At this point, would you trust George Santos if he said the sky were blue? The New York congressman is officially in the House of Representatives as of last week, and yet he's still getting caught in new lies each day. In a promisingly meta new twist, his latest fabrication feels like a joke that someone's already made about George Santos.
Santos was one of the four Republicans who flipped New York congressional districts in the 2022 midterms, and like the other three, he did so by screaming about crime. Unlike the other three, he also did so through world-historic feats of mendacity. Santos's pitch was that he was a successful businessman who'd attended Baruch College and the prestigious Horace Mann School, and then worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, allowing him to loan his own campaign $705,000 afterward. Every single part of that biography turned out to be a lie—all that's known for sure is Santos was committing criminal check fraud in Brazil during his alleged schooling years—and federal prosecutors, the Federal Election Commission, and the House Ethics Committee are all investigating him over campaign finance shenanigans.
Santos's kinda-sorta colleagues in Republican party leadership in Nassau County called on him to resign today, with chairman Joseph Cairo admonishing Santos for disgracing himself and the party with "deceits, lies, and fabrications." In the process of making his case, Cairo also revealed a new Santos lie: He told Cairo that he was a volleyball star at Baruch College, the school he did not attend, and helped them win "the league championship."
Nassau County Republican Party Chair Joseph Cairo says Rep. George Santos (R-NY) claimed he had been a volleyball "star" at Baruch College — which he did not attend — and led his team to a "league championship." pic.twitter.com/fjIp3n1Yo2
— The Recount (@therecount) January 11, 2023
The volleyball lie is delightfully specific, especially since it confirms last week's investigative findings of Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich. It will sit in the pantheon alongside other canonical things Santos lied about, including:
- His educational and work history
- His maternal grandparents surviving the Holocaust (multiple records show they were both born in Brazil)
- His fake animal charity called Friends Of Pets United (he does not appear to have united with any other friends of pets, though he at least did go through the work of hosting a fake fundraiser and making off with the money)
- Four of his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shooting (none of his employees died in the Pulse nightclub shooting, and it's unclear whether he even had "employees")
- His marriage history, and to whom he's been married (there is scant evidence that his alleged husband exists and the relationship is no longer mentioned in his campaign bio)
- That his mother, a finance executive, died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (she was not a finance executive, was likely in Brazil, and after Santos posted on the fifth anniversary of her death in December 2021, he later tried to thread a weird lie about her developing cancer in the wake of the attacks)
For his part, Santos has refused to resign because he wants to serve his constituents. A couple of his constituents replied to his defiant tweet with complaints about how his office makes him unreachable.
