Things George Santos Is Accused Of Lying About (That We Know Of So Far)

Embattled Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) received House committee assignments this week despite repeated calls for his resignation from Democrats and some Republicans over the ways he, to put it mildly, misrepresented himself.

The freshman representative acknowledged that he had “embellished” his resume but added that he did nothing “criminal.” While Republicans in his home county want him gone, the response on Capitol Hill has been less decisive.

And thus Santos ― or the congressman known as George Santos ― is now part of the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He’d reportedly lobbied House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to place him on a financial committee, but top Republicans did not want him there, according to CNN.

As he faces federal, state and international investigation, Santos has certainly had a rough start to his two-year term. But he has so far flatly refused the idea of stepping down, even as it seems that each new day brings to light another wild allegation about his past. He ran for Congress one other time, in 2020, so there are multiple years’ worth of interviews, appearances and campaign materials in which Santos shared parts of his (alleged) backstory.

It’s hard to keep up ― which is why HuffPost created this list of things Santos is accused of lying about.

The 34-year-old has reportedly not always gone by “George Santos.” According to CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, his aliases include Anthony Santos, George Devolder, Anthony Zabrovsky and George Anthony Santos-Devolder, among others. (Devolder was his mother’s surname.)

Earlier this month, video emerged showing Santos introduce himself as Anthony Devolder at a 2019 event in support of then-President Donald Trump.

Following his election win in November, Santos addressed a Republican Jewish Coalition summit in Las Vegas, where he was billed as a Jewish Republican. He identified himself as a “proud American Jew” in campaign materials obtained by the Jewish news outlet Forward. But when his heritage was called into question, Santos told the New York Post that he never claimed to be Jewish. “I said I was ‘Jew-ish,’” he said.

He has claimed that Zabrovsky is his family’s original, Jewish last name. But a professional genealogist told CNN there was no indication of a name change in his lineage.

Santos told Fox News in 2021 that his grandparents “escaped socialism … communism and the Holocaust,” and he repeated the claim during his campaign. His grandfather was originally from Ukraine, Santos said, and fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis. Yet the Forward and CNN reported that records on genealogy and Jewish refugees did not back up Santos’ story. Rather, the outlets found evidence that his grandparents were born in Brazil. The New York Times found the same.

Santos tweeted in 2021 that “9/11 claimed my mothers life.” His campaign website states that his mother had been inside the World Trade Center’s south tower and survived the attack, passing away a “few years” later of cancer.

But records obtained by The New York Times show that Santos’ mother was not even living in the country at the time ― she was in Brazil. An obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Devolder, states that she died in 2016.

In immigration documents reviewed by The New York Times, Santos’ mother said she worked as a housekeeper and home aide — not as the “first female executive at a major financial institution,” as the congressman has said. People who knew Santos’ mother recalled that she made a living cleaning houses and selling food, according to the outlet.

She was also born in Brazil, and not Belgium, as Santos had claimed, according to CNN.

Campaign finance disclosure forms show that Santos lent his campaign $700,000, the Times said. He claimed that he earned a salary of $750,000 from a company called the Devolder Organization (more on that later).

The source of Santos’ wealth is uncertain. In his mid-to-late 20s, he seemed to struggle with financial difficulties; the Times found that he faced eviction twice in the Queens borough of New York City. But a few years later, during his 2022 campaign, Santos was reportedly spending tens of thousands of dollars on travel, restaurants and hotels in New York, Florida, Texas and California, the Times reported.

He raised so much money that he donated some of it to other Republican candidates.

A subsequent New York Times investigation found questionable dealings by a political group that raised funds for Santos, RedStone Strategies. The Washington Post found ties to the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

The Devolder Organization was described on a Santos campaign website as his “family’s firm,” The New York Times reported. But information on the company, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is scant, the Times said. Santos reportedly described it as an outfit that links investment funds to wealthy investors, but it is not clear who the company’s clients were. He told Semafor that he performed services like helping wealthy people find yachts to buy.

He didn’t just work for the supposed family biz; Santos also worked for the Florida investment firm Harbor City Capital, where he was hired in 2020 under the name George Devolder. The firm was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme and shut down in 2021.

Despite his claims to the contrary, The New York Times found no records of real estate properties belonging to Santos or his immediate family in the U.S. (On required forms from his campaigns, Santos only disclosed an apartment in Rio de Janeiro.)

In an interview with WNYC, Santos said that people working for him were killed during the 2016 attack on an Orlando gay nightclub. The New York Times found no connections to him or the various companies he’s worked for among the 49 people who died at Pulse.

Horace Mann told CNN it has no record that Santos ever attended. The private school also checked for aliases.

Santos had claimed in a 2020 YouTube video that his parents lost money in the real estate market and that he had to drop out four months before graduation, later earning a GED diploma.

“Unfortunately my parents fell on hard times, which was … something that would later become known as the depression of 2008,” Santos said. “But we were hit a little earlier on with the over-leveraging of real estate.”

Santos claimed he graduated from Baruch College and New York University, but both institutions told several news outlets they had no record of him ever attending.

He claimed on a resume that his GPA at Baruch was 3.89 and that he graduated summa cum laude.

He eventually told the New York Post he didn’t graduate from any college.

In 2020, Santos appeared on a morning radio show where he said that he went to Baruch on a volleyball scholarship and “slayed” teams from Harvard and Yale.

“I sacrificed both my knees and got very nice knee replacements, knee replacements from playing volleyball,” Santos claimed on air.

The New York Times reported that neither Wall Street behemoth could come up with any record of Santos’ employment there, as he had claimed. Santos later told the New York Post that the assertion was a “poor choice of words,” as he did not work “directly” for the companies. He also told Fox News that his claim was “not false at all” but rather “debatable.”

There is no record that Santos’ supposed charity, Friends of Pets United, ever existed as a legitimate tax-exempt organization, The New York Times reported after checking with the IRS and attorney general offices in New York and New Jersey. The Times said he claimed that he ran a tax-exempt pet charity for five years starting in 2013 ― around the same time he faced apparent financial trouble.

Santos denies an alarming story from a Navy veteran, Richard Osthoff, who told a New Jersey outlet that he got in touch with Santos in 2016 for help financing surgery for his beloved dog, Sapphire. Osthoff said that at the time, he was living in a tent on the side of a highway, and there was no way he could afford the stomach cancer treatment for his pit bull mix. A veterinary technician pointed him to Friends of Pets United.

Santos, whom Osthoff knew as Anthony Devolder, allegedly helped him raise $3,000 through GoFundMe that summer, but the veteran said he never saw a dime. He said Santos closed the fundraiser and stopped answering texts and calls. A GoFundMe spokesperson told The Washington Post that the fundraiser was real, and that the company had banned Santos’ email address from being used on the service.

Sapphire died in January 2017.

Santos told the New York Post that he is not a criminal, “not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.”

Speaking on longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast, he said he’s lived “an honest life.”

“I just pray for all of you, when they come for you, that you have the same strength I have,” he said, as NPR reported.

In 2008, Brazilian authorities accused him of stealing a checkbook and fraudulently spending $700. The investigation was stymied by their inability to locate Santos, according to The New York Times. But with his election to Congress, they have said they are reopening the case.

Santos said the suggestion that he was a drag performer is “categorically false.”

“The media continues to make outrageous claims about my life while I am working to deliver results,” he tweeted this week.

Multiple reporters, however, said they have obtained photos or video of Santos performing as Kitara, provided by former friends from the Rio de Janeiro gay community.