Tangle - The George Santos scandal.

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

Rep. George Santos (R-NY). In the November election, Santos flipped New York's 3rd District red, defeating Democrat Robert Zimmerman. But the newly elected member of the House is now facing increasing pressure to resign after revelations that much of what Santos told the public about his life was untrue or cannot be verified. Plus, a question about the word "woke" and what it really means.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Blindspot” stories here and here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.Today’s clickables: Quick Hits (2:27 ), Today’s Story (4:30), Left’s Take (9:01), Right’s Take (13:17), Isaac’s Take (18:32), Your Questions Answered (22:05), Under the Radar (24:37), Numbers (25:20), Have A Nice Day (26:15).You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited by Zosha Warpeha. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to

your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else.

I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about George Santos, the newly elected Republican congressman who, I guess you could say he's making a name for himself with some lies, some fibs, some fabrications on his resume. Before we jump into his story, though, I have two things I want to say. First of all, we are starting something or building something called Tangle Weekly that I'm hoping to release in this quarter of 2023. Aside from allegations of, you know, being secretly right-wing or left-wing, two of the most common complaints we get about Tangle are that it builds up in somebody's inbox because there's a bunch of emails, they don't get to reading some, and it stresses them out, or that the newsletters can sometimes be too long. About

15% of readers say this. I obviously believe that the essence of Tangle is nuance, which requires us to make lengthier posts that other news outlets who try to explain an entire story in a few short sentences just don't do. Obviously, this podcast takes 25, 30 minutes, but I also hear your concerns and I want to offer a solution. So we are going to build out something called Tangle Weekly. The gist is it's a newsletter. It's going to be released once a week. It will take five minutes or less to read, and it will recap all of our newsletters and debates from that week and include some links to read more if you want to. So if you are interested in that and you want to put your

name on our mailing list, we're going to build up the mailing list before we launch the newsletter, just to make sure we have a bunch of people reading. There is a link in today's newsletter to do that. There's also a link to that Google form in today's episode description. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to jump in with our quick hits for the day. First up, Army General Mark Milley traveled to the Ukraine-Poland border, marking his first in-person meeting with Ukrainian officials. Separately, Ukraine's interior minister died in a helicopter crash near Kiev. The crash appears to have been an accident.

Number two, the Justice Department has declined to seek the death penalty for the shooter who killed 23 people in El Paso, Texas in 2019. Number three, Microsoft says it will lay off 10,000 employees, or about 5% of its workforce, following similar pledge cuts from Amazon and Salesforce. Number four, the White House is pressing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican from California, to publicize the terms of the deals he made with right-wing lawmakers to earn their votes. Number five, China's gross domestic product grew at 3% in 2022, falling to its second lowest level in at least four decades. Just minutes ago, newly elected Republican Congressman George Santos, who has been under growing pressure to resign after lying about his job history, his education, his family heritage, said after several days saying simply no, he said he would resign under very specific circumstances. Take a listen.

In response to those that are calling for you to resign, I will not resign. I will be continuing to hold my office elected by the people. Tonight, New York Congressman George Santos maintains he will not resign despite growing pressures from both parties. But he's now facing multiple investigations that could take the decision out of his hands. These are blatant lies. My question is, do you have no shame? Do you have no shame in the people who are now you're asking to trust you to go and be their voice for them, their families and their kids in Washington? Tulsi, I can say the same thing about the Democrats and the party. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden's been lying to the American people for 40 years. In the November election, Santos flipped New York's third district, defeating Democrat Rob Zimmerman. But the newly elected

member of the House is now facing increasing pressure to resign after revelations that much of what Santos told the public about his life was untrue or cannot be verified. Last week, New York Republicans in the House and Republican State Party officials called on Santos to resign, but House Republican leaders continued to stick by him. Yesterday, Santos was placed on the House Small Business Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. About six weeks after Santos won his election, the New York Times released an investigation revealing that Santos' resume was full of misleading credentials or outright lies. While campaigning, Santos sold himself to voters as the son of Brazilian

immigrants, an experienced Wall Street investor, and an openly gay Republican. Santos also boasted that his family owned a real estate portfolio with 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that has saved over 2,500 dogs and cats. Among other things, the Times discovered that alleged employers Goldman Sachs and Citigroup had no record of Santos ever working there. Baruch College, where Santos says he graduated, couldn't find a record of anyone with his name and birthday. There is no record of his animal charity at the IRS.

His company, the Volder Organization, which he said manages $80 million of assets, appears to have no clients, and journalists have struggled to find any records of its properties. Santos also failed to disclose criminal charges for check fraud that he faces in Brazil. Other oddities exist too. Santos claimed he was Jewish on his campaign website and to potential donors, but now says he is Jew-ish that he was raised Catholic and descended from migrants who fled Nazi persecution. He falsely claimed his grandparents survived the Holocaust and once said his mother, whose family has lived in Brazil since the 1800s, was a white immigrant from Belgium. He has also told stories

of how 9-11 claimed his mother's life, though she died in 2016. She was in the towers on 9-11 but died of cancer years later, which Santos attributes to September 11. Santos, who says he is openly gay, also didn't disclose a marriage and divorce from a woman just two weeks before he filed his campaign paperwork for a run in 2020. Perhaps most notably, there are still unanswered questions about how he accrued his wealth so recently and rapidly. In 2020, Santos claimed no assets or income, but in the following year said he had earned $750,000 through his own $5 million company and owned a condo in Brazil. He also donated $75,000 to his own campaign and then another $700,000 in 2021 and 2022. After a deluge of news reports exposing his resume, Santos admitted to fabricating key details in an interview with the New York

Post, but claimed he was merely embellishing his achievements. He reiterated that position in an interview with Fox News' Tulsi Gabbard, who was filling in for Tucker Carlson. Santos has vowed not to step down and says he will serve out his full term. New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has defended Santos, saying a lot of people in the Senate and others have fabricated resumes, and asking what are the charges against him? Is there a charge against him? In America, you're innocent till proven guilty. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions from the left and the right, and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the left is saying. Many call for Santos to resign or be forced out by Republicans. Some call out the difference between New York Republicans and

other Republicans in Congress. Others take a serious tone, calling for Santos to get help and a little bit of empathy from pundits once he steps down. In NBC News, Democratic Representative Richie Torres said Santos is a distraction and a danger to democracy. As we know now from intrepid investigative reporting, his candidacy was a fraud, predicated on a massive web of deception, Torres said. By his own admission, Santos rose to elected office by lying to voters about almost every facet of his personal business and professional life, including his family heritage, education, and professional experience, business dealings, philanthropic endeavors, and campaign finances. Under normal circumstances, the depth and breadth

of his deception would shame one into resigning from public office. But these are not normal times, and Santos is shameless, not only in his lying, but in lying about his lying. On a radio show titled War Room, Santos reassured Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, that he has led an honest life and has never been accused of wrongdoing. Never mind all the lies Santos has told and the multiple criminal investigations accusing him of wrongdoing, Torres wrote. It boggles the mind how anyone who has methodically misled the public to this magnitude could be trusted to exercise the duties of his congressional office in good faith. Every American should worry about the risk of

Santos having access to classified information and what he might do with it. The presence of this man in Congress is a danger to our democracy and national security, a disgrace to this institution, and a major distraction from the pressing problems that are far more worthy of In MSNBC, Dean Obadiah contrasted New York Republicans to the current Republicans in Congress. Republican leaders in New York's suburban Nassau County made an impressive show of political leadership when several of them called for the resignation of admitted embellisher Representative George Santos, Obadiah said. But one powerful Republican leader, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, was not among them. Instead, McCarthy gave us a profile in political cowardice, not only by not calling out Santos,

but by defending him with whataboutisms about others who have embellished their resumes in the past. The contrasting reactions to the astonishing lies of an elected member of Congress tells the story of two different GOPs, one that calls out wrongdoing and looks out for voters it serves, and another that barrels ahead in the pursuit of political power, no matter the cost or consequences. In Al Jazeera, Andro Mitrovica said Santos needs to resign, but he also needs help. The breathtaking scope and nature of those lies about his schooling, work, faith, and family have understandably not only rendered Santos a deeply unsympathetic figure, but raised the possibility that his deceptions may have a more sinister hue, he said. It would be simple for me to join the

withering pile on, not only to ridicule Santos, but to excorciate him for his, by now, familiar glossary of egregious lies. At the risk of being dismissed as Pollyanna, I instead ask my colleagues in the fourth estate and readers to pause and consider that Santos may be suffering from a mental malady that not only explains his aberrant behavior, but also demands our charity, sympathy, and understanding. Yes, our charity, sympathy, and understanding, he wrote. I'm not going to play amateur psychologist and venture a diagnosis of the congressman. It is clear to me, however, that this troubled young man needs help. I pity him. These days,

much is written and said about the necessity to adopt a more enlightened attitude towards mental illness and to recognize how endemic the pain and hurt is among all sorts of people in all walks of life, including, I dare say, politicians. Sadly, this progressive attitude often evaporates instantly when a juicy political story sets off a furor. Then, the real, keenly felt human consequences of that reporting becomes an afterthought if they are examined at all. Alright, that is it for the leftist saying, which brings us to the right's take. The right is divided on Santos, with some saying it should be up to voters and others arguing he should step down. Some attempt deflection by calling out the numerous lies of other politicians

like Joe Biden. Others say the extent of Santos' lies do matter, and some are very concerning. In Newsweek, Salem radio host Mark Davis said voters and nobody else should decide Santos' fate. What price should politicians pay for lying? The question is short but not simple. A sarcastic retort almost writes itself, to the effect that if lying is universally disqualifying, Congress would be able to meet inside a mid-sized car, Davis said. Republican voters have to know that a resignation would throw open a special election as soon as April. Political analysis still mapped the district as leaning Democratic. The House of Representatives' margin is already narrow enough.

Do Republicans have a duty to call for his exit? They do not. The arguments against his resignation are compelling and nonpartisan. I would be willing to accept them even if a Democrat had sullied himself in this fashion. Twas the season of chaos and all through the house, not one person was stressing. Holla differently this year with DoorDash. Don't want to holla do the most? Holla don't. More festive, less frantic.

Get deals for every occasion with DoorDash. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. It is impossible to know how many Santos voters are so thoroughly repelled that they wish for him to pack up his stuff in the Longworth House office building and slink off into obscurity. Maybe it's a majority, maybe it's relatively few. If he quits, only his detractors win. Santos' continued service is hardly a

comfortable win for his supporters, if that's even the right word, Davis said. Any sensible citizen would be repulsed by his transgressions, but Republican voters who sought a Republican representative are entitled to get one, even if he's flawed. If the Republican base in the district hungers sufficiently for a representative with a less tainted history, it may elevate any number of opponents in the primary campaigns which will take shape in just a few months. That's the thing about a two-year term. You're always running. In the Washington Post, Mark Thiessen said Santos must have learned from Biden how to make up details about his past. Biden has lied about his family history. During the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, it emerged that he had plagiarized a speech by British labor leader Neil Kinnock,

adopting Kinnock's family history as his own, Thiessen said. Not only were many of the words stolen, so were the facts. Biden was not the first in his family to go to college, only the first on his father's side, and his ancestors had not been coal miners, though a great-grandfather was a mining engineer. Biden has also made numerous false assertions about his educational achievements. He claimed in 1987 that he had graduated with three degrees from college, had received an award as the outstanding student in the political science department, finished in the top half of his class at law school, and received a full academic scholarship. None of that was true. He has also falsely claimed to

have been arrested multiple times for taking righteous stands, Thiessen wrote. According to the New York Times, there is no evidence that he was ever arrested during a civil rights protest. the New York Times, there is no evidence that he was ever arrested during a civil rights protest. He has also lied about his experience in war zones. In 2021, Biden told State Department employees that he was shot at overseas, similar to a debunked claim of being shot at inside Baghdad's fortified green zone made during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007. And of course, Biden lies constantly about his record as president. He falsely claimed to have passed his student loan forgiveness by a vote or two. Congress never voted on it. He has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he has cut the federal debt in half,

that real incomes are up, they've suffered the largest decline in four decades, that his CHIPS Act will create 1 million construction jobs, the real number is 6,200, that his Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation, it will not, and that none of his military commanders advised him to leave a residual force in Afghanistan, they did. In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote about why Santos' lies matter. As the story played out, I realized Mr. Santos is Sam Bankman Freed. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is a 21st century state-of-the-art fraudster, a stone-cold liar who effectively committed election fraud, a calculating political actor

who took advantage of voters' trust. He wasn't driven by inadequacy but entitlement, she said. It is interesting that most of his lies were tied up with money and status. Mr. Santos' main answer to the accusations is what he told the New York Post. My sins here are embellishing my resume. They appear to go beyond that. Where did he get the $700,000 he loaned his campaign? When he ran unsuccessfully in 2020, he disclosed no assets and claimed a salary of $55,000 from a development firm. In the years leading up to 2020, he hadn't been rising at Goldman. He'd been reportedly working at a call center in Queens. His 2022 filings, however, showed sudden wealth, Noonan wrote. He claims he made between $3.5 and $11.5 million at a company

he founded in 2021. He told reporter Kadaya Goba of Semaphore that he did deal building with high net worth individuals. He didn't respond to Semaphore that he did deal building with high net worth individuals. He didn't respond to Semaphore's request for names of clients. All right, that is it for the left and the right's take, which brings us to my take. So before we get to all the cynicism, let me just give a few shout outs. First, to Nassau County GOP and the five New York Republicans in the House of Representatives who know with a great deal of confidence that calling for Santos to step down could be disastrous for them from a political standpoint, but they're doing it anyway. Their actions should be the norm in a scenario like this, but in today's political landscape, they are not, and they deserve big kudos for taking the high ethical ground.

Second to Tulsi Gabbard, the much maligned former Democrat turned Tucker Carlson substitute, who delivered to Fox News viewers one of the best interviews of any politician I've seen in some time. Gabbard got to the heart of the issue quickly. My question is, do you have no shame, Gabbard asked him. Santos tried to pivot. Look at Joe Biden. Biden's been lying to the American people for 49 years. Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame, Santos asked. This is not about the Democratic Party, though, she interrupted. This is about your relationships, frankly, with the people who have entrusted you to go and fight for them. Should Santos resign? Yes, of course. That's an easy question to answer.

But he says he is not going to, which presents a few harder questions. Should Congress remove him? Should Republicans force him out? And if they do, is this the new red line? Mark Thiessen's opinion piece raises good points about the danger of playing this game. If we're going to kick politicians out of their seats for lying, how many lies does it take? What kind of lies? What if the lies are known before they run or only after? What parts of a resume must be ironclad and true? What is the difference between an embellishment and a lie? President Biden appears to concoct stories out of thin air, but often gets spoken about like an innocent grandfather

who is misremembering his glory days. Donald Trump lied as if he was trying to break records, and he probably did. How much is disqualifying? Does it matter how long someone had been in public life before they started lying? And which lies are worse than others? It's almost amusing to catch Santos in lies about his fake pet charity. It's offensive to catch him lying about his family surviving the Holocaust. But it's downright troubling to

catch him in lies about his money, finances, and past clients and donors. This is where the real story is. Where did his money come from? How did he go from a broke, failed, no-name political candidate working at a call center to owning a mysterious company worth $5 million? Where did he get his $1 million apartment in Rio de Janeiro? How did he loan $700,000 to his campaign? Who are the clients he says he was selling boats and airplanes to who made all this money and why won't he name them? What about his association with the company caught running a $17 million Ponzi scheme? And why can't he answer any simple questions about his wealth and where it came from, even when he's talking to fellow Republicans like Representative Matt Gaetz?

It's the equity of my hard-working self invested inside of me, was the bizarre answer Santos offered. The confounding and never-ending litany of lies about his resume is enough to never trust another word he says and should be immediately disqualifying to any voter next time he's up for an election. But it's the simple questions about where his money came from and what he's done with it that absolutely must be answered for him to continue serving in Congress. Santos appears not to have those answers, which is the most alarming part of the whole affair and poses the largest threat to him. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from

Josh in Portland, Oregon. Josh said, how do you define the word woke? I'd love to see you do a breakdown of the evolution of its meaning and usage in politics. It seems like more and more Republicans are blaming their troubles on woke liberalism, while I don't see any Democrats or independents using the word at all. Okay, so I'll start by saying this. It isn't really my word to define. It's actually a real word with an actual definition. Merriam-Webster defines it as aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues,

especially issues of racial and social justice. I think that's actually a pretty good definition. It used to be that people proudly called themselves woke to express the sentiment that they were now awake to societal injustices they'd previously ignored. That proud identity became a target, though. While quote-unquote woke culture initially charged protests around police violence or racism, it evolved to be intrinsically tied with being a social justice warrior, policing people's language, taking righteous offense on behalf of others, and jumping from one cause to another with only a surface-level understanding of the issues. Conservatives and less socially liberal Democrats, or less woke Democrats, successfully rebranded

the most woke people as whiny, pretentious, overly sensitive, highly educated yet ignorant, and often detached from the movements they claim to be fighting for. educated yet ignorant, and often detached from the movements they claim to be fighting for. And frankly, I think it was easy to rebrand woke that way because there is a lot of truth to the branding. Being woke became social capital, a way to impress black trans or gay friends or Instagram followers, more than it was about understanding issues or participating in actual grassroots movements for policy change and political candidates. A lot of the woke people I encounter in real life or online seem to be self-absorbed, constantly seeking out grievances and moving from one major issue to the next without doing

the harder work that activism requires. Many woke movements around language use or policy changes are actually very unpopular among the very people they are supposed to serve. All of this is a shame. There are real injustices out there and people being more aware of societal ills or political issues shouldn't be demeaned but celebrated. But that awareness has basically turned performative and competitive and I think the toxic culture in many progressive circles basically devoured itself with some help from the right, and that is how we got here. All right, we are skipping today's under-the-radar section and replacing it with a blind spot report from Ground News, which is an app that tells you the bias of news coverage and what stories people

on each side are missing. Ground News is one of our partners. Many on the right missed a story about how ExxonMobil accurately predicted present-day climate change as early as the late 1970s while funding publicity campaigns that downplayed its long-term effects. Many on the left missed a story about the University of Southern California's plan to no longer use the phrase working in the field because of its quote racist connotation. That's it for our blind spot report, which brings us to our numbers section. The amount of money George Santos charged to his campaign for flight destinations like California, Texas, and Florida was $40,000. His reported salary, commission, and bonuses in 2020 while working at LinkBridge was $55,000. His reported income in 2021 and 2022 while working for the Devolder organization, a company that shares his surname, was $750,000. On his campaign website,

the worth of the assets Santos claims Dev the Boulder organization managed was $80 million. The number of clients or properties Santos has disclosed or the New York Times could locate during its investigation was zero. The amount of money a leadership pack started by Santos donated to the gubernatorial campaign of Representative Lee Zeldin was $25,000. Lee Zeldin was $25,000. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day section. An extremely rare snowy owl has arrived in a California suburb and transfixed the neighborhood. What brought the owl to Cyprus and Orange County remains a mystery, but the predatory bird's habitat is the high Arctic tundra.

The bird's arrival has become the subject of impassioned debate among bird experts, the New York Times reports, but it has also brought neighbors and Californians from across the area out of their homes to marvel at its beauty. It's like seeing Santa Claus on a beach, one neighbor, a marine biologist said, like that out of place, but cool. Incredibly, a Tangle reader and photographer who we recently interviewed in our Tangle Reader podcast series, Miriam Stein, went to see the bird and actually got her own photo. We asked her permission to publish it. It is in today's newsletter, and there is a link to the story from the New York Times in today's episode description. All right, that is it for our podcast today. As always, if you want to support our work,

please go to readtangle.com slash membership. A reminder that becoming a member is what funds our podcast and our forthcoming YouTube channel, our staff, it's how we lay our editors. It is basically the thing that makes this whole ship run. Please, please, please consider going to readtangle.com and becoming

a member. If you don't want to do that, or you haven't done that, or you can't do that for financial reasons, just spread the word, you know, share the Tangle Podcast around, do whatever you can. It's all a big help. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a great day. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited by Zosia Warpea. Our script is edited by Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who created our podcast logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75.

For more from Tangle, check out our website at www.tangle.com. T'was the season of chaos, We'll be right back. Every occasion with DoorDash. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th,

only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca.