The Daily Beast Podcast - George Santos’ Sketchiness Isn’t Ending Any Time Soon

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

The more Daily Beast politics reporter Roger Sollenberger uncovers about “liar” George Santos—the latest being that his employed sister Tiffany Santos is being evicted from her Queens apartment that Santos recently moved into—the more questions he has. Sollenberger joined The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie on this bonus episode of the show to talk about everything he knows so far about Santos and all the things that don’t add up, including his and Tiffany’s sketchy living situation—and why he is calling this saga surrounding the Congressman “an endless story.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today. We're almost back to our regular schedule, post holidays and all.

But in the meantime, we have a special bonus episode for you today. We're going to be joined by the Daily Beast politics reporter Roger Solenberger as he guides us down the rabbit hole that is the mysteries and lies of the newly elected congressman George Santos. Folks, I am very happy to be joined on the new abnormal with politics reporter at the Daily. B's Roger Solemberger, who along with a couple of his colleagues, broke another interesting story about George Santos, the man that is the griftiest liar part of the Republican Party, which is crazy because there are just so fucking many of them. He's just so bad at lying, though. The title of this piece is the wild eviction drama. George Santos can't say. seem to explain much like other things. Roger, let's dive in. Tell us how this research and this

story came to be. How did you all decide to delve into the very untalented Mr. Ripley that is George Santos? It was started out after the New York Times broke that story, actually. The first story in sort of late December that unraveled a bunch of the lies that he'd been telling, you know, about his biography, about his, you know, his professional life, a bunch of claims about that. You know, raised questions about his, you know, financial claims as well. And I broke a story based off of court records after that news broke. And that story was that, well, he had actually been married to a woman and divorced her in 2019. And I found that in court records.

Santos, you know, is gay. He is openly gay and, you know, says that he'd been comfortable that identity for 10. years, by the way. It's not just, you know, some aside in his biography. But I was like, so what else is in these court records? And I found that there is a pending eviction against his sister. Now, typically that's, you know, not really the stuff of news, right? You know, the financial life of candidate's sister, but in this case, it absolutely is. The place that she's facing eviction from is pertinent in a number of ways. One of them is that Santos moved into this place. And after New York Times story broke. He says that he's living there. He also has used this address,

however, while he was, I guess, not living there, as the address for his $705,000 worth of campaign finance loans. There's a lot of questions about where those loans come from, by the way, how he got that money, and whether that was legal, which we also wrote about. And Santos, we don't even really know where he was living before this. So, you know, his sister is facing eviction at this place. And then he tells me that he's moving out once I start asking about it. Like he's like, oh, no, I'm moving out today. Actually, my family moved my stuff for me because I was in D.C. There's just a swirl of questions around that. And I'm happy to get into more of the details. Yeah. So I want people to understand that this isn't just something to laugh about or meme about,

frankly, that the financial disclosures and the residence of a candidate for office, in New York actually matters, right? And financial disclosures, as we all know, as we're going through the saga with Donald Trump, also matter for a number of reasons. But you all write this, Roger, Santos, whose 2022 financial disclosure states a net worth between $2.5 million and $11.5 million,

along with a condo in Rio de Janeiro, valued between $500,000 and $1 million, was spotted moving into his sister's Elmhurst neighborhood apartment on December 27th. And then it goes down to say, but what you just alluded to, which is that three weeks prior to that, he was toting his personal effects and four dogs in the Elmhurst apartment. So later on in the article, you all lay out the fact that Tiffany Santos, George Santos's sister, received $30,000 of federal aid that was intended for those distressed tenants who had the inability to pay their rent because of a loss of job due to COVID.

So can you go into more detail about that revelation and then also your residence as it pertains to running for office as an elected official in New York? Yeah, sure. So it's really all about the money, right? As you pointed out, Tiffany Santos was initially, her lease was terminated in May. of 2022, right? George Santos is, by his own claims, a multi-millionaire. He's staying with her. He's not buying his own place. Well, that's not really, you know, quite typical. He seems to be between lots of places all the time. She applied for that rental assistance and received it, by the way.

It goes directly to the landlord. It does not go to her this program. But the question there is that two weeks before the federal government paid about $30,000 to this landlord, Tiffany Santos was somehow able to bring $8,700 to a top ally of George Santos. Where does she get that money? That's not typical either. Campaign finance experts say that this, you know, does raise questions about whether that money was, in fact, her money. We don't really know. It's just an atypical pattern, right? That $30,000, by the way,

did not cover the back rent that she owed. She'd been owing it since August 2020, and at that point, it totaled something like $60,000, but she was making major campaign donations. She was also not unemployed. She was working at the time, as she said, in some of her donation filings, that she had been working for a group called Rise

in Y pack, a state level pack in New York that was coincidentally working with, you know, Santos allies and she got paid about, you know, $25,000 through that pack. The question here is, is just all about the money. Santos has a condo in Rio de Janeiro, but he does not help him in the United States of America. He's not helping his sister. That's his prerogative, obviously, but he is moving in with her. And then he tells me he's moving out, you know, on Monday that he's going to relocate to another apartment in North Queens that it would also be a rental. He also says that he might be canceling his voter registration so as to help conceal his address from the prying eyes of the media. It's just, there's way more questions than we had answers here, but some of these questions

contain fact patterns, shall we say, that seem more than suspicious, not just to me, but to legal experts I consulted for this article. You know, one of the things that also stands out in your article that I want to lift up because it makes me so disgusted, which is the fact that you write here that in 2021, Santos demanded the city lifted the eviction moratorium. He criticized the program as unfairly helping tenants while punishing landlords, claiming falsely that he and his family had been deprived of rent. They were owed on 13 properties, which we now know is absolutely. bullshit. The only difference between George Santos and every other member that is sitting in the House chamber right now is the fact that he is very, very bad at lying, but can't seem to stop himself. Roger, so with these legal consultants that you use to help put together this story,

what are some of the things that are being investigated with regard to George Santos right now? Well, I'd like to point out that we have done some of the only reporting that has been able to answer questions about where this money is coming from. And we have identified four of his, you know, so-called companies, so-called clients. We did that in a report a couple of weeks ago. It is a complete mystery how he's getting this money. But these legal experts are pointing to the fact that those loans to his campaign appear, the way that he described them by. the way, to be illegal corporate contributions. You cannot just take money out of your company and put it straight into your campaign. If that is an independent company, you cannot do that for that intention,

right? You have to know where this money is coming from. That's a core foundation of campaign finance law. So we have $700,000 coming from, you know, a number of clients, four of whom we've identified, that are going, you know, that money's going to with the campaign. So do the clients know about that? That's totally unclear. I have no idea. Santos, you know, all very likely could have just been, you know, doing this on his own. But then you have questions about the sister's donation, too, right? So is that donation, is that coming from the sister herself who is applying for rental assistance at a rent-stabilized apartment?

Mm-hmm. He was claiming, you know, at different times to have a job and to not have a job. So how are she getting that $9,000 and why is she putting it into the campaign for a woman named Michelle Bond? Right. Right. Bond is the girlfriend of Ryan Salome. Ryan Salome is one of the executives at FTX with Sand Bankman Freed.

That whole universe has its own questions about straw donations, straw donations being contributions given in the name of another person. What we might be seeing here, I don't know yet, is convergence of these two scandals. Is it possible that Ryan Sassad. Salome is a client of George Santos. I don't know, but they are very close. He is very close with Michelle Bond, who got crushed in her primary. It's unclear to me why she was running and what exact kind of platform she was running on and why she received so much money from somebody who, you know, had failed to pay rent for at that point for about two years.

Roger, just based on the research, right, an investigation that you have done thus far, Are they using, like George Santos and Michelle Bond, is it that they're using running for office as a money-making scheme, as a pass-through? Do these businesses, does the business that supposedly devolder, the DeVolder organization that you say that Santos pulled at least $1.75 million in cash from this organization including a $750,000 salary between $1 and $5 million in dividends that he pulled to put in his campaign.

Like, is this just like a pyramid scheme? I think that's a very good question. We have seen grifter candidates who are just running for attention to, like, get money and be influential. You can't really make money out of your own campaign. I want to point out, though, something that's very interesting. that when Santos made the largest donation that he made to his campaign in a lump sum, it was $500,000, right? And that was in March of this year. At the time, Ted Cruz had a case before the Supreme Court, which everyone, you know, pretty much knew he was going to win, given the Constitution of our Supreme Court these days, that would allow candidates to fully repay any loan that they made to their campaign in any amount with money that they raise after they. election. At first, that was capped at $250,000. Ted Cruz argued it was unconstitutional. The court agreed, and now you can pay yourself back with campaign donor money after you get elected to any

amount. So at the time, you could imagine that Santos might have reason to believe that he could get this money back in donations after the campaign. So is that money going back to him and his organizations. I'm not really sure of any of the answers to the questions, but I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind, that it was possible that Santos thought that he would get this money back. And if he owed anybody, you know, if he owed any debts, then he might be able to pay that back. Like he wasn't looking at, you know, possibly not looking at a major loss. I want to point out that his campaign did spend this money. It doesn't appear like he was making up these loans.

They look like he was just saying that he was loaning money to his campaign, that he didn't have. The campaign spent the money. So it does appear like it is real money, at least from what we know now. But the question is about where it was coming from and where it was going and how Santos was planning possibly to claw it back through donor money after the election. are very pertinent questions here. And it suggests that, you know, Santos himself, you know, a pretty small-time dude who is, you know, making $55,000 a year as a, quote, vice president at some sort of capital introduction firm that looks a little bit.

I don't know, not exactly like, let's say, Goldman Sachs, that he may have felt confident about being able to recoup the money he was putting into his campaign. Well, because we have bullshit campaign finance laws, thanks to the Supreme Court and evidently to the case that you just named with regard to Cruz, is there any time limit in terms of when you're able to use your donor's money in order to pay you back? It appears the answer is no. Great. Ted Cruz already trying, like right after that, I think he filed to try to pay back loans

that he'd given from years and years ago. and a bunch of candidates have been trying to take advantage of this new ruling as well. So, yeah, I guess it is possible that Santos, who says that he was only going to serve three terms, by the way, his ballotpedia sort of questionnaire that he filled out. But it is possible that he could, you know, be taking this money in and paying it back to himself over years. I'd also like to note, to that end, that the four clients that we identified, all of them, right? And then our campaign donors. One of them is connected to a company that Santos, it's like a parent company kind of organization, he's associated with it.

But all these people are major campaign donors. And they've all given thousands of dollars to Santos. So you can actually sort of see a financial circle here. What is next in your investigation of the very untalented Mr. Ripley, George Santos? It just looks sort of like an endless story. We're looking into a number of things. I'd like to, you know, sort of clone myself. It's too much. Wow. Okay. So then we will stay tuned to figure out what comes next in your investigations. Because to me, Roger, the most interesting thing now, one, I want to know if Tiffany Santos is going to be actually evicted.

And whether or not these campaign donors, who also, by the way, give to other NASA County Long Island Republicans, if they are going to be investigated, as we know, over the holiday season, that investigations into George Santos have been opened at both the local and federal level to do exactly what your investigation has laid out thus far. Something just does not smell right. Federal investigators are looking at those campaign finance loans, by the way. That's part of the investigation has been reported. Well, Roger, I hope that you will come back when he, have another scoop for us because this is indeed fascinating and also terrifying. Thank you so much.

I enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate you. Hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded the Daily Beast podcast at

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