George Santos, the former Republican congressman from New York whose outlandish fabrications and criminal schemes fueled an unforeseen rise and spectacular fall, was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison on Friday.
His 87-month sentence will bring an end, or at least a pause, to a turbulent period in which Mr. Santos was catapulted from anonymity to political and pop cultural infamy, a national spotlight that, even when negative, he often relished more than rejected.
Mr. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other deceptions, including lying to Congress, fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits and bilking campaign donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Standing before Judge Joanna Seybert in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., a hushed Mr. Santos, 36, seemed far removed from the swaggering lawmaker whose lies — that he was a college volleyball star and a Wall Street financier with ties to the Holocaust and Sept. 11, to name a few — turned him into a national punchline and led to mocking impersonations on “Saturday Night Live.”
“Mr. Santos, words have consequences,” the judge told Mr. Santos. “You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.”
Mr. Santos was given until July 25 to surrender to begin serving his term.
If his lies accounted for his ignominious rise, Mr. Santos’s financial misdeeds are what triggered his downfall. Well before any resolution in his criminal case, his colleagues in the House made the unprecedented decision in December 2023 to expel him from Congress without a conviction.
After an ethics investigation found Mr. Santos had spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to push him out, a bipartisan break from party orthodoxy that seems unthinkable two years later as President Trump uses the bully pulpit to unite Republicans in Congress behind him and hold their slim majority.
Though Mr. Trump has made expansive use of his presidential pardon power, he has shown no indication he might pardon Mr. Santos, who has yet to receive the president’s favor despite his strong adherence to Mr. Trump’s politics. After losing his first bid for a House seat in 2020, Mr. Santos backed Mr. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election and wrongly said that he, too, had been the victim of voter fraud.
Two years later, Mr. Santos won what had been a Democratic-leaning district on Long Island. The victory by Mr. Santos, a young Brazilian American and the first openly gay Republican to be newly elected to Congress, seemed to signal a shift in the party’s politics.
But Mr. Santos’s campaign was built on a spectacular array of lies that would be exposed before he even took office. He claimed to be a descendant of Holocaust refugees. His mother, he said, was in the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks. And he boasted of extensive experience at Wall Street firms that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.
His résumé was false, and so was the loan, one of several schemes that federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York argued Mr. Santos had used to enrich both himself and his campaign as he ran for office.
In an indictment in 2023, prosecutors said that Mr. Santos stole from donors, used his campaign account for personal purchases, inflated his fund-raising numbers, lied about his wealth on congressional documents and committed unemployment fraud.
Judge Seybert followed federal prosecutors’ recommendation for an 87-month prison sentence. Prosecutors argued that Mr. Santos needed to serve extensive time to reflect the “seriousness of his unparalleled crimes’ and “to protect the public from being defrauded.”
They also criticized him for his pugnacious social media posts that suggested he had little remorse for his actions, and for using his notoriety to make money and build a brand off his crimes.
Almost immediately after Mr. Santos was expelled by his peers in Congress, he began recording personalized videos on the app Cameo, making twice his congressional salary. In recent days, he capitalized on his sentencing by slashing prices because it would likely be his “last week on Cameo.” Under pressure to repay victims and fund his own defense, he also began a podcast last year titled “Pants on Fire,” a winking allusion to his penchant for lying.
Mr. Santos’s lawyers pushed for a sentence of two years followed by probation, saying the former congressman had acknowledged the gravity of his crimes and was committed to paying nearly $375,000 in restitution.
True to form, Mr. Santos has prevaricated around his guilt. On social media, he has railed against the Justice Department for politically motivated prosecution and denied having misused campaign funds — a direct contradiction of statements he made during his guilty plea.
But this week, he told The New York Times he would not ask for a pardon because he needed to take “accountability and responsibility.”
Still, those who know Mr. Santos personally are not convinced of his penitence.
“I wouldn’t trust a word out of his mouth,” said Peter Hamilton, who became friendly with Mr. Santos about a decade ago. At the time, Mr. Hamilton lent Mr. Santos, then known as Anthony Devolder, several thousand dollars for a down payment on an apartment.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Santos begin ducking his calls. And though Mr. Hamilton pushed for years, even getting an order from small claims court, he was never repaid until Mr. Santos was vaulted into the public eye.
“He betrayed the trust of the public and won a House seat by being a con man,” Mr. Hamilton said. Even a seven-year sentence, he added, would be “too little.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
Grace Ashford covers New York government and politics for The Times.
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