Former Representative George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn, was released from a federal prison on Friday night after President Trump commuted his seven-year sentence for fraud.
His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that Mr. Santos was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey after 10 p.m. on Friday night. “A great injustice has been corrected,” Mr. Murray said.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Mr. Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats. Calling the former congressman “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” Mr. Trump said that he believed that Mr. Santos’s sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.
The president also suggested he had been moved by Mr. Santos’s accounts of being in prison, which he had published in a regular column in a local Long Island newspaper.
“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”
Mr. Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He served fewer than three months of his 87-month sentence.
Mr. Santos will also no longer be required to pay more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to his victims, according to a copy of the commutation posted online by Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney.
Mr. Santos’s commutation — which cuts his sentence short but does not wipe out his conviction — is part of a blitz of grants of political clemency that Mr. Trump has doled out to his political allies or other figures who have been embraced by his right-wing supporters.
For months, it looked as if Mr. Santos, who rose to political prominence as an adherent to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, would not be granted similar favor. Even as the president gave sweeping pardons to those charged in connection with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Santos’s appeals to get his sentence reduced were unsuccessful.
His commutation is the latest startling twist in an outlandish political odyssey that saw Mr. Santos move from a little-known conservative from Long Island to an infamous example of deceit and political fraud.
When he won his seat in 2022, Mr. Santos was heralded as a sign of a shift in Republican politics. Young, Brazilian American and openly gay, Mr. Santos seemed to signal an expansion of the G.O.P.’s tent. His victory, in a Democratic-leaning district in Long Island, was celebrated for helping Republicans narrowly win control of the House.
But Mr. Santos’s congressional career was imperiled almost immediately, after The New York Times and other outlets exposed that his ascent was built on a spectacular web of lies.
Mr. Santos claimed that he was descended from Holocaust refugees. His mother, he said, had been in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He claimed to be a college volleyball star. And Mr. Santos boasted of extensive Wall Street experience that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.
None of that was true.
As more of Mr. Santos’s claims were exposed to be false or misleading, his Republican colleagues grew increasingly uneasy. When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of multiple criminal schemes, ranging from fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits and lying on official forms to using his political campaign to enrich himself, swindling money from donors for personal expenses and using one donor’s credit card to steal $11,000 for his personal use.
After a congressional ethics investigation found that Mr. Santos improperly spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans purchases, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to expel him from Congress in December 2023.
He became the first person in history to be expelled from the House without being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.
Less than a year later, Mr. Santos, who had for more than a year denied all wrongdoing, pleaded guilty in his criminal case. He acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other schemes, including lying to Congress, stealing money from campaign donors and fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits.
At Mr. Santos’s sentencing, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York at the time, John J. Durham, described the conviction as a warning. “To Mr. Santos and other dishonest individuals of that ilk, who lie, steal identities and commit frauds to get elected to public office,” he said, “public officials who criminally abuse our electoral process will end up in a federal prison.”
A spokesman for the Eastern District declined to comment on Friday night.
Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Mr. Murray, thanked Mr. Trump in a statement, in which he called him “the greatest president in U.S. History” and said that he was “so proud to be an American.”
Mr. Santos’s commutation may cause a political headache for many of his Republican colleagues, especially on Long Island, where four congressional seats have been hotly contested battlegrounds in recent elections.
Representative Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican who was among those leading the charge for Mr. Santos’s expulsion, decried the commutation on Friday evening. In a social media post where he did not address Mr. Trump, Mr. LaLota wrote that Mr. Santos “didn’t merely lie — he stole millions, defrauded an election, and his crimes (for which he pled guilty) warrant more than a three-month sentence.”
Mr. Santos remains more popular among a cadre of far-right MAGA politicians outside of New York, a few of whom publicly pushed for his release.
“THANK YOU President Trump for releasing George Santos!!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the brash Republican and MAGA adherent, wrote in a social media post on Friday night.
Ms. Greene was one of the first to call for a commutation, sending a letter to the Justice Department in August. Around that time, Mr. Trump, who had by that point issued numerous pardons to staunch supporters, did not rule out offering one to Mr. Santos. But in an interview with Newsmax, Mr. Trump said that he had not yet been asked.
“He lied like hell,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”
In his post on Friday announcing Mr. Santos’s commutation, Mr. Trump once again cited their shared political views, this time as a justification for his release.
He suggested that Mr. Santos’s transgressions — which include crimes that Mr. Santos acknowledged in court that he committed — paled in comparison to those of Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who has admitted that he misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War era.
“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Mr. Trump wrote.
In a statement to The Times, Mr. Blumenthal dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments. “This rant is fabricated nonsense,” he said. “There’s no excuse for commuting George Santos’ sentence.”
But Mr. Trump indicated that his position had not been swayed only by politics. He was moved in part by Mr. Santos’s reports that he had been held in solitary confinement.
Since entering custody in a federal prison in southern New Jersey, Mr. Santos, rarely one to shy away from the media spotlight, had been writing a regular column about his time in prison in The South Shore Press, a newspaper on Long Island.
In September, Mr. Santos wrote that he had been moved into the “Special Housing Unit” after his lawyer reported to prison officials that he had received a death threat against him. (Ms. Greene has also said that she had received a letter from Mr. Santos saying that he was in solitary confinement.)
In his accounts, Mr. Santos described isolating conditions, once likening being in solitary confinement to a “slow-motion form of torture.” He said that prison officials told him that he would remain in special housing until a full investigation into the threat against him had been finished. And Mr. Santos, who campaigned as a law-and-order candidate, repeatedly renewed his calls for clemency.
On Monday, the South Shore Press published a direct letter from Mr. Santos to Mr. Trump. Describing his experience as “unlike anything most Americans could ever comprehend,” he appealed to the president on a personal basis.
“Mr. President, I have nowhere else to turn,” Mr. Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”
Mr. Santos spent 84 days in federal custody. According to the Bureau of Prisons website, he had been scheduled to be released in September 2031.
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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