The individuals who guaranteed the $500,000 bond of Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., last month were revealed by a New York federal court on Thursday to be his father, Gercino dos Santos Jr., and his aunt, Elma Santos Preven, according to a recently unsealed court document.
Santos was indicted on 13 federal charges in May, with prosecutors accusing him of wire fraud, money laundering and making false statements to Congress. He pleaded not guilty.
On Thursday, Santos told reporters outside his office he hoped to keep the names concealed to protect his family from the press.
“Now you’re going to go harass them, a 71-year-old and a 60-year-old. That’s what you guys do best right? Is make people’s lives miserable,” Santos said. “The death threats I get? I can handle that. I ran for public office. They did not. They’re private citizens.”
Santos previously indicated he would rather go to jail than reveal the names of the people who guaranteed his bond.
“My client would rather surrender to pretrial detainment than subject these suretors to what will inevitably come,” Santos’ lawyer Joseph Murray wrote in a letter to the judge earlier this month.
Two federal judges ruled the sources of the bond could be revealed after 11 news organizations petitioned the court, arguing their identities were in the public interest.
In campaign finance filings, dos Santos listed his occupation alternatively as a painter, in construction and retired. Preven reported she was a mail handler for the U.S. Postal Service.
Santos confirmed on Thursday his dad was a painter and his aunt a postal worker. He would not say how they had the funds to guarantee the bond, but claimed they weren’t required to show their assets to the court.
“‘Where did the money come from? Who gave them the money?’ That’s all nonsense,” Santos said.
In May, prosecutors alleged the freshman congressman “used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives.”
He was charged with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds and two counts of lying to the House of Representatives.
Among the allegations, prosecutors say Santos induced supporters to donate to a company under the false pretense that the money would be used to support his campaign. Instead, they say, he used the money for personal expenses, including designer clothes and his credit card and car payments.
Santos also is accused of lying about his finances on congressional disclosure forms and applying for and receiving unemployment benefits while he was employed as regional director of an investment firm that the government shut down in 2021 over allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme. Santos was never implicated in the federal investigation into the alleged Ponzi scheme.
The congressman, who represents parts of Long Island and Queens, has described the charges as a political “witch hunt” and pledged not to resign. He announced a run for reelection earlier this year.
Last year, after winning a district on the border of Queens and Long Island that voted for President Joe Biden just two years earlier, media outlets began examining the relative newcomer’s resume and discovered he had lied or misstated numerous parts of his background, from his professional and academic resume to his heritage, and even his claims that he had employees who died in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
He admitted to lying about being a college graduate, working at prestigious Wall Street firms, and being a descendant of Holocaust survivors, claiming that his grandparents “fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”
During his campaign, he referred to himself as “a proud American Jew.”
Confronted with questions about that story, Santos, a Roman Catholic, said he never intended to claim Jewish heritage.
A local newspaper, the North Shore Leader, had raised issues about Santos’ background before the election but it was not until a few weeks after the election that the depth of his duplicity became public.
“He told me, I remember specifically — I’m into sports a little bit — that he was a star on the Baruch [College] volleyball team and that they won the league championship,” one local Republican official recalled at a January press conference calling on him to resign.
The House Ethics panel launched an investigation into Santos in March. And Nassau County prosecutors and the New York attorney general’s office had previously said they were looking into possible violations of the law.
On Thursday, the House Committee on Ethics said they have issued over 30 subpoenas and more than 40 “voluntary requests for information” in the Santos probe.
“The Committee is aware of the risks associated with dual investigations and is in communication with the Department of Justice to mitigate the potential risks,” wrote the commitee’s chair, Michael Guest, R-Miss., and top Democrat, Susan Wild of Pennsylvania.
Besides questions about his life story, Santos’ campaign spending stoked scrutiny because of unusual payments for travel, lodging and other items.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center lodged a complaint with the Federal Election Commission and urged regulators to investigate Santos. The “mountain of lies” Santos propagated during the campaign about his life story and qualifications, the center said, should prompt the commission to “thoroughly investigate what appear to be equally brazen lies about how his campaign raised and spent money.”
In his filings with the FEC, Santos initially said he loaned his campaign and related political action committees more than $750,000 — money he claimed came from a family company.
Yet, the wealth necessary to make those loans seems to have emerged from nowhere. In a financial disclosure statement filed with the clerk of the U.S. House in 2020, Santos said he had no assets and an annual income of $55,000.
His company, the Devolder Organization, wasn’t incorporated until spring 2021. Yet last September, Santos filed another financial disclosure form reporting that this new company, incorporated in Florida, had paid him a $750,000 salary in each of the last two years, plus another $1 million to $5 million in dividends. In one interview, Santos described the Devolder Organization as a business that helped rich people buy things like yachts and aircraft.
Court records indicate Santos was the subject of three eviction proceedings in Queens between 2014 and 2017 because of unpaid rent.
Santos removed himself from committee assignments but has otherwise been steadfast in his refusal to resign, taking on a combative and occassionally trollish persona as he finds support in corners of the far-right, including the influential New York Young Republican Club, which has close ties to former President Donald Trump and his key allies. Santos is a dues-paying member of and donor to the club and its executive secretary, Vish Burra, serves as one of his top congressional aides.
Democrats have been uniform in their calls on him to resign and six freshman Republicans from New York elected alongside Santos last year have joined those calls, but House Republican leadership has held back. With a slim majority in the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has relied on Santos’ support on key votes, including the California Republican’s election to lead the chamber and on the debt ceiling bill Republicans passed last month.
Republican leadership in Nassau County, where the majority of Santos’ district is, called on him to resign back in January. A Newsday/Sienna College poll later that month found 78% of voters in his district, including 71% of Republicans, thought he should resign.
“If he’s not in jail next summer, I’ll be fully campaigning for his Republican primary opponent,” fellow Long Island Republican Rep. Nick LaLota told Spectrum News in April.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
