Republicans knew of George Santos’ lies, but turned a blind eye

In late 2021, as he prepared for his second bid for a House of Representatives seat from a New York suburb, George Santos authorized his campaign to commission a routine study of his background.

Campaigns often use this type of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opposing candidate could take advantage of. But when the Santos report came back, findings from a Washington research firm were far more surprising, suggesting a pattern of dishonesty that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.

Some of Santos’ own constituencies were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they told him to drop out of the race and warned that if he continued he could face public humiliation. When Santos disputed the key findings and decided to continue running, members of the campaign team dropped out, according to three of the four people with knowledge of the study that The New York Times spoke with.

The episode, which had not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected professionals in the Republican campaign had indications long before the public that Santos was weaving an elaborate web of falsehoods and that the candidate had been warned that these lies were vulnerable and could easily be revealed.

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a company accused of pyramid scheme. Multiple property evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of this was in the report, which also said that Santos, who is openly gay, had married a woman. The report does not provide conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wonder whether the marriage was for immigration purposes.

It remains unclear who, if anyone else, knew the contents of the study at the time, or whether the information reached party leaders in New York or Washington. Santos, 34, managed to keep most of it hidden from the public until after he was elected, when a Times investigation independently dug up the troubling allegations documented by the researchers and others they hadn’t uncovered.

After the Times sent a detailed list of questions to ask for this story, a lawyer for Santos, Joe Murray, said, “It would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokesman for Santos’ congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.

Santos himself admitted to some inventions, but insists he was only exaggerating his qualifications. He promised to serve a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are investigating his activity.

The existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most disturbing questions that still surround Santos’ strange saga: how the control system of American politics —Republican leaders, Democratic opponents and the snooping media—allowed a fabulist who bragged about ghostly mansions and a fake resume got away with their hoax for so long?

Interviews with more than two dozen associates, opponents and donors, as well as contemporary communications and other documents examined by the Times, show that Santos inspired a great deal of suspicion during his 2022 campaign.

Well-connected supporters suspected he was lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign aide alerted a state party official to what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the House Republican political action supercommittee told some lawmakers and donors that he found Santos’ story unconvincing.

But in every case, instead of publicly denouncing Santos, Republicans turned a blind eye. They neglected to draw the attention of more powerful leaders and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some believed that Santos’ falsehoods were common political exaggerations; others thought the Democrats would do the dirty work for them and Santos would be denounced in the heat of the election campaign.

But Democrats have struggled to do that. In 2020, party incumbent Tom Suozzi dismissed Santos as an unviable threat and did not conduct any opposition polls as he cruised to victory. When Democrats examined it two years later, they found some of the most egregious fabrications missing.

Democrats then worked unsuccessfully to convince the news media, which had been weakened by years of staff cuts and consumed by high-profile disputes, to dig deeper into the troubling clues they uncovered. Aside from The North Shore Leader — a small Long Island weekly that labeled Santos “a farce”— and a few op-eds in Newsday, the New York media machine paid little attention to him.

Santos was a political neophyte when he first expressed interest in running for a seat in the Queens and Nassau County House in 2020. His only real election experience ended quickly: a year earlier, he was forced to abandon his campaign. insurgent for a low-ranking party office in Queens because he didn’t have enough signatures to get on the list. Among solid Long Island Republican circles, he was virtually unknown.

Under normal circumstances, Santos would have been kicked out. Republicans in Nassau County, which comprises most of New York’s 3rd congressional district, have long been famous for exercising tight control over candidates.

But with the country in lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and the district expected to remain under Democratic control, no one else raised their hand to run. Santos sent in a resume and answered an assessment questionnaire filled with lies, including that he had a 3.9 GPA from a college he never graduated from and job credentials he didn’t have. A county GOP verification team accepted their responses without question.

When Santos decided to run again two years later, local Republicans once again supported him. They believed that turning the district around would once again be impossible.

By that time, there were already questions among donors and political figures about where exactly Santos lived and the source of the money that supported the lavish lifestyle he bragged about.

In the summer of 2021, one of Santos’ former advisers, who insisted on anonymity, discovered his connections to Harbor City Capital, a Florida company accused of a pyramid scheme, and other suspicious business practices that Santos had concealed. The aide said he took the findings to a state party official that fall and tried to pitch the story to a newspaper, but did not follow through.

Around that time, Santos began to attract suspicion from some friends and potential donors active in New York Republican circles. Santos told one of them, Kristin Bianco, that he had secured former President Donald Trump’s endorsement when he had not. That led her to express her concerns about Santos to more committed Republicans, including friends of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, an early supporter of Santos, whose top political adviser was assisting his campaign.

In the spring of 2022, Santos’ candidacy suddenly became competitive after a state court scrapped a Democratic precinct scheme and adopted new, more Republican-friendly district boundaries.

And the assumption that any information harmful to Santos would have been found in the 2020 campaign turned out to be wrong. Suozzi, the popular Democratic nominee, asked an outside company for quotes to run opposition polls on Santos. But he decided not to spend the money — sparing him significant scrutiny in his first race.

With a more competitive race expected in 2022, pollsters for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) took the first significant opposition poll of Santos that summer, putting together an 87-page poll book. It extensively documents Santos’ past statements, including his radical views on abortion rights and the January 6 riot in the Capitol.

Using public records, the committee’s researchers also raised some red flags in Santos’ biography: multiple evictions; no IR records for an animal charity he claimed to have created; details about his involvement with Harbor City (Santos himself was not mentioned in the pyramid scheme allegations) and more recent suspicious dealings; as well as apparent discrepancies in his income statements that raised questions about the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had loaned to his campaign.

But with orders to produce similar research books on dozens of other candidates across the country, the tense committee staff left things unchecked. At several points, researchers explicitly flagged the need for follow-up investigations, such as “determining whether Santos has a criminal record.” And the study failed to reveal the main issues that had driven Santos’ own supporters to drop out months earlier: his forged educational background, his marriage to a woman and doubts about his residency.

A spokesperson for the DCCC declined to comment.

Santos’ 2022 opponent, Robert Zimmerman, landed the poll book in late August, shortly after winning a competitive and expensive Democratic primary. Short of time and money, Zimmerman concluded that it would be better to spend it on advertising and prospecting operations. And he believed that the campaign committee’s report, as well as Santos’ far-right views on abortion and January 6, provided him with powerful campaign material.

Zimmerman said his campaign tried to goad local and national wire reporters with leads about Santos, but had little luck. “The response we got pretty generally was that they just didn’t have the people or the time or the money for it,” Zimmerman said.

One outlet stood out: The North Shore Leader on Long Island, run by Republican attorney and former House candidate Grant Lally. The paper ran a few articles casting doubt on Santos’ claims that he owned extravagant cars and houses and labeling him a “fabulist—a hoax”, although it lacked the details that would later emerge about his falsified resume or background.

What Republican leaders heard about Santos’ troubles is hard to map. Santos required his campaign workers to sign confidentiality agreements, limiting the vulnerability report’s dissemination.

In the spring of 2022, Santos needed a new team of consultants. With the help of Stefanik’s top policy adviser, he chose a consulting firm and shared the vulnerability study.

The new breed of advisers, led by Big Dog Strategies, never spoke to their predecessors and didn’t know why they left the campaign. After Santos again insisted that he had graduated from college and addressed other allegations in the report, the new team accepted his explanations and began plotting a campaign. They would use political themes — not the candidate’s biography — to win the election.