Since his May 10 indictment, Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has brought in a surprising amount of money—about $133,000, according to his new campaign finance report—but what’s more interesting than Santos just raising money is who’s been donating to him and why.
The short answer? It may have something to do with Guo Wengui, the self-proclaimed billionaire who defected from China and is now an enthusiastic supporter of American right-wing causes.
The vast majority of Santos’ fundraising haul—a total of $101,861—rolled in over the course of just three days, between May 20 and May 22. All of those donors had Chinese surnames, almost all of them contributed the maximum allowable amount of $3,300, and 26 of them had never given to Santos previously, according to Federal Election Commission data. For 14 of those donors, it was their first political contribution ever.
On June 23, that same pattern returned, this time to the tune of $24,100, all from donors who had never given to him previously. And the bulk of that cash, it turns out, went right back into Santos’ personal pocket.
In all, Santos received $125,961 from those donors. About $66,000 of that amount came from donors who had never given to any federal committee before, and more than $50,000 came from first-time Santos donors. Of all his donors this quarter, only five had given to him previously—accounting for just $157 of his $133,000 haul.
The Daily Beast attempted to contact nearly all of these donors. Almost every number associated with these donors had an automated voice message. One woman picked up but quickly hung up after saying she didn’t speak English.
There was, however, one Santos donor who told The Daily Beast why they had given to the embattled congressman. The donor pointed to legislation Santos had sponsored, specifically a bill introduced to support Guo Wengui, the self-identifying Chinese Communist Party dissident who was recently brought up on federal charges related to a $1 billion fraud scheme.
Santos has leant vocal support to Guo in recent months, and has sponsored a total of 11 bills targeting the CCP over the course of his brief tenure in Congress, all of which were introduced after Guo’s arrest in March,
“He is working on the direction that I believe will benefit United State of America and the world,” this donor told The Daily Beast. “So when he asked to chip in, I chip in.”
“I support him because he is not a talker,” the donor texted. “He did what he promised. He said he will propose a #FreeMilesGuo bill, he actually did it.” The donor, who appears in prior FEC records, said that while he had supported other candidates based on their promises, he had been “disappointed every time.”
“You can find the info you need on GETTR,” the donor added.
A search for “George Santos” on GETTR returned top results that were almost entirely related to his support for Guo. Santos’ pinned post on his own GETTR profile has a link to his online WinRed donation page. It has more than 600 likes and has been shared more than 320 times.
When The Daily Beast contacted Santos about the donations, he said, “when you see a cluster of donation [sic] of a similar amount it’s safe to assume it’s a fundraiser that took place.”
“That’s the extent of my comments to you,” Santos wrote in a separate text message. “Best of luck writing your hit piece.”
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REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
Santos did not answer additional questions about when this purported fundraiser would have taken place or the circumstances that would have brought together a collection of donors from across the country.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance law expert at Documented, told The Daily Beast that the clustered names and dates do indeed suggest a coordinated fundraising push.
“It certainly appears like there was some kind of organized fundraising effort for Santos,” Fischer said. He observed that a large amount of that money went to pay down Santos’ personal loans.
Many of those donors marked their occupation as “retired.” Some, however, listed occupations that aren’t characteristic of big donors.
The fact pattern might raise “red flags” with prosecutors investigating Santos’ financial statements, according to campaign finance specialist Brett Kappel at Harmon Curran.
“This filing would raise red flags with the lawyers running the Santos investigation in the Eastern District of New York,” Kappel told The Daily Beast, adding that many donors listed occupations that “seem to be incompatible with the size of their reported contributions,” such as a part-time cashier, a housewife, and multiple college students.
“It’s unusual for students to make any reportable contributions, much less the largest permissible contribution,” he said.
In May, federal prosecutors charged Santos with wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to Congress—the body that is also currently investigating his finances, criminal history, and statements about his past.
The spending side is also markedly different.
Santos, whose wastefulness has drawn FEC complaints alleging that he used campaign funds for illegitimate personal expenses, appears to have tightened his belt. The committee reported about $104,000 in disbursements over the last three months, the bulk of it for an $85,000 payment to Santos himself, reimbursing a slice of a $215,000 personal loan from last September. It’s his first such repayment in years.
The rest of the expenses were divided up in comparatively small amounts. About $2,300 went to Dallas-based Cobra Legal Solutions on June 16, for legal work. Cobra, however—a “leading legal operations outsourcing provider,” according to a 2022 press release—had rebranded a month before that payment, as Purpose Legal.
The campaign also doled out $3,500 to its new treasurer, Jason Boles, a professional political accountant who runs the books for more than 50 active committees, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The committee spent a total $375 for internet services, with another $1,527.31 reported as a “reimbursement” to a man named Matheus Ting, at a New York City address. The FEC database shows no prior records of any Santos receipts or expenses involving Ting.
A handful of payments—to United Airlines and The Line Hotel in D.C.—were backdated from February. It’s not clear why they didn’t appear on the campaign’s previous report. About half of those disbursements came when the campaign had been without a treasurer for more than 10 days and could not legally raise or spend money, according to federal regulations.
Another Santos mystery also got even more mysterious—his personal loans to his campaign.
The amounts, dates, and sources of those loans have been inconsistent all year. This filing shows that they have changed yet again, with $185,000 in previously reported loans seeming to disappear altogether.
The campaign’s report for the end of 2022 showed that the self-declared millionaire had loaned his campaign a total $755,000 over the 2022 cycle. In April, the campaign knocked that total down to $715,000, with no explanation. Now, his personal loans total just $530,000.
The dates are also different. Where the loans were previously scattered across the 2022 calendar year, they’re now all concentrated in the two months before the November election. It’s unclear how this can be reconciled with the statements in his prior 2022 reports showing how much the campaign had in the bank after the loans.
It’s possible that the totals are the result of Santos acquiring an experienced treasurer. Before Boles took over last month, the campaign listed a treasurer named “Andrew Olson,” who had never run a federal committee previously and doesn’t appear to even exist, as alleged in an FEC complaint from good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“If this professional treasurer went into the books, maybe they finally got this right,” Fischer said. “But like any Santos issue, it’s hard to know what’s going on.”
Ursula Perano, Tracy Connor, and Matt Fuller contributed to this report.
