Newly elected GOP congressman spun false tales about education and work history, report claims

A Republican whose surprise victory in a New York congressional district helped his party win a narrow majority in the House of Representatives reportedly has a largely fictionalised background that also includes a previously-unreported brush with the law.

George Santos, now congressman-elect from New York’s 3rd District, was the subject of a wide-ranging dive by the New York Times into his background which appears to have revealed a man who may not be exactly who he claims.

The Times’s investigation highlighted claims including Mr Santos’s assertion that he graduated from Baruch College in New York City around the same time that he was apparently also spending at least some time in Brazil. The school said it had no record of him receiving a diploma, even using several spelling variations of Mr Santos’s name. He also claimed on a previous version of a biography on his campaign website to have worked as an “associate asset manager” for Citigroup, a major financial services and investment banking corporation based out of the city, but a spokesperson for the company told the paper it had no record of him ever being employed there.

Mr Santos further claims to have run an unidentified company that employed four victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, even though none of the victims worked for any companies listed in his various biographical passages.

The congressman-elect even appears to not be living in a residence to which he is registered to vote, the same address he used for a campaign donation as recently as October. A reporter for the Times arrived at the residence to find a woman who “said on Sunday that she was not familiar with him”; it wasn’t clear from the Times’s reporting how long the unidentified woman has lived at the residence in question, or whether Mr Santos voted using that address in November, which would be a crime if he did not reside there at the time.

The Independent has reached out to an attorney representing Mr Santos for comment; the same attorney denounced the Times’s reporting as “defamatory” in a brief statement to the newspaper but did not explain why two institutions at which Mr Santos claims to have worked and studied would deny knowing him.

The reporting on Mr Santos was highlighted on Twitter on Monday morning as evidence of the shocking failure of New York state Democratic Party leaders to mount a coherent and competitive campaign this election cycle. The state, a blue bastion, was the site of some of the GOP’s biggest inroads this election season and some regional Democratic-aligned groups are being put to task for their failure to raise funds and support candidates running for office or to protect their seats. A lack of opposition research conducted by state party operatives now sits at the top of the list of complaints from younger Democrats in the state like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have described their party’s statewide apparatus as uninterested in winning elections or anything else besides protecting their own jobs and those of their allies.

“Collectively the NY Dems in 2022 ran probably the worst campaign in the history of any modern state party,” wrote Harvard’s Erik Baker.

Mr Santos’s victory was far from the only humiliation for New York Democrats this election cycle.

The state also was the site of Sean Patrick Maloney’s defeat, a significant blow for House Democrats given that the New York congressman was in charge of their caucus’s entire campaign arm in 2022.