George Santos Liked Using a Fake Jewish Name on GoFundMe Because “The Jews Will Give More”

George Santos used to go by a Jewish last name to better scam donors to his made-up animal charity, according to a former acquaintance.

Gregory Morey-Parker, who said he and the New York representative were roommates for a few months, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Tuesday that Santos had gone by Anthony Zabrovsky at the time.

“He would say, ‘Oh, well, the Jews will give more if you’re a Jew.’ And so that’s the name he used for his GoFundMes,” Morey-Parker said.

As we all know by now, Santos appears to have fabricated the bulk of his professional résumé. He also seems to have lied about his personal background, including that he is descended from Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust. He has previously said his maternal grandparents changed their name from Zabrovsky to avoid persecution. Records indicate, though, that Santos’s grandparents were born in Brazil and that he has no Jewish heritage whatsoever.

Santos also claimed that he ran a nonprofit called Friends of Pets United, which worked on pet rescue (but seemed to hate cats). 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 attorney general’s office could find records of the organization being registered as a charity. CNN has found that Santos ran a GoFundMe campaign that no longer exists for a pet charity under the name “Anthony Zabrovsky.”

Santos has come under fire from both constituents and the Republican Jewish Coalition for making up Jewish ancestry (particularly with a Holocaust link) for clout. Pretending to be part of a community so you can get more money out of people is also deeply offensive.

The Republican congressman continues to defy logic and offend all sensibilities. He is facing multiple calls to resign, three ethics investigations, three criminal ones, and a fraud charge in Brazil, and yet he was still given committee assignments in the House of Representatives.

Every day, I wake up and think it can’t get worse for George Santos.

And every day, I’m proven wrong.

In May 2016, Santos allegedly raised $3,000 for a homeless and disabled veteran’s service dog, Sapphire, who was suffering from a life-threatening stomach tumor. After Santos (who went by Anthony Devolder at the time) closed the GoFundMe, he took the $3,000 and was never heard from again.

The revelations come from Rich Osthoff, the swindled veteran, who spoke with Long Island local outlet Patch.

Osthoff had been living in a tent in an abandoned chicken coop on the side of a New Jersey highway, alongside his dog, Sapphire, given to him by a veteran’s charity. After Osthoff visited animal veterinarians and learned about Sapphire’s tumor that would cost $3,000 to operate on, a veterinary technician helped connect him to “a guy who runs a pet charity” who could help.

That supposedly charitable man was Anthony Devolder—one of Santos’s former public identities—and the charity was “Friends of Pet United.”

The “charity” raised some $3,000 through GoFundMe. Osthoff recalled that after the fundraiser began, it became harder and harder to reach Santos. The now congressman had also led Osthoff along. In August, Santos had the vet tech drive Osthoff and Sapphire to a practice in Queens; Santos insisted they couldn’t use the New Jersey vet’s office and he had “credit” with the Queens one.

The veterinarian in Queens said Sapphire’s tumor was inoperable, something the New Jersey vet had not said. After the odd trip, Santos became even harder to reach. Finally, in November, Osthoff begged Santos to let him take Sapphire to another vet. “My dog is going to die because of god knows what,” he texted Santos.

“Sapphire is not a candidate for this surgery the funds are moved to the next animal in need,” Santos wrote back. Santos said he would take Sapphire himself elsewhere for an ultrasound but that Osthoff could not come and that it could not occur at the New Jersey office because they apparently wouldn’t accept the charity’s funding method.

Santos stopped responding after that, and the GoFundMe was gone. After all was said and done, Santos took the money and went with the wind.

A November 2016 Facebook post from Osthoff shows him declaring what happened. “To everyone who helped me and Sapphire raise the money for her surgery, I’m sorry to say that we were scammed by Anthony Devolder,” Osthoff wrote. “Sapphire has NOT received veterinary care, and her growth is 3 to 4 times bigger than it was when the campaign was fulfilled. She is facing euthanasia within months.”

Sapphire died two months later, on January 15, 2017. Osthoff told Patch that, after being out of work with a broken leg for over a year, he couldn’t even afford to euthanize and cremate Sapphire.

“I had to panhandle. It was one of the most degrading things I ever had to do,” he told Patch.

Read more at Patch.

Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, both of whom have blocked crucial legislation, literally high-fived over their mutual belief in keeping the filibuster.

The two were speaking on a panel about U.S. foreign and domestic policy at the Davos World Economic Forum on Tuesday. Sinema argued that the current levels of partisanship in government are not “healthy for democracy,” and then Manchin asked if they still agreed on not getting rid of the filibuster.

“That’s correct,” Sinema said, and the pair high-fived.

The filibuster is a process used to block a bill’s passage in the Senate. Contrary to popular belief, the filibuster is not in the Constitution but is instead thought to have arisen from “tenuous precedents and informal practices,” according to the Center for American Progress. As of late, the filibuster has been used to essentially enforce minority rule. It takes 60 votes to end debate on a bill, so senators in the minority party can still block a bill’s passage through the filibuster. Since bills must pass the Senate before being signed into law, minority senators can force the majority party to agree to changes in the legislation before allowing a final vote.

Democrats have been trying for years to abolish or at least amend the filibuster, but there have been holdouts—notably Sinema and Manchin. The two senators have made names for themselves as perpetual thorns in Joe Biden’s side, blocking some of the president’s keystone legislation, such as the $2 trillion Build Back Better package aimed at tackling climate change and social welfare.

Manchin and Sinema have been accused of being more self-serving than public servants. West Virginia Senator Manchin voted against paid leave for rail union workers, backed fossil fuel initiatives such as the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline, and fomented the ridiculous pro-gas stove frenzy.

Sinema, meanwhile, appears to have undergone an ideological 180 since coming to Capitol Hill, seemingly jettisoning the progressive beliefs she previously espoused. She went viral for voting with a flippant thumbs-down against increasing the minimum wage—despite previously being vocal in support of raising it. The Arizona Democratic Party censured her for opposing the removal of the filibuster and accused her of cozying up to wealthy donors instead of fighting for her own constituents.

She was already deeply unpopular across party lines in Arizona, and since switching from Democratic to independent in December, it has only gotten worse. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Sinema is one of the most unpopular senators in the entire country.

In this country, nobody wants to work (with George Santos). The New York representative had been hard-pressed to find a place to contribute his seasoned and experienced mind, but finally, it appears he’ll be finding a home on the Small Business Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee—among the many areas of Santos’s expertise.

The news on Tuesday comes after uncertainty about whether Santos would have a spot on any committee at all. Last week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Santos would not receive a spot on any key committee. Santos had hoped to gain a spot on the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the House Financial Services Committee, amazing preferences given the international and financial investigations Santos currently faces.

According to CNN correspondent Manu Raju, several Republican chairs indicated their unwillingness to have Santos on their committees. But Republicans also feared that if they denied Santos committee spots, it would set a precedent for any other members who may face public scrutiny even while they have not been charged with a crime. As in, Republicans were putting more weight on the possibility of future members being as brazenly dishonest than they are on the importance of not rewarding that dishonesty with committee spots. The kind of calculus only to be found in a very reasonable political party.

Again, Santos is facing criminal investigation both in Brazil for fraud and in the United States on the federal and county level into his finances and background. Republicans’ purported fears already don’t apply to the case at hand.

Moreover, they have already set a precedent for not seating members they deem unfit onto committees. In 2019, the House Republican Steering Committee elected to keep Republican Steve King off committees after he had asked in an interview with The New York Times how terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” became “offensive.” So seating Santos in order to avoid setting bad precedent for their party in fact overturns the previous precedent they had set.

But the crux of all this is that Republicans have a narrow majority. When they did not seat King on any committees, they were in a 30-some-seat minority, so the stakes of punishing someone were low. But now Republicans cannot afford to lose any more members. And any move they would have made to further delegitimize Santos risked him resigning or being forced out. So their calculus is perhaps less concerned with future precedent and more with not punishing members when the Republican Party needs every last one of them. Santos may not have gotten on the committee he wanted, but political realities at least gave him something.

Nearly two years ago, the House, including 11 Republicans, voted to strip Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments just weeks into the Georgia freshman’s first term. The resolution followed Greene’s racist and antisemitic rhetoric; her parroting of conspiracy theories on the 2020 election, 9/11, and the 2018 Parkland shooting; and her repeated indications of support for fatal violence against Democrats.

Fast forward two years, Greene is now being elevated to the House Homeland Security Committee—despite having incited plenty of threats herself against the homeland.

Greene, a key provocateur of the rhetoric that led to the January 6 Capitol riot, had encouraged people in 2019 to “flood the Capitol” and resort to violence “if we have to.” Greene expressed support for executing Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. After announcing her run for Congress, she posted an image on Facebook of herself holding a gun next to images of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” she wrote in the caption.

Insofar as Greene displays any “concern” for protecting the homeland, it nearly always consists of racist fearmongering and lies. “They want to conquer America, and we’re not going to do it,” Greene previously said about Muslims. “We don’t need gun control! We need Muslim control!” a 2018 comment read on Facebook. Greene liked it.

In 2018, Greene wrote a theory that California’s deadly wildfires were a result of space lasers possibly controlled by the Rothschild investment bank. Greene also called George Soros—a businessman, philanthropist, and notable Democratic donor—a “Nazi” and “a piece of crap that turned in his own people over to the Nazis.” Soros is a Holocaust survivor.

The Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over the border. House Republicans have said they aim to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as part of their perennial focus on the border. Greene is one of 32 Republican co-sponsors of recently introduced articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. (The last and only time a Cabinet secretary was impeached was in 1876, when Secretary of War William Belknap was impeached by the House and subsequently acquitted by the Senate.)

All that is to say, beyond conducting impeachment hearings and trafficking conspiracy, it does not seem likely Greene’s new assignment will lead her to pursue much constructive policy to keep people safe.