George Santos has yet another accusation of deceiving people for campaign donations to answer for.
The latest accusations come from Bloomberg, which reports that the congressman himself told multiple people that he was involved in the production of the Broadway flop Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark during his bid for a House seat in 2022 — a false fact that was apparently part of his pitch for donations.
The news triggered a statement of condemnation from the show’s actual producers, who reached out to Entertainment Weekly through a spokesperson: “Of all the tribulations the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark had to endure, we are very pleased, proud and relieved to report working with George Santos was not one of them."
It’s the latest example of a fiction that Mr Santos is accused of telling that is on its face deeply bizarre and simultaneously a potential criminal liability for the congressman and/or his staff.
He’s already been accused of hiring a staffer who went on to impersonate newly-elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff in his own calls with donors, a move ostensibly made to insinuate that the first-time congressman had the direct backing of the GOP leader.
FBI officials are, according to multiple reports, looking into the Santos campaign and the congressman himself while at least one investigation into the congressman’s long list of lies is also underway at the state level.
Mr Santos has admitted to being dishonest about his background, while declining to specifically address many of the individual falsehoods he has been caught in or accused of telling. Those include lying about his supposed Jewish faith, having attended college, and whether his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
At the same time, he has refused to resign his congressional seat (despite polls showing that as many as eight in 10 of his constituents want him gone) and vowed to remain in office for two years.
After losing the support of his home county’s Republican Party organisation and earning calls for his resignation from a host of Democrats and Republicans, Mr Santos last week announced that he would step down from two congressional committees.
