Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the next Democratic leader in the House, on Wednesday accused Representative-elect George Santos of being a “complete and utter fraud” after a new report cast doubt on the claim of Santos regarding his Jewish ancestry.
“His whole life is made up,” Jeffries told a news conference in Washington. “Did you commit fraud against voters in New York’s 3rd Congressional District?”
Hours before Jeffries spoke, New York City-based Jewish publication The Forward reported that Santos, a Republican, may have misled voters about having Jewish ancestry, a claim he made on its website and in remarks during the election campaign. .
In his current biography, Santos says his mother, Fatima Devolder, was born in Brazil to immigrants who “fled persecution of Jews in Ukraine, settled in Belgium and again fled persecution during World War II.”
But according to The Forward — which cited information from genealogy website My Heritage, Brazilian immigration documents and refugee databases — Devolder’s parents appear to have been born in Brazil before World War II. Later, CNN ran a similar story that also cited interviews with several genealogists.
Fatima Devolder died in 2016, according to an online obituary. Santos said in a 2020 interview that her family converted to Christianity in Brazil, and on Devolder’s Facebook page, which links to Santos’s, she regularly shared Christian images and liked several Facebook pages associated with Christian organizations headquartered in Brazil.
Santos’ campaign, his lawyer and a political consulting firm that had been responding to media inquiries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Republican Jewish Coalition, an influential conservative group that has backed Santos and classified him as a Jewish Republican, said it had contacted the elected representative’s office regarding The Forward’s report.
“These allegations, if true, are deeply concerning,” said coalition director Matt Brooks. “Given its seriousness, the elected deputy owes the public an explanation and we look forward to hearing it.”
Santos, whose victory in a district spanning parts of Long Island and Queens helped his party secure a narrow majority in the House next year, did not directly respond to questions about his past raised by a New York Times article earlier this week. .
The Times report found that Santos may have misled voters about key details from his resume that were on his campaign website during his two congressional runs, including his college graduation and alleged career on Wall Street.
It also found that Santos failed to include important information about his company, the Devolder Organization, on the financial disclosure forms. The organization, registered in 2021 in Florida, was dissolved by state officials in September because it failed to file an annual report. On Tuesday (20), Santos filed the paperwork to reinstate it.
The claim that Santos’ maternal grandparents fled persecution of Jews was added to his campaign website between April and October, according to an analysis by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. An earlier version of Santos’ biography said only that Santos’ maternal grandparents “fled the devastation of World War II in Europe”.
Although Santos has identified himself as Catholic, he has more frequently trumpeted his Jewish heritage on the campaign trail, even when describing himself as a non-practicing Jew. Already in June 2020, during his first run for Congress, he wrote on Twitter that he was “the grandson of Holocaust refugees”.
On Sunday night, Santos attended a Long Island Hanukkah party hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition. He also spoke last month at the coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas.
In his speech in Washington, Jeffries did not address the new questions about Santos’ origins. But he said the Times report left him with questions about Santos’ suitability for the job, which he believes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy needs to address.
Legal experts said it was unlikely that the lower house would deny Santos his congressional seat. There are procedures that allow losing candidates to challenge the results of a House election. But a Supreme Court decision in 1969 prohibited the House from barring candidates from taking office unless they do not meet constitutional requirements for age, citizenship and residency in the state.
Some Democrats and government watchdog groups have called for a deeper investigation of Santos’ past claims and financial status statements, either by the bipartisan Congressional Ethics Office or federal prosecutors.
Democratic Representative-elect Dan Goldman of New York, a former assistant US attorney, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believes there are two possible federal crimes that prosecutors should investigate.
The first question, he said, is whether Santos purposefully and intentionally made false statements on his financial disclosure forms. Such a breach, he said, would require investigators to satisfy themselves that there was a clear and conscious intent to withhold or misrepresent information.
“As someone who had to make these disclosures, they are made under penalty of perjury,” Goldman said.
But Goldman, who was the lead investigator in the first impeachment case against former President Donald Trump, said he believed authorities should investigate whether Santos’ false statements could be considered part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Such an accusation would be an aggressive approach, Goldman said. (It was used Monday by the committee investigating Trump over the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Santos was a former Trump supporter.)
Prosecutors would need to prove that Santos interfered in a federal election by deliberately spreading false information and that he worked with others to do so.
“I think it’s worth investigating whether his efforts to repeatedly and widely lie about just about anything amount to the level of an effort to defraud voters in his district to vote for him,” Goldman said.
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