The Beautiful Irony of George Santos Being Charged With Covid Unemployment Fraud

The co-sponsor of a bill to prevent unemployment fraud was charged with committing unemployment fraud.

On Tuesday, George Santos was indicted on 13 counts related to money laundering, wire fraud, lying to Congress, and theft of public funds. A day later, Republicans began voting on a bill to recoup Covid-19 unemployment benefits from fraudulent claimants. Santos was unable to participate, however, because he was busy being processed for his 13 counts, including fraudulently claiming $24,000 in Covid unemployment benefits while making a $120,000 salary.

The cherry on top is that Santos himself is one of the co-sponsors of the bill, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act.

When asked about the clear conflict, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise demurred.

“In regard to George Santos, he was already removed from all his committees,” Scalise said, in contrast to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s earlier suggestion that Santos himself elected to leave his committee assignments. “He’s going to have to go through the legal process. But we’re going to continue to work to root out fraud, and there’s lots of it: We’re talking about tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.”

Santos is also part of the Republican quest to hold the debt ceiling hostage to impose work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP benefits: again, a great irony given his own fraudulent use of government handouts.

The contradiction is run-of-the-mill from a conservative ideological movement (note: all Republicans, and some Democrats) that, in all senses, has carried out a “regulation for thee but not for me” regime.

On government handouts, the conservative movement has showered corporations—particularly those in special favor with it, like fossil fuel or railroad companies—with subsidies and rolled-back regulations.

On taxes, the rich have been able to evade taxes and secure wild tax breaks, while the poor pay disproportionately more for a society that treats them disproportionately worse. The majority of Americans pay for a system that only makes the gap between rich and poor even wider, and the cycle continues, entrenching it all further and further.

And on unemployment benefits, Republicans are now pursuing a bill that pretends to go after fraudsters while actually seeking to repeal federal funds approved by Democrats in 2021 that would empower the Labor Department to investigate fraud cases. All the while, one of their own co-sponsors appears guilty of the exact misdeed Republicans claim they’re attempting to address.

The contradictions are all backgrounded by a political movement that has complained about government spending and student debt relief while being among the largest recipients of emergency Covid PPP funding, or among the politicians—from Dianne Feinstein to Kelly Loeffler and Richard Burr—who have committed insider trading during the height of the pandemic.

Ever since Representative George Santos forced his way into the public consciousness six months ago, a major question has been exactly how he made his money. The Republican congressman claimed to have made millions in a short amount of time, with no real explanation of where the money came from.

The new charges against him, if anything, make things even more complicated.

Santos was formally charged in a New York federal court Wednesday with 13 counts of various forms of financial fraud, including two counts of making false statements on his House financial disclosure reports. Santos has previously claimed he had made $3 million in the years before he ran for Congress, including a $750,000 salary in 2021.

But according to court documents, he never came close to making that much. The court filing alleges that Santos only earned about $55,000 in 2020, when he first ran for Congress, in salaries from two different companies. One of those companies, Harbor City Capital, was accused of a ponzi scheme, which Santos conveniently failed to disclose.

The indictment also says Santos falsely claimed a $750,000 salary and between $1 and $5 million in dividends from his company Devolder Organizations. So if that’s the case, where did Santos get the money he claimed to have, including his campaign funds? And did it even exist?

The indictment makes it clear that prosecutors are also trying to determine the source of Santos’s alleged massive personal wealth.

Santos was also charged Wednesday with two counts of unemployment fraud for claiming unemployment Covid-19 benefits and five counts of wire fraud for soliciting donations in 2022, saying they were for his House campaign. Instead, he transferred the donations to his own bank account and used it for personal expenses, such as buying designer clothes and making credit card payments.

The indictment checks out with other shady dealings we’ve learned about regarding Santos in recent months. One donor told Talking Points Memo that they had donated $1,000 to his 2020 campaign, paying via credit card over the phone. Over the next year, more than $15,000 in fraudulent charges were made on that card, with some of the money going to companies and other campaigns linked to Santos.

Santos also helped broker the sale of a $19 million yacht between two of his biggest donors just a few weeks before the election in November, The New York Times reported. He told Semafor that his referral fee for such a deal would be several hundred thousand dollars.

But in the end, exactly where all his money came from remains a mystery. Perhaps his upcoming federal trial will help shed a little more light on the matter.

More and more Republicans have actually begun to expand their expressed discomfort with, or outright disdain for, Donald Trump after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday.

But, of course, there are swarms of Republicans still tripping over themselves to expose themselves as disgusting, both in their docility and in their demonic defenses—or even lauding—of Trump and his now affirmed sex-pest behavior.

Here’s a taste of how some Republicans are defending a man even former aides are now admitting was a serial harasser.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron—who already has shown his meek deference toward those in power by not charging any police officer for killing Breonna Taylor—expressed little woe for Trump.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville said the verdict holding Trump liable for sexual abuse “makes me want to vote for him twice.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio—who ran against Trump in 2016 and now acts as his cute little lapdog—assailed the jury and case as a “joke.” Very cool for a sitting U.S. senator to dismiss the entire legal system (and the regular Americans who did their part in participating in it) not on any systemic issues but because Trump was found responsible for sexually harassing someone.

Rubio also dismissed Trump being found liable for defaming Carroll. “If someone accuses me of raping them and I didn’t do it, and you’re innocent, of course you’re going to say something about it.… It was a joke.”

It wasn’t a joke—and if Trump wanted to “say something,” why didn’t he defend himself at his trial?

Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis simply put her hands up, as if she has no agency as one of the 0.00016 percent of Americans who are in Congress.

She said the ruling does not impact her decision on who to support in 2024. “I’m going to stay neutral,” the Wyoming Republican said when asked whether she has anything to say about her party’s front-runner being found liable for sexual abuse.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—now juggling between being asked about Trump being charged with sexual abuse and defamation and George Santos being charged with 13 counts of fraud and lying to Congress—elected to keep his chest out and chin up by simply ignoring questions about Trump’s charges.

“Sir, what’s your reaction to President Trump being found liable in the E. Jean Carroll case?” a reporter asked him in the halls of Congress. McCarthy pursed his lips and kept walking.

New York Representative and serial fabulist George Santos was charged Wednesday with 13 counts of various forms of financial fraud.

The freshman congressman known for making up a career in volleyball (among other more serious fabrications) surrendered to authorities at the federal court on Long Island. He was officially charged with five counts of wire fraud for soliciting donations to a company that was managed by his LLC, Devolder Organizations LLC. Santos allegedly said the money would go towards his House campaign, and that the donations could be unlimited because the company was a Super PAC and a registered nonprofit, none of which is true.

Santos was charged with three counts of unlawful monetary transactions for transferring those donations from the company bank account to his personal account. The court documents allege that he used those funds for personal expenses, “including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments,” not his campaign.

He was also charged with one count of theft of public money and two counts of unemployment fraud. In mid-June 2020, Santos allegedly applied for unemployment benefits under the Covid-19 relief program, despite the fact that he was making a $120,000 salary at an investment firm. According to court documents, Santos received regular unemployment payments from June 2020 until April 2021, even though he was employed.

Finally, Santos was charged with two counts of making false statements on his House financial disclosure reports. In 2020, when he first ran for Congress, he claimed his total earned income was $55,000, paid by one company. In reality, he made about half of that from a second company, Harbor City Capital, which was accused of a ponzi scheme and which he conveniently failed to disclose.

Then, in 2022, he claimed he had a $750,000 salary from Devolder Organizations LLC and between $1 and $5 million in dividends from the same company in a savings account. Court documents allege that not only were neither of these statements true, but Santos only made about $48,000 from 2021 up to when he filed the disclosure form. Half that money was a salary from another company, and the rest came from unemployment benefits.

Santos has courted nothing but scandal since he was elected in the 2022 midterms. He appears to have fabricated the bulk of his professional and educational resume. He also claimed his mother survived 9/11 (she was not even in the country) and seemingly lied that his grandparents fled the Holocaust and four of his employees were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Santos is also still under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, and he agreed to a deal with Brazilian authorities investigating him for financial fraud.

This story has been updated.

Read the full indictment here.

For those concerned with where Tucker Carlson might land after being booted out of Fox, fear not. He’s actually landing in a spot where he’ll be even more ideologically comfortable, and where he won’t be bothered by the pesky particulars of things like editorial responsibility, or legal liability.

Why? Because Elon Musk’s Twitter is rolling out a welcome mat for the far-right television host. Carlson is going to relaunch his show on the social media website, bringing along some of his old staff from Fox.

“Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter,” Carlson said in a video statement on Twitter.

“The best you could hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits,” Carlson continued. “And you know that if you bump up against those limits, often enough, you will be fired for it,” perhaps nodding towards his own departure from Fox after the network shelled out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for the network’s lies about its voting machines and the integrity of the 2020 election.

The news of Carlson’s show comes after months of Musk ramping up Twitter to be more like a far-right haven and less like an open platform that serves as a massive information highway for the world.

Musk has reinstated far-right Nazis back to Twitter. He has banned numerous journalists for doing their job. He has completely upended the verification system, enabling impersonation and misinformation to run rampant. He gave exclusive file access to a handful of writers, so they could construct a cherry-picked and conspiratorial narrative about online right-wing suppression.

In recent days, Musk has whipped up lies and conspiracy theories surrounding everything from the horrific mass shooting in Allen, Texas carried out by a neo-Nazi and white supremacist, to Daniel Perry’s killing of homeless man Jordan Neely on the New York City subway.

All that dangerous rhetoric—illustrated by how the shooter in Allen, Texas, explicitly has said stochastic terroristic figures like Libs of TikTok inspired him—has been tolerated and indeed encouraged by Musk under the abstract glorification of “free speech.”

“Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one is Twitter, where we are now,” Carlson said. “Twitter is not a partisan site, everybody’s allowed here…but actually the gatekeepers are still in charge,” he continued. “We think that’s a bad system. We know exactly how it works,” he concluded, alluding to “the new version” of his show being an antidote to his posed problem.

Carlson has long made his brand one that purports to advocate for the little guy, while he in fact redirects anger towards the wrong targets, or even flatters people who already have power and influence (like Musk). The dynamic was more of the same in his remarks.

Musk for his part claims that Twitter has not signed an exclusive deal with Carlson, and that he is “subject to the same rules & rewards of all content creators” (which, given how much misinformation and inflammatory content users have been allowed to spread so far, doesn’t necessarily say much anyhow).

Nevertheless, news of Carlson’s show still indicates how Musk is using Twitter to create his own echo chamber. Already, within Musk’s new Twitter regime—in which most of the mere thousands of Twitter Blue subscribers are Musk sycophants, far-right users, or both—most top replies beneath the sorts of conspiratorial tweets Musk himself promotes are similarly conspiratorial or inflammatory. And these same tweets are the ones that receive inordinate amounts of amplification in areas like Twitter’s “for you” recommendation tab. Any illusion of debate or open discourse or even intellectual exchange that Twitter may have had previously is gone.

So make no mistake, any “free speech” that Carlson is advocating for (read: at best, faux populism that doesn’t genuinely call for collective action against corporate villains; at worst, viciously racist whip-ups that encourage vigilantism or militaristic police crackdowns against protestors) is not only already allowed, but encouraged on Musk’s Twitter.

Twitter has already been circling the drain; advertisers have been fleeing en masse, and they likely will only depart faster after Musk’s even more explicit conspiratorial turn over the past 48 hours. Carlson’s deal adds another layer of shit that’ll whirl down the drain.