Who IS This Guy?

So a rather bizarre scandal reared its head this week - in a month, nay a life cycle of utter madness ever since 2016 Gods help us, so this being cray-cray is saying something - when the New York Times started looking at the newly elected people from this midterms cycle, and discovered this George Santos who won a US Congressional seat in the Long Island part of New York was, well, lying about his entire goddamn resume and parts of his personal biography.

Since the Times is definitely behind a firewall for me, I'm pilfering much of the info from Raw Story so do help a blog out and donate or subscribe to Raw Story please and thanks. Oh, the report via Travis Gettys (I can't see who the Times reporters are, my bad):

George Santos, a son of Brazilian immigrants who presented himself as a "seasoned Wall Street financier and investor" who owned 13 properties and operated an animal rescue charity, became the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, but a New York Times review of public documents and court filings called into question his résumé.

Both Citigroup and Goldman Sachs told the newspaper they had no record of Santos working there, as he had claimed, and Baruch College found no record that he had graduated in 2010, also as he claimed.

The Internal Revenue Service also found little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friend of Pets United, was a tax-exempt organization.

It gets crazier.

Santos loaned more than $700,000 to his campaign and donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the past two years, but his company, the Devolder Organization, has virtually no online presence and his financial disclosures don't reveal any clients -- which election law experts say could be a problem if those clients actually exist.

The Times also could not find any records of the properties his family allegedly owns.

This part of the story quickly raises a ton of red flags. If Santos doesn't have a verified source of employment or income (if he's not earning money from the properties he claims to have, for example), then where the hell did that $700,000 he "loaned" to his own campaign come from? This reeks of money laundering. I mean, for all of the fakery surrounding trump's questionable finances, at least he actually owns stuff he can use as collateral to get loans. 

All anyone can confirm at the moment is that George Santos was caught committing checking fraud in Brazil back in 2010, and that Santos had been evicted from residences several times for missing rent payments. 

With a hot scandal to follow, there's been denials and recriminations and further exposure of Santos' falsehoods. He claimed he lost employees in the tragic Orlando Pulse mass shooting, but nobody can tie any of the fallen to his alleged businesses.  The latest report is that Santos may be lying about his family's Jewish background that they fled due to the coming Second World War and Holocaust. 

There's open questions now if Santos is really gay. After all, he's lied about everything else about himself. (Update: Santos was married to a woman before divorcing in 2019. It could just mean he was bi/closeted and came out afterward. It happens. But he never mentioned the marriage when he campaigned, so... Lie of Omission.)

This story is exposing a lot of sins right now, and not just Santos'. 

The Republican Party at the New York level has to deal with the reality one of their bright new stars is a goddamn fake, not to mention the thousands of campaign dollars they've gotten from this guy puts everyone's ledgers under scrutiny. The entire GOP party in that state has a lot of answering to do.

The Democratic Party at the New York level is also getting yelled at. In this day and age of extreme partisan politics, Oppo Research should be Campaigning 101. This wasn't Santos' first attempt at elected office, and one thing you're supposed to do is go through your opponent's work history and background to find ANY questionable acts and weak spots in their narratives to exploit. While Santos' opponent reportedly did some digging, and then tried to get the papers to follow up, nobody really paid attention until he'd actually won (and ironically getting the attention as a "future GOP star" in a mostly-Dem state). There's a growing push to remove the current party head in New York - who's floundered at keeping the party organized already, this is one more faux pas on him - and this could get ugly.

This is also a massive indictment of our electoral process, especially for the Congressional and state legislative offices. I've complained about this before, that our choices for candidates are barely - if ever - vetted for qualifications to the jobs we're supposed to elect them to. The parties are so desperate to draft celeb candidates - or too beholden to the religious and cultural extremists to allow the more unhinged and vulgar - that they don't care about actual QUALITY of that candidate until it's too late. You would think a stronger background check would be run on these candidates - especially to make sure you don't get anyone like Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott embezzling from your own party's funds - to guarantee you're presenting the Best and the Brightest to reflect your party's ethos. Guess what Republicans, someone like Santos - and so many others - are proving your party has no ethics at all.

It does not help that the only ones who can even put their names on the ballots for consideration are the only ones who can AFFORD - by clean money or laundered - to run in the first place. It costs money to file for an election primary, it costs thousands of dollars to run any kind of campaign. You can see it with Santos working to buy a win with $700,000 that nobody can confirm came from honest business. Elections have turned into a racket, a billion dollar industry that buys you a lot of political influence that can siphon even more taxpayer money into your own pockets later on. Gods help us with that open scandal.

Everything about Santos demands a full criminal investigation.

Hell, we need to run a criminal investigation to find out who George Santos really IS.