Santos has claimed that he lives with his sister in Huntington, NY, on Long Island after reporters were unable to reach him at the Whitestone, Queens address that he used for his voter registration. His sister, however, lives in Elmhurtst, Queens according to “court documents, as well as interviews with neighbors and a doorman.”
What’s also eye-catching on his campaign disclosures are the “more than 30” expenses claimed for office supplies, meals, transportation, etc. that were exactly $199.99, one cent below the threshold requiring receipts to be filed with reports. That, Paul S. Ryan, an election law expert, told the Times would be exactly how a campaign looking to hide the illegal use of campaign funds would do it.
“I consider deployment of this tactic strong evidence that the violation of law was knowing and willful—and therefore meeting the requirement for criminal prosecution,” Ryan said.
Santos also spent huge amounts on travel expense—$30,000 for hotels, $40,000 for airfare, and $14,000 on car services—for a candidate running in an urban district measuring 254.8 square miles. “By way of comparison, Nick LaLota, the Republican representative-elect from the First Congressional District, in Long Island’s Suffolk County, spent roughly $900 on hotel stays, $3,000 on airfare and $900 on taxi services, according to his campaign filings, the Times reports. “Sean Patrick Maloney, the outgoing head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who lost to a Republican in the Hudson Valley, spent just $8,000 on air travel, according to his filings.”
The expenditures are one thing. The money he used to pay for them—including that mysterious $700,000 that he loaned himself—is quite another. And that’s what’s landed Santos federal prosecutors’ attention. Sources to ABC News “were careful not to characterize this as a formal investigation and stressed that prosecutors, at this stage, are only looking at publicly available filings.”
They’ll find much to interest them there, including that loan, which could have been illegal if he took the money from his company, the Devolder Organization, to fund his campaign. Santos told the Daily Beast this week that “he withdrew money from the firm to underwrite his campaign.” He said the same thing on WABC radio on Monday, that it “was the money I paid myself through the Devolder Organization.”
“You can fund a campaign with your own money to whatever extent you’d like, but the deal is it has to be your money,” Jordan Libowitz, communications director of government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told the Daily Beast. “Two major problems here. One, if it’s the company’s money, it’s not his money. If it were Santos personally doing business as the company—that is, if it were his bank accounts—that’s okay. But this is an actual corporation, and you can’t make a corporation to run money through to your campaign.”
There’s also plenty of questions about where that $700,000 came from before it got to Devolder Organization. “If I wished to illegally fund a campaign and hide it, what I would do is run the money through a dummy corporation, then to a dark money group that supports the campaign. But if I was not that up on things, or a little lazy, I might … set up the dummy corporation, say it’s in the name of the candidate, then have the candidate pay himself the money and give it to the campaign,” Libowitz said. “This isn’t to say that this is clearly an illegal pass-through donation scheme, because we don’t know the full picture yet—but if it were one, this is what it would look like.”
There’s definitely enough to keep prosecutors and investigators busy here.
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