Incoming New York GOP Congressman Seems To Have Made Up His Entire Resume

A MAGA Republican New York representative-elect appears to have fabricated almost his entire resume, The New York Times reported Monday.

George Santos was elected in November to represent Long Island. The way he tells it, he is the son of Brazilian immigrants who graduated from Baruch College, with a stint at New York University. He then went on to work for multiple Wall Street firms before launching his own financial management firm. His family owns multiple real estate properties, and he founded an animal rescue charity.

Except, none of that might actually be true. And the biggest question is, how did Democrats fail to catch any of this during the election?

Neither Citigroup nor Goldman Sachs, two of the main places Santos claims to have worked, were able to verify his employment, according to the Times. Neither Baruch nor NYU could find a record of Santos attending their institutions. What’s more, the time Santos says he was at Baruch overlaps with a criminal investigation into him for fraudulent purchases in Brazil.

He says his family owns 13 rental properties, but none were listed on the required financial disclosure forms for his campaign. His multimillion-dollar company has no reported clients, website, or even a LinkedIn page. Santos claimed that four employees from one of his companies—he did not specify which—were killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. But the Times said that none of the victims’ names matched employees at the companies he mentioned in his biography.

The IRS couldn’t find any records that the animal rescue charity Santos says he founded in 2013 held tax-exempt status, and neither the New York nor New Jersey attorneys general offices could find records of the organization being registered as a charity.

And yet Santos still won his district by more than eight percent, helping Republicans flip a seat and clinch a hair-thin majority in the House of Representatives. It seems Democrats failed to do any due diligence on him and instead focused on trying to brand him as an extremist.

Read more at The New York Times.

On Monday, nearly 200 countries agreed to rein in the ongoing global loss of nature, pledging to protect 30 percent of the planet—land and oceans—by 2030. The goal, known as 30x30, was agreed to at the COP15 U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) summit in Montreal, Canada. The United States was one of two countries not signing.

Currently, about 17 percent of land and 8 percent of oceans on the planet have some form of conservation measures in place. The global effort to increase those figures comes three years after a 2019 U.N. report showed 75 percent of land-based environments and 66 percent of marine environments have been “severely altered” by human actions—leading to some 1 million animal and plant species at risk of extinction.

The massive environmental cost translates to an equally large financial cost. Between 1997 and 2011 alone, the world is estimated to have lost up to 31 trillion U.S. dollars per year from biodiversity loss spurred by degrading action and preservatory inaction.

The United States was one of two countries not involved in shaping and signing the agreement. Citing threats to commercial interests and infringements on American and land sovereignty, Republicans have blocked the U.S. joining the CBD since its conception in the 1990s. A two-thirds Senate majority is required for ratification. (The only other country to not sign the agreement was the Holy See.)

President Biden has yet to make a case that Republicans are blocking America’s involvement on the global stage as they side with financial interests and make abstract claims for “sovereignty,” while America’s actual natural landscape deteriorates.

While the U.S. did not sign onto the U.N. agreement, the Biden administration has announced its own 30x30 plan. But with the U.S. refusing to join the 30x30 goal alongside other nations, there is less collaboration and trust shared to actualize the goal.

The worldwide push to stem environmental degradation is only one step towards reversing the damage humans have caused, and replacing those systems with something better. And as has been evident with the Paris Agreement’s stalled climate goals, an agreement is just words until proven otherwise.

This article was updated.

Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has made a habit of governing by poll. But he may wish he had held off on the latest one.

Musk asked his followers Sunday night if he should step down as head of Twitter, promising to “abide by the results” of the poll. The poll closed Monday morning, and the results are clear: More than 17.5 million people voted, with 57.5 percent saying “yes” and only 42.5 percent saying “no.”

Musk’s purchase of Twitter in late October has been rocky, to say the very least, and many analysts assumed the deal started as a joke that then went too far. It’s been rumored that Musk never wanted to take the company’s reins in the first place and has been looking for a way out.

Since taking over, Musk has fired almost all of the top executives and the entire board of directors, as well as nearly half the company’s workforce. Many other employees have quit. Advertisers have left the platform in droves due to Twitter’s increasingly lax content moderation rules.

Meanwhile, hate speech has flourished and Nazis are being allowed back on the platform. Musk seems to be governing by whim rather than following a business plan.

It’s gotten so bad that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter over the weekend to the board chair of Tesla, which Musk founded, questioning whether he was qualified to continue leading the electric vehicle company.

In her letter, Warren cited reports that Musk had improperly reallocated Tesla funds and employees to Twitter to keep the social media platform afloat, and warned that he could have Tesla overpay for advertising space on Twitter to fill the void left by other companies.

And on Friday, the European Union threatened to impose sanctions on Twitter after Musk suspended multiple journalists’ accounts.

As the government scrambles to put together final touches on a bill to fund the government, the fate of countless Afghans hangs in the balance.

Tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees residing in the United States remain in limbo, without a certain path to permanent residency. Even more Afghan allies have been left behind since the U.S. military withdrawal last August.

Advocates have spent the better part of about a year and a half lobbying for the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that would expand the special immigration visa program to include previously omitted groups of people who aided the U.S. military, establish pathways to resettle allies still trapped in Afghanistan, and provide a pathway to permanent legal residency for the tens of thousands of evacuees now in the U.S. Advocates now seek to attach the bill to the government’s omnibus spending package.

The bill boasts bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress but has stalled for months, to much-warranted frustration. “Afghans have been let down by the entirety of this war,” said Arash Azizzada, co-founder of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow.

It took one year for Congress to even introduce the Afghan Adjustment Act, but it was produced promisingly, with bipartisan support out of the gate. But five months later, Congress has not included the bill in the continuing resolution or the defense spending bill, nor has it just passed the bill on its own. Even before the act was a standalone bill, advocates lobbied Congress to attach the measures to a May Ukraine-focused spending bill to no avail.

Despite bipartisan support in both chambers, the bill still falls short of a guaranteed filibuster-proof majority. This week, The Wall Street Journal editorial board endorsed the bill, and numerous other senators came out in support of the act: Republicans Roger Wicker and Jerry Moran and Democrats Patrick Leahy and Jeanne Shaheen. All this signals the last-second momentum that could perhaps finally push the legislation over the top—not a moment too soon.

On Thursday, the Senate passed another one-week continuing resolution to keep the government afloat through December 23. Final spending allocations for the government omnibus are said to be unveiled as soon as Monday.

“If there’s a failure to keep the promise to Afghans, it will be a bipartisan failure. Both parties own what comes next,” said Azizzada.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will vote Monday on whether to recommend three criminal charges against former President Donald Trump to the Department of Justice.

According to Politico, the panel will be considering a report from a subcommittee that recommended at least three possible charges against Trump: insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States government.

The panel could conceivably recommend other charges as well, but there is no indication one way or the other for the time being.

Monday’s decisions follow the continual crime circus surrounding and trailing Trump. Earlier this month, Trump’s namesake organization was found guilty on numerous charges of tax fraud and related crimes connected to a 15-year scheme that gave top executives off-the-books lavish perks, enabling them to evade taxes.

Congress legally can’t force the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions, but the department has ramped up its own investigations into the former president. Trump is also still under investigation for seizing classified documents after he left the White House.

Meanwhile, the New York attorney general is also pursuing a $250 million civil lawsuit into whether Trump’s asset valuation statements were indicative of fraud. Among financial penalties, Trump and his family could be barred from leading business operations in New York ever again.