first tweet.” Which we assume entailed mocking up badly photoshopped images of him and asking one another, “Which sounds better: ‘Your favorite president is back’ or ‘I bet you’ve been missing your favorite president’?”
And now she sits on the Homeland Security Committee
(And the House Oversight one too!)
