George Santos’s plea deal invites a review of the former Republican representative’s most enduring, sometimes fabulous – but reliably pointless – false statements that destroyed the career of someone briefly seen as a potential young star of the Republican parties.
Here are some of the main ones.
The Brazilian drag performer
The former New York congressman was identified as the Brazilian drag performer Kitara from a photo but said the claim was “categorically false”. Santos later said that he had at least dressed in drag. “I was young and I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life.”
Broadway musical producer
Santos told potential donors that he had produced Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the biggest Broadway flop of the modern era, infamous for losing $50m, delays and injured Spider-Man actors.
Sports star
Santos boasted that he had been a star volleyball player at a New York college he never attended. And he did not attend New York University, where he said he’d received an MBA, or indeed the exclusive Horace Mann prep school in the Bronx until the 2008 financial crisis forced his family to pull him out.
Wall Street king pin
Santos said he was a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor”. But the two firms he claimed to have worked for – Citigroup and Goldman Sachs – said they had no record of ever employing him. Santos later said he’d used a “poor choice of words”.
Jewish?
Santos claimed Jewish maternal grandparents who’d fled persecution in Europe. But it turned out they’d been born in Brazil. He later said he never claimed to be Jewish. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Nor had his mother been working in her office in the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, as he said. His mother, Fatima Devolder, was not in the US in 2001.
Victims of a mass shooting
Santos said he had four employees at the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida that claimed 49 victims. He later said he planned to build a business they were going to work at.
The puppy con
Pets, too, were drawn into Santos’s imaginative web. And there was a scheme in Pennsylvania involving rescue puppies and bad checks. He said he ran a pet charity called Friends of Pets United. He did not. But he raised $3,000 for a surgery on a service dog belonging to a disabled Navy veteran. However, the dog wasn’t sick. Santos took the money anyway.
