George Santos, the disgraced former congressman and notorious fabulist who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft after being expelled from the House, has been in federal prison for 11 days on a sentence of more than seven years.
On Monday, one of his former colleagues began a formal effort to get him out.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the brash Georgia Republican and MAGA adherent, sent a letter to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney asking that Mr. Santos’s 87-month prison term be commuted, calling it “excessive” and a “grave injustice.”
Ms. Greene’s letter came just days after President Trump, who has doled out pardons or clemency to staunch supporters and others favored by his right-wing base, did not rule out offering a pardon to Mr. Santos, saying only that he had not been asked.
“Nobody’s talked to me about it,” Mr. Trump said on Friday in an interview on the right-wing channel Newsmax. Still, the president, who is known for his own exaggerations and outright falsehoods, acknowledged Mr. Santos’s reputation.
“He lied like hell,” Mr. Trump said. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”
It was an accurate assessment. Mr. Santos, 37, rode into Congress in January 2023 as the object of national scorn after The New York Times and other outlets uncovered that he had fabricated much of his résumé, including a booming Wall Street career and ties to Sept. 11 and the Holocaust. He was ejected that December, after three-quarters of the House voted to expel him.
But during his 11-month stint in Congress, Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, frequently aligned with hard-right lawmakers like Ms. Greene. And even before he took office, Mr. Santos was a reliable Trump loyalist. After both men lost their elections in 2020, Mr. Santos repeated the president’s debunked claims of election fraud and falsely insisted that he, too, had an election stolen from him.
On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the Capitol riot, Mr. Santos traveled to Washington, where he asked the crowd at a rally, “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald Trump?”
Mr. Santos was never charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. He has given contradictory statements about whether he was present that day.
But while Mr. Trump gave sweeping clemency to those charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Santos’s attempts to get his sentence reduced had not met with success.
Mr. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and identity theft and acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other schemes, including lying to Congress, stealing money from campaign donors and fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits. During his sentencing, the judge in his case expressed doubt that he had shown any genuine contrition.
Ms. Greene did not ask for a pardon for Mr. Santos, which would wipe out his conviction. But in her letter to the pardon attorney, Ms. Greene argued for a commutation, which would cut short his term, saying that Mr. Santos had shown regret for his actions and that his sentence “extends far beyond what is warranted.”
Without providing details, she also insisted that many members of Congress had “committed far worse offenses” with no consequences. A spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“George Santos has taken responsibility,” Ms. Greene, who voted against expelling Mr. Santos, wrote in a social media post. “He’s shown remorse. It’s time to correct this injustice.”
Mr. Santos reported to federal prison in southern New Jersey on July 25. In the 11 days that he has been in federal custody, he has published two columns about his experience in The South Shore Press, a newspaper on Long Island.
“I haven’t given up,” he wrote in the column published Monday. “I won’t. Because this moment in my life, as bitter and brutal as it is, will not define the whole story. It’s only a chapter. And like any good book, the best chapters are still unwritten.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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