In the days before he was sentenced to federal prison last spring, George Santos said that he was ready to accept his fate.
Mr. Santos, the discredited former Republican congressman from New York whose name had become practically synonymous with shameless deceit, had pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He admitted to a host of other schemes and said that it was time to take accountability.
As has so often been the case with Mr. Santos, he quickly changed his tune.
Faced with more than seven years in prison, Mr. Santos, who begged a judge for leniency and then sobbed in court when he did not receive it, took to social media to make a plea that just days earlier he had sworn he would avoid.
“I believe that 7 years is an over the top politically influenced sentence,” Mr. Santos wrote in April, “and I implore that President Trump gives me a chance to prove I’m more than the mistakes I’ve made.”
It took months of social media pleas, weekly dispatches in a small newspaper, handwritten letters from solitary confinement, entreaties from Republican allies and 84 days of prison time. But Mr. Santos’s request was finally granted.
On Friday night, Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Santos’s sentence and ordered his release from federal custody, part of a far-reaching wave of clemency that the president has granted to political allies since taking office in January.
“Good luck George, have a great life!” the president wrote on social media.
Mr. Santos, 37, walked out of prison in New Jersey after serving less than three months of an 87-month sentence. Though his criminal record remains intact, he must no longer pay over $370,000 in restitution to his victims.
Mr. Santos did not respond to phone calls and messages seeking comment. His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that Mr. Santos was picked up by family late Friday night and then headed home.
“I’m so, so happy,” Mr. Murray, who met with Mr. Santos on Saturday, said. “This took an enormous effort by so many wonderful people.”
Several others who had spoken with Mr. Santos since his release said that he was thankful for the support and relieved to be out.
Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, was one of a handful of Republican lawmakers who had pushed for clemency for Mr. Santos. He said that Mr. Santos called him moments after he left custody.
“He sounded like the old George, and I was glad,” Mr. Burchett said, adding that Mr. Santos told him that he had lost “about 43 pounds” in prison.
The ‘Weaponized Justice System’
When Mr. Santos reported to the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton on July 25, he seemed resigned to the length of his sentence.
That is not to say that he went quietly. In the months that passed between his sentencing and the start of his prison time, Mr. Santos, a social media enthusiast, kept posting.
He asked for clemency. He criticized the “weaponized justice system,” and then attacked the attorney general over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
And Mr. Santos lashed out at a host of Republicans whom he accused of blocking him from being pardoned, pointing the finger initially at House Speaker Mike Johnson and then at a group of New York Republicans who had pushed for his expulsion from Congress.
But Mr. Santos’s praise for Trump was, as with few things in a life marked by lies, consistent and constant. And when it came to seeking clemency, that loyalty may have been Mr. Santos’s greatest asset.
“It doesn’t matter if I get pardoned or not,” Mr. Santos said in a video days before he entered federal custody. “I’ve supported him for a decade.”
By that point, Mr. Trump had issued a blitz of pardons and commutations to his supporters or others whose cases he said were examples of the political weaponization of the justice system.
His actions included a broad grant of clemency to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; a pardon for reality television stars convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks; and one for another former Republican congressman from New York, Michael Grimm, who had pleaded guilty to tax evasion.
Many of those successful pardon seekers had forcefully accused the Justice Department of singling them out over their political views. Mr. Santos had been doing the same since he was indicted. And he had been a vocal adherent to Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement since 2016.
Yet while other Republicans were released early or saw their convictions wiped clean, Mr. Santos seemed to stand alone. Though his lawyer said he had started to apply for clemency for Mr. Santos, the website of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney’s office never showed a record of a clemency case.
The day before he reported to prison, he issued a farewell to his social media followers. “I may be leaving the stage (for now), but trust me legends never truly exit.”
‘He Lied Like Hell’
Then, the week after Mr. Santos went to jail, Mr. Trump offered one possible explanation for why Mr. Santos’s plea for clemency had not been granted.
In an interview with the right-wing media outlet Newsmax, the president said that he had never been asked.
Mr. Trump acknowledged the former congressman’s penchant for fabrication. “He lied like hell,” Mr. Trump said. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”
Still, the president did not rule out a pardon.
“Nobody’s talked to me about it,” he said.
Days later, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rabble-rousing far-right Republican from Georgia, put in a formal request.
Mr. Santos had considered Ms. Greene a friend in a Congress where he had few allies. The two were ideologically aligned, and Ms. Greene had vocally opposed Mr. Santos’s expulsion from the House.
On Aug. 4, Ms. Greene sent a letter to the pardon attorney, Ed Martin. In it, she acknowledged that Mr. Santos’s “crimes warrant punishment.”
But Ms. Greene maintained that Mr. Santos’s sentence was excessive, explaining her argument with words that seemed designed to appeal to Mr. Trump’s grievances with the justice system.
“I strongly believe in accountability for one’s actions, but I believe the sentencing of Mr. Santos is an abusive overreach by the judicial system,” she wrote.
As Ms. Greene was speaking on Mr. Santos’s behalf, the former congressman was making the case for himself from prison. For nearly a year, Mr. Santos had been writing a regular column for The South Shore Press, a small weekly newspaper that covers Suffolk County on Long Island.
After he went to prison, the column continued, giving Mr. Santos a rare public platform for a federal prisoner.
At first, Mr. Santos used his column to document his dismay at conditions inside the medium-security prison where he had been assigned.
He described a “punch to the gut” when he saw his own reflection in a prison uniform and decried ramshackle conditions like mold in the ceiling and insufficient air-conditioning for the New Jersey summer.
“The building itself is hardly fit for long-term habitation: sheet metal walls, shoddy construction, the look and feel of a temporary warehouse rather than a permanent facility,” Mr. Santos wrote during his third week in prison.
He also expressed surprise to find he was housed in the same dorm as a former campaign aide, Samuel Miele, and seemed grateful at the chance for the two of them to discuss their shared misdeeds. Like Mr. Santos, Mr. Miele pleaded guilty to wire fraud in court, admitting he used his position to charge donors’ credit cards without their permission. Unlike Mr. Santos, he is still in prison and has not been granted clemency.
Before his sentencing, Mr. Santos, who is gay, said that he wanted to be placed in solitary confinement, alluding to fears of sexual assault. But he seemed to be relieved that his time in prison offered some camaraderie.
Then, on Aug. 28, that was taken away from him, according to Mr. Santos.
In a column he wrote on Sept. 4, Mr. Santos said that his lawyer, Mr. Murray, had been warned of a death threat against Mr. Santos. According to Mr. Santos, he told his lawyer to ignore it. Instead, Mr. Murray told the prison warden.
Then, according to Mr. Santos’s column, officials moved him to solitary confinement in the prison’s “special housing unit,” citing safety concerns.
His writings renewed a push by Republican allies to win him clemency. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado began calling Mr. Martin, the pardon attorney, she said in a social media post. And she and Mr. Burchett called for an investigation into conditions at Mr. Santos’s prison to draw attention to his case.
The Road to Release
It was early October when Mr. Trump gave the first indication that he was starting to listen.
On Oct. 7, Mr. Trump wrote a social media post calling for an investigation of a Democratic critic, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. For years, the president has blasted Mr. Blumenthal for mischaracterizing his military service record during the Vietnam War.
“Right now there is a Congressman sitting in prison for lying about his past during a campaign,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Well, those lies were nothing compared” to Mr. Blumenthal’s.
Mr. Santos was not in prison for lying. He had admitted in court to using one donor’s credit card information to steal $11,000 for his personal use, and to persuading other donors to give money to what he falsely said was a super PAC supporting his campaign. He had fraudulently taken unemployment payments when he was employed and had falsified campaign finance records to help secure money from the national Republican Party.
In a final plea to Mr. Trump, published in The South Shore Press on Oct. 13, Mr. Santos made a political case for his release.
“A lifelong Republican and a proud believer in your America First vision, I never wavered,” Mr. Santos wrote. “Supporting you wasn’t just a political decision — it was personal. It was rooted in my conviction that you were the only leader who truly put this nation, and her people, first.”
Four days later, Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Santos’s sentence. In his announcement, he noted that the former congressman had “the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
Mr. Santos told The South Shore Press that he had been released from solitary confinement by the time Mr. Trump granted him clemency.
According to the paper, other prisoners told Mr. Santos on Friday evening that he was on TV. Initially, Mr. Santos ignored them. Then, he saw that the text on the bottom of the screen said his sentence had been commuted.
Since his release, Mr. Santos has been uncharacteristically quiet. He has not yet issued a public statement, and his public social media accounts have largely been dormant.
But Mr. Santos quickly reactivated his account on the app Cameo, where he had been charging for personalized videos practically up until the day he went to prison.
On his profile, he added one simple, celebratory phrase: “I’m back!!!”
Grace Ashford contributed reporting.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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