Former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) was sentenced Friday to seven years and three months in prison, putting a bookend on the more than two year scandal that captivated Washington and brought the New York Republican from a GOP trailblazer to an embarrassing stain on the party.
The sentence marks the latest development in the drama that surrounded the former congressman, who earned praise as the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a nonincumbent in 2022 before becoming the face of controversy after his background was exposed as a series of outlandish lies.
The storm surrounding Santos on Capitol Hill hit an apex in December 2023, when he was expelled from the House in a bipartisan vote, becoming the sixth lawmaker in history to be ousted from the lower chamber.
As his political career nosedived, prosecutors charged Santos with 23 federal counts over several criminal schemes. He took a deal last summer that included pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Federal law mandated that U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert, an appointee of former President Clinton who oversaw the case, sentence Santos to at least two years given the severity of his charges.
Santos’s attorneys contended that punishment is sufficient given his remorse, but the judge’s 87-month sentence matches prosecutors’ recommendation.
As part of his plea deal, Santos admitted to filing false campaign finance reports, charging donors’ credit cards without authorization and fraudulently receiving unemployment benefits, among other things, saying he was taking responsibility for the “lies I have told myself.”
He also agreed as part of the deal to pay nearly $374,000 in restitution and a forfeiture judgment of roughly $205,000.
Central to his sentencing was whether Santos truly felt remorseful. Prosecutors urged the lengthier sentence by asserting he “remains unrepentant,” pointing to his recent social media posts attacking the Justice Department.
Santos pushed back in a letter to the judge earlier this week, telling Seybert he was committed to making amends for his crimes.
“But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head. True remorse isn’t mute; it is aware of itself, and it speaks up when the penalty scale jumps into the absurd,” Santos wrote.
Santos’s sentencing puts an end to his stunning rise and fall on Capitol Hill. His election in 2022, which flipped a blue seat red, was hailed as a boon for Republicans until weeks later, before he was even sworn into office, The New York Times reported that several parts of his biography and resume were fabricated.
From the minute he arrived on Capitol Hill, he was mired in controversy, which culminated with an historic vote in December 2023 to expel him from the chamber. A bipartisan group of lawmakers came together to support his ouster, overcoming the inflated two-thirds threshold required for expulsion.
The move reverberated in Congress. Santos’s expulsion left House Republicans, already grappling with a razor-thin majority, down a key vote. Later, in February 2024, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) won a special election to replace Sanos, putting the purple district back into Democratic hands.
With his trial in the rearview mirror and the sentencing in, Santos is now staring down time behind bars — a reality that he, during an extensive sit-down interview in the Capitol the day before his expulsion, said he was worried about.
“Wouldn’t you be? I mean, of course,” Santos told reporters when asked if he was scared to go to jail. “That’s why I made it very clear that I am, you know, standing my ground, but of course, everybody should be, these are serious allegations and I have a lot of work ahead of me.”
This story was updated at 12:47 p.m.
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