George Santos, Hit With Two Ethics Complaints in Two Days, Says He’s Done Nothing Wrong

Serial fabulist George Santos maintained Tuesday that he has done “nothing unethical,” even after being hit with two ethics complaints in as many days.

On Tuesday, two of his fellow New York representatives filed an ethics complaint against him. Ritchie Torres and Daniel Goldman, both Democrats, filed a formal complaint asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Santos broke the Ethics in Government Act by failing to file “timely, accurate, and complete financial disclosure reports.” They then personally hand-delivered the complaint to Santos.

The two say that his reports for 2020 and 2022 lack sufficient information and that Santos has contradicted what is in the 2022 reports in his public statements.

“They’re free to do whatever they want,” Santos told reporters in response. “I have done nothing unethical.”

Santos, who was sworn in Saturday, has admitted he fabricated parts of his professional background. But it appears he also made up details of his educational history, his ethnicity and religion, and even his mother’s death.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center also filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, accusing Santos of masking the real source of campaign’s funds, misrepresenting his campaign’s spending, and using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors and prosecutors in Nassau County, New York, are investigating Santos’s finances and financial disclosures.

Santos has faced multiple calls to resign from Democrats, but Republican leadership seems unsure of what exactly to do with him. With the party holding onto the House majority by only a few seats, every vote counts—and Santos proved his loyalty by voting for Kevin McCarthy in every round of votes for speaker.

As Politico put it, “House Republicans know George Santos is a problem. They’re just not sure what to do about him yet.” One option includes not seating him on any committees, but the final consequences of his fabrications are still unclear.

After a handful of classified documents were found at President Biden’s former private office, Donald Trump, his allies, and even some of the mainstream media are stumbling over themselves to equate it with Trump’s hoarding of hundreds of classified documents after he left office. But the two cases are nowhere near the same.

The classified documents were discovered by Biden’s personal attorneys in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. Fewer than a dozen documents were found, with CBS reporting the number at roughly 10. It is unclear what the documents contain and how sensitive they are. CBS News reported the documents do not contain nuclear secrets.

On the same day the attorneys found the documents, the White House counsel’s office notified the National Archives. The documents were handed over the next morning.

Meanwhile, recall that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago came after numerous attempts by the government to retrieve documents from Trump. The raid uncovered droves of documents that included documents from the CIA, NSA, FBI, and materials that described a foreign government’s nuclear defense capability. Overall, the government has recovered at least 300 classified documents since Trump left office; again, Biden’s team themselves actively returned the roughly 10 such documents that they found.

Of course, the difference isn’t stopping Trump or other Republicans from reacting in bad faith.

“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked on Truth Social Monday night. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”

“We want to know exactly what documents were taken by both President Trump and now President Biden and want to know if they’re gonna treat President Biden any differently than they treated President Trump,” said GOP Representative James Comer.

Based on what we know so far, the number of the documents in question and the responses by the pair are radically different—so both cases indeed warrant different treatment. But it seems some mainstream media sources are not interested in laying out that plain fact:

Here—though the clip is not as bad as Froomkin’s tweet implies—the pair of commentators discuss how much of a “political gift” the situation is to Trump and pessimistically assert that nuance that could accurately communicate the differences in the two cases just won’t “cut through.” The duo speak as if they themselves aren’t also how thousands of people take in information, and aren’t ones who can help communicate that nuance. So, sure, they and we can agree that the right wing might operate in bad faith. But the mainstream media can’t haplessly stand in the middle of it all, shrugging their shoulders and saying it’s all just a darn shame.

Representative Katie Porter announced Tuesday that she is running for California senator in 2024.

The progressive star will run to replace long-serving Senator Dianne Feinstein. In her announcement video, the representative highlighted threats to democracy and socioeconomic inequality. She called out the Senate as a place where “rights get revoked and special interests get rewarded,” name-dropping Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular.

A former law school professor, Porter has made a name for herself as a tough interrogator and a progressive who can still appeal to swing voters. She is often seen on the House floor with whiteboards breaking down complex numbers and has achieved name recognition in a body of 435 members based on merit, not controversy—no small feat. Recently, she went viral for reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck during Kevin McCarthy’s interminable run for House speaker (and even coordinated her outfit to the dust jacket).

The California representative is also a strong fundraiser, raising more than $25 million during the November midterms and finishing with $7 million still in her coffers. She won her third term after a tight race that ended with days of vote counting. Although the Senate seat is expected to remain solidly blue, Porter is well positioned to run a competitive campaign.

Porter’s announcement comes before Feinstein has given any indication that she will retire. Feinstein, 89, has served in the Senate for 30 years and accomplished major achievements, such as chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee and assembling the 2014 CIA torture report, which found the agency had misled the government and American public about its use of torture in interrogating terrorist suspects. But in the past year, there have been concerns that she is losing the mental ability to continue serving.

Porter’s Senate bid would give Feinstein an opening to retire gracefully, passing the baton to the next generation as Nancy Pelosi did to Hakeem Jeffries.

“Everyone is of course welcome to throw their hat in the ring, and I will make an announcement concerning my plans for 2024 at the appropriate time,” Feinstein said in a statement after Porter’s announcement.

“Right now I’m focused on ensuring California has all the resources it needs to cope with the devastating storms slamming the state.”

This post has been updated.

Lynette Hardaway, better known as “Diamond” in the ultra-pro-Trump duo Diamond and Silk, passed away Monday night, the pair’s official Twitter account said. She was 51.

Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson (“Silk”) have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Trump announced Hardaway’s death on Truth Social before the official Diamond and Silk tweet, calling it “really bad news for Republicans and frankly, ALL Americans.” Both posts said her death was unexpected, but neither shared the cause of her death.

Diamond and Silk gained notoriety during Trump’s 2016 campaign through their political commentary videos on YouTube, in which they embraced his MAGA ideology. They said they had switched their political affiliation from Democrats to Republicans after Trump announced he was running.

Trump was quick to latch on to them, hyping up the fact that they were two Black women, thus supposedly proving that he was not racist. Diamond and Silk spoke at his rallies for the 2016 campaign, attended his inauguration, and testified in Congress multiple times in 2018 about Facebook supposedly suppressing their content.

Their fame and close relationship with the then president helped them get contributor jobs at Fox News, which at the time was aggressively pro-Trump. Diamond and Silk held multiple commentator roles at Fox News from 2016 to 2020, when the network cut ties with them for actively pushing Covid-19 conspiracy theories on air.

The women said that Covid-19 death numbers were being inflated to make Trump look bad. They also said they would refuse to get a Covid vaccine if Bill Gates had been involved in its production, accusing him of trying to control the global population, and suggested that 5G technology was being used to infect people with the coronavirus. All of these claims are untrue.

Diamond and Silk then landed their own show on far-right network Newsmax, calling themselves Trump’s “most loyal supporters.”

On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a pseudo-hype video celebrating herself and the GOP House majority after the caucus made history in hosting the longest House speaker election since before the Civil War.

The video, posted with the caption “It’s time to begin … and they can’t stop what’s coming,” was set to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” with a smattering of clips showing Greene dramatically striding through the halls of Congress, apparently to showcase her prowess as a political operator greasing the wheels of the House voting 15 times before Representative Kevin McCarthy finally won the speakership.

Garnering over four million views and some 14,000 likes (just 0.35 percent of viewers actually liking the video), the clip was removed after Dr. Dre himself requested Twitter remove the video. “I don’t license my music to politicians, especially someone as divisive and hateful as this one,” he told TMZ.

Dr. Dre’s lawyer, Howard King, had a few more words to share with Greene. “One might expect that, as a member of Congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country. It’s possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on,” King wrote in a cease and desist letter addressed to Greene. King also sent a separate letter to Twitter requesting the company block her post.

Greene had told TMZ she was locked out of her account for using the copyrighted music without permission. And after so gleefully using Dr. Dre’s music in her engagement-snatching video, she snapped back at the eminent musician. “While I appreciate the creative chord progression, I would never play your words of violence against women and police officers, and your glorification of the thug life and drugs,” she told TMZ.

Perhaps such a 180 can be best left with the words of another classic Dril tweet that always seems relevant to the right wing in America: