In Shock to No One, George Santos’s Charitable Effort Doesn’t Add Up

Former Representative George Santos may be pulling off another charity scam.

He announced Monday that he was bringing his long-denied drag alter ego Kitara Ravache to Cameo, offering up $350 videos, for which 20 percent of the proceeds would be donated to two charities: 10 percent to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports first responders and military veterans, and another 10 percent to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. But now one of the charities is claiming that he has never contacted them.

“We have not engaged in any conversations with Rep. Santos or his team. The Foundation did not know about his planned donation before his post on X,” the Tunnel to Towers Foundation said in a statement provided to New York Times reporter Michael Gold.

Santos has been on the Cameo platform, which offers personalized messages from certain celebrities for sale, since December, and he has made a lot of money from it, likely more than he ever earned as a member of Congress. He also has a history of pocketing money that he claimed was for charity: Santos allegedly took money from a GoFundMe meant to pay for surgery for a veteran’s service dog in 2016. It makes a lot of sense that Santos would come up with a charity-based scheme to rake in more money from Cameo, perhaps to pay for more Botox or OnlyFans.

Is the former congressman simply desperate for cash? He recently dropped a bid to return to the House of Representatives after raising zero dollars, and he still has to come up with funds to pay his various legal fees. Santos currently faces 23 federal charges for unemployment fraud, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud.

Donald Trump hasn’t quite let go of the possibility of utilizing mob violence if he loses the next election.

In a sprawling interview for Time magazine, Trump hinted that leveraging political violence to achieve his end goals was still on the table.

“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he told Time. “It always depends on the fairness of the election.”

And from Trump’s perspective, that’s winning rhetoric. According to him, his incendiary comments supporting a mob mentality, his early warnings of forthcoming abuses of power, and his threats to be a dictator on “day one” are only inching him closer to the White House. “I think a lot of people like it,” Trump told Time.

Recent poll numbers would suggest he’s correct—or that people actually don’t seem to mind his aggressive, democracy-defying verbiage, at the very least. In a Harvard CAPS/HarrisX poll published April 25, Trump performed seven percentage points better than President Joe Biden when the two were matched up alongside independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jill Stein, and Cornel West. And in a batch of state-based polls published on Monday by Emerson College, Trump took every battleground state.

Meanwhile, the trial that will determine Trump’s level of involvement on the day that his followers actually attempted to overthrow Congress’s certification of the 2020 vote has been indefinitely waylaid by the former president’s claim of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court heard arguments for that case last week. It is currently unclear how the justices will decide the case, though they are expected to issue an opinion sometime between the end of June and early July.

Donald Trump has made no secret of his plans to take revenge if he makes his way back to the White House.

In a new interview with Time magazine, Trump said he would consider firing U.S. attorneys who refuse to follow his orders on prosecution of others.

“It depends on the situation, honestly,” he said, undermining the idea of independent law enforcement.

When asked if he would prosecute Fani Willis or Alvin Bragg, the Atlanta-area and Manhattan district attorneys who are currently prosecuting him, he also wouldn’t outright reject the idea.

Well you said Alvin Bragg should be prosecuted. Would you instruct your attorney general to prosecute him? 

Trump: When did I say Alvin Bragg should be prosecuted?

It was at a rally. 

Trump: I don’t think I said that, no. 

I can pull it up. 

Trump: No.

And when it came to Biden, Trump again made clear he’s open to the idea of prosecution.

After initially saying he “wouldn’t want to hurt Biden,” Trump seconds later said it all depends on the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” said Trump, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Trump also revived the idea of enforcing Schedule F, which allows the president to fire nonpolitical government officials. This would allow him to fire civil servants who refuse to carry out his orders. 

“You have some people that are protected that shouldn’t be protected,” he said.

It’s no secret that Trump and many of his far-right allies want to purge the government of civil servants who aren’t loyal to their agenda. Famously, Trump adviser Steven Bannon said he wanted to dismantle the administrative state. President Biden has taken steps to bolster and strengthen the administrative state, which would be in clear jeopardy if Trump is reelected.

In the rest of the Time interview, Trump was at times contradictory but also said that he would consider pardoning every single one of the January 6 rioters and take steps to deport millions of undocumented immigrants via detention camps and the U.S. military. In any case, if he wins reelection, it’s safe to say that the U.S. government would be upended, with Trump using all of the legal means at his disposal. Those who want to preserve democracy as we know it would have a tall order on their hands.

Judge Juan Merchan ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump will face consequences for repeatedly violating the gag order in his New York hush-money trial, though it remains to be seen if the imposed fines will be enough to deter him from future violations.

Trump will have to pay $1,000 per violation, amounting to a $9,000 fine for continually violating a court-imposed partial gag order that prevents him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, jurors, witnesses, or any of their family members. The $1,000 fine is the maximum allowed for gag order violations by state law, though Merchan himself acknowledged the limitations of such a fine when the “contemnor can easily afford such a fine.”

In a decision noting that the court cannot craft an “appropriate” financial penalty, Merchan wrote that, in order to “protect the dignity of the judicial system and to compel respect for its mandates,” the court “must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”

Trump was found in contempt for all but one of the 10 violations alleged by the prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office earlier this month. At the time, the office requested the judge issue Trump a $1,000 sanction for three prior posts, along with another warning to the GOP presidential nominee that future violations could lead to jail time.

But that won’t be the end of it: Trump is scheduled for another gag order hearing on Thursday, when the judge will hear arguments on another four alleged violations.

Trump has been violating the order since the very beginning of the trial. Mere hours into the first day, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced that they believed Trump had violated the gag order via a series of posts on Truth Social made earlier in the morning.

“DA notes a 9:12 am post today, potentially made inside the courthouse, also violates the order,” reported MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.

That might refer to a post in which Trump quoted a headline from a New York Post op-ed, writing that “a serial perjurer will try to prove an old misdemeanor against Trump in an embarrassment for the New York legal system.” If so, that would mean that leveraging the words of others, even media outlets, to benefit his own beliefs would be off the table.

But the level of punishment for Trump’s disregard for his gag order could vary, according to MSNBC analyst Caroline Polisi, who noted two weeks ago it might range from a “tongue lashing” to “monetary sanctions” to actually “putting him in jail.”

“The judge is in a tough spot here,” Polisi said during live coverage of the trial. “No judge wants to be that, you know, person. That is the one to throw former President Trump in jail for criminal contempt. I personally just don’t see that happening. But, the judge’s hands may be tied here. You know, we’ve seen previous judges issue these sort of escalating, sanctions, monetary sanctions.”

Trump is on trial for allegedly using former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case and stands accused of falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

This story has been updated.

Rudy Giuliani issued some bold advice to leaders of the Republican party on Monday: pull the same stunt that Donald Trump was impeached over.

“They should bring over from Ukraine about 20 Ukrainian witnesses—I can get ’em—that are still being held there,” Giuliani said on Newsmax, addressing House Speaker Mike Johnson and Representative Jim Jordan. “Somebody should lean on Zelenskiy. You want another penny, give us your Biden file.”

But that scheme has already been tried—by Giuliani himself. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani took to Ukraine to connect with officials in his effort to “find dirt on the Bidens” that could potentially hurt then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s chances at taking the White House.

That plan blew up in his face when it resulted in Trump’s first formal impeachment by the House of Representatives, which adopted two articles of impeachment in December 2019 after they determined Trump had solicited the aid of foreign governments in the 2020 election.

But the bombshell would have lingering ramifications when Giuliani’s conspiracy was utilized as fodder for a House probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with Republicans accusing Joe Biden of orchestrating a political cover-up in the Eastern European nation while serving as vice president in order to protect his son’s seat on the board of Ukrainian oil company Burisma. In February, the singular witness supporting that astounding allegation reportedly admitted that the whole narrative was actually hand-crafted by top Russian intelligence officials.

And despite it being generally bad practice to lean on foreign governments, Giuliani is, arguably, the worst political operative to take advice from when it comes to involving other countries in campaigns against domestic political opponents. None of his previous efforts have seemed to work out for him. The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” is currently named as one of more than a dozen co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case, and just last week was named in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.