The Daily - Botox, Hermès and OnlyFans: Why This May Be George Santos’s Last Week in Congress

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Only five members of the U.S. House of Representatives have ever been expelled from the institution. This week, Representative George Santos, Republican of New York, could become the sixth.In a damning ethics report, House investigators found that the congressman spent tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions on Botox, Ferragamo goods and vacations.Grace Ashford, who covers New York State politics and government for The Times, explains why, after a year in office, so many of Mr. Santos’s colleagues have had enough.Guest: Grace Ashford, a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York State politics and government for The New York Times.Background reading: Representative George Santos faces a new expulsion push led by his own party after a damning report.House ethics investigators found that Mr. Santos used campaign money on personal spending splurges in the Hamptons and Atlantic City.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Only five members of the U.S. House of Representatives have ever been expelled from the institution. This week, Republican Representative George Santos of New York could very well become the sixth. My colleague, Grace Ashford, explains why, after a year in office, so many of Santos' colleagues from both parties have had enough.

It's Monday, November 27th. So, Grace, welcome back to the show. Hey, Michael. Good to be back. So, we haven't talked in a while. The last time you were on the show, George Santos was not yet a member of Congress. He was a congressman-elect. And you had discovered, along with our colleagues in your collective reporting, that Santos had fabricated much of his life story, really basic facts about his career, his education. It caused a huge uproar. Nevertheless, he is sworn into office,

and then his life gets incredibly messy. That's right, Michael. So last December, shortly after our first story came out, federal investigators at the Department of Justice opened an inquiry. In March, the House Ethics Committee announces a parallel investigation. And then in May, the DOJ actually charges Santos with over a dozen felonies. In October, they add 10 more charges, including aggravated identity theft. And through all of this, Santos stands strong and resolute. He says he's innocent. He says he's going to remain in Congress to serve his constituents. And there for a while, it looked as though he was maybe going to be able to actually outrun all of this, all of these attempts to bring accountability.

He was the subject of two expulsion efforts, both of which failed. The first is led by Democrats, and it gets tabled by Republicans who say the investigation should be allowed to run their course. The second is led by this cadre of Republicans from New York, and this also fails resoundingly. Not only does it fail to get the two-thirds majority that it needs to pass, it doesn't even get a simple majority because of how many Democrats voted against it. Well, just explain that. Why would Democrats vote against this and vote to keep Santos in office? Well, I think for a lot of people,

they look at Santos as not just being about Santos, but always about precedent. And, you know, once we start getting into a place where on the basis of news reports, on the basis of accusations, a member can be removed from the office that they were duly elected to. I think there were a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that found that to be pretty concerning. So Democrats said, let's wait. Let's not, you know, rush to judgment. Let's wait and sort of see the evidence that comes either from the criminal case or from this ethics investigation, which they knew at that point was pretty close to its conclusion. And so that's really where things stood until the release of this really damning ethics report the week before Thanksgiving.

Okay, so tell us about this report. So this report is the culmination of months and months and months of investigative work. The committee issued dozens of subpoenas. They interviewed, I think, nearly 40 witnesses. They reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents, looking for evidence that he had violated, you know, House ethics rules, but also federal law. And all this culminates with the filing of a third resolution to expel Congressman Santos coming from the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, a Republican from Mississippi. And this is really the most serious challenge that

Congressman Santos has faced yet. And it's all going to come to a head in the coming week. Right. Because later this week, there's going to be a vote on the House floor to formally remove Santos from Congress. And from everything you're saying, it sounds like the third time could be the real time. It actually could happen. This is definitely the most serious of these challenges thus far. So what did House ethics investigators who put this report together actually find? Well, they lay out what I think is one of the most kind of comprehensive theories of the case in terms of Congressman Santos. And they put it right at the top of their report. They say

that they have found substantial evidence that he violated both house ethics rules and criminal law. And specifically, they say that he sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his candidacy for personal financial profit. Hmm, basically turned the idea of running for Congress into a kind of personal piggy bank. As though the four years that he spent the idea of running for Congress into a kind of personal piggy bank. As though the four years that he spent campaigning and running for office was one long-running grift that would allow him to enrich himself. Okay, and what are the specifics that the report establishes to support that claim? Well, I think, you know, our listeners are somewhat familiar now with some of the biographical embellishments that we've reported about Congressman Santos. You know, this sort of story that he told about himself, that he worked on Wall Street, and that he's a successful businessman. The report really digs into this narrative that he's

putting forth and shows how this kind of works as a big circle. He portrays himself as the successful businessman in order to solicit funds from donors. Donors buy into it and buy into him, give him money that he then funnels to himself. And now we can see from this ethics report all of the ways in which he is finding ways to take that money and bring it back to himself. For example, one of the biggest questions that I had as a reporter from the very beginning of my time looking into George Santos was about the large personal loans that he reported having made to his campaign. Right. He claimed that that successful businessman that he wasn't, but that he claimed to be, was capable of giving his campaign a lot of money. This is really central to this image that he has of himself as a successful businessman is that he has all this money that he can loan to his campaign. In 2020, he says he

loans himself more than $80,000. In 2022, that number skyrockets. It's more than $700,000. Wow. And now for the first time, we have a lot more details about what was really going on there. What exactly was going on with those alleged loans from Santos to his campaign? Well, in 2020, Santos reports that he loans over $80,000 to his campaign over a series of transactions. And this is a little bit unusual because according to the financial disclosure that he files with the House that same year, it says that he's only earning $55,000 a year, and he has no savings. What we didn't know, but we do know now, is that in fact, he did not loan his campaign $80,000. He loaned his campaign $3,500.

So why make that claim? Two reasons. The first is that it made his campaign look a lot more successful on paper than it was in reality. And successful campaigns draw more donors and more support. Right. And number two, it gave him this mechanism through which he could actually repay himself for the loan that he hadn't really fully made. In the process, collecting tens of thousands of dollars of profit. collecting tens of thousands of dollars of profit.

So he basically discovers if you tell the world that you have loaned your campaign money that you didn't have, no one seems to check. And you can then reimburse yourself for some of that money, all that money, and basically just steal from your campaign. Yes, and according to the ethics report, this is not the only way that he finds to divert campaign funds and donor funds into his own pocket.

What are the other ways? So the other thing we learn about in great detail is this Florida company called Redstone Strategies that Santos had been using it as sort of an intermediary where he will transfer money from other places, other accounts, into Redstone Strategies. At which point, it sort of becomes his to do what he wants with it. We'd heard a bit about Redstone before. He was actually charged back in May with having stolen $50,000 from two different donors using Redstone. He had told them that it was a type of independent expenditure committee and that the money would be used to fund ads. But no ads were ever bought. And in fact, we can see now from the report that a lot of that money just went straight into Santos' pocket. Just how much money was Santos able to extract

from this company, Redstone? Well, the number that the ethics report gives is $200,000. Wow. Does the report say how much money overall that Santos took from his donors, from his campaign coffers? So it's really hard to come up with a single number that encapsulates all of this because there are so many profit streams. But at one point, investigators mentioned that Santos withdrew nearly a quarter of a million dollars in cash from his various bank accounts. And we have no idea what became of that. Wow.

But it's not even just the money that he explicitly pulled out of his campaign that concerns them. There's this whole sort of other category of campaign spending that they give us a lot of details on, which is really just how he used the campaign to fund his life. Hmm. So walk us through this in as much detail as you can. Well, you know, as we sort of said at the top, key to the story that George Santos is telling about himself

is this notion that he is a very wealthy person with, you know, excellent taste who's able to kind of live the high life. And in this ethics report, we get to see just how high that life was. This report is loaded with horrible, inexcusable, totally juicy details. The damning 56-page report finding Santos allegedly using thousands of dollars in campaign funds on trips to Atlantic City and even to pay his own rent.

We learn about trips to Atlantic City. Apparently he told a staffer that he liked playing roulette. The report also specifically detailed a list of suspicious campaign expenditures, including more than $10,000 on fashion at Hermes and Ferragamo. We learn about thousands of dollars that he spent at luxury stores. $1,400 at a medical spa that performs Botox treatments. We learn about thousands of dollars worth of spa treatments, a number of which are actually identified as being for Botox in documents. And smaller purchases at OnlyFans, a website often used for adult content and pornography. One of the expenditures that drew the most attention was a payment to the website OnlyFans. This obviously raises some eyebrows because it's not generally how people would like their political donations to be spent, but also because there is a video of George Santos telling a television reporter that he has no idea what OnlyFans was, and he'd only learned about it very recently, which is, again, hard to square with a payment like this.

And Grace, there's no world in which the expenses we're talking about can be construed as campaign expenses, and thus, they are violations of campaign finance laws. It's very hard to make the case that payments to, you know, designer stores and on fancy hotel stays benefit the people of New York's third congressional district. And so when Congress members and their staff get finished reading this report, there's this real sense that the tides have shifted for Congressman Santos, that all of the evidence that they were looking for has now been laid out in stark detail, details that are going to be very difficult to explain away, let alone forget. Now they've seen what they needed to see, and they are ready to move to expel Congressman Santos. We'll be right back. So, Grace, how is everyone in Congress thinking about and talking about this upcoming vote to expel Santos, this third effort to push him out of the House and, from everything you've said, the gravest threat so far to his career in Congress?

Well, Congress is kind of abuzz with the details of this report and, you know, what it might mean for this upcoming vote. We're seeing signs on both sides of the aisle that these revelations have had a real impact on the way people are thinking about this very consequential decision. Probably the most interesting response comes from Santos himself. While he calls the report a smear, he says that if the ethics committee had any ethics, they wouldn't have released it. He nonetheless also kind of seems to bow to some of this news and makes the announcement that, in fact, he will not run for reelection in 2024. Something he has previously never been willing to say. No. And it's actually, I think, a pretty consequential shift for him in terms of

the story that he's been telling because, you know, he has been steadfast in saying that he is innocent of everything he's been accused of and that he will continue to serve his constituents and that he will be reelected even. And so this is the first time we're starting to see that perhaps he is letting go of that vision as well. Interesting. Should we see that announcement, him saying, I'm not going to run for re-election, as an attempt to kind of head off this expulsion vote as a way of saying, I'll see my own way out. So there's no reason to force me out the door. Well, you know, perhaps, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that he is necessarily going to see himself out. Notably, his announcement does not come with any promise to resign from office. He, in fact, says he will continue to serve as long as he is allowed.

Okay, well, given that complex Santos reaction, I'm not running for election, but I won't resign. How are both Democrats and Republicans in the House thinking about this vote and whether kind of rushing to judgment, now feel that in this ethics report, they have the formal finding that makes them, you know, kind of confident to make a decision like this, grave as it is. Probably one of the highest profile of those is Representative Jamie Raskin from Maryland, who initially had voted to protect Mr. Santos to avoid setting a precedent of, he said, expelling people based on intuition, you know, without criminal convictions or disciplinary findings. In the face of this report, though, he said that he thought that it was very clear what the duty of the House was, and that was to expel.

Got it. So Democrats seem very much ready en masse to vote to expel Santos. What about House Republicans? Well, this is where things get a little trickier. So there were already a group of Republicans that had been pushing pretty vocally to expel Congressman Santos, many of whom hail from New York. New York. And in fact, most of those are people who were elected in 2020 and represent these kind of moderate districts in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island, where they have been already targeted for being on the same party as Congressman Santos. Right. And of course, their moderate constituents probably won't hold it against them to vote to expel Santos because they're not hugely partisan districts. I think that's part of the calculation. And so now what we're seeing is that those lawmakers are having some success in persuading

their colleagues to support an effort to expel. And what are some examples of those Republicans who are kind of flipping toward expulsion? Republicans are showing us they do have the ability to call out one of their own. I did not vote in the past to expel George because I didn't believe there was due process. And so the Ethics Committee really, I think, gave him the opportunity. He did not avail himself of that opportunity. The Ethics Committee found that he did not cooperate. I think he's been given the fair due process now. There's Representative Ken Buck from Colorado.

Congressman Greg Murphy of North Carolina said that Santos's actions were reprehensible and he was not worthy of being a member of Congress. There's Representative Greg Murphy. Congresswoman Ashley Hinson of Iowa said the conduct was illegal and unacceptable, and Americans deserve better from their representatives. Republican Zach Nunn says it's time for Santos to go. The people of America deserve better, and we're going to make sure he's held accountable, just as we would anyone who has violated federal law. There are three representatives from Iowa, Zach Nunn, Ashley Hinson, and Marionette Miller-Meeks. We were able to see that he inappropriately used donor money for all these other things for personal gain.

As well as in New York State, Nicole Malliotakis. And that was enough for us to say he should no longer be serving as a member of Congress. And one way that we can see just how significant this shift within the Republican Party is, is that the current resolution to expel Santos was introduced by the Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Michael Guest from Mississippi. But now the Ethics Committee chairman putting his weight behind this in a real signal that he believes that the conduct that his committee, this bipartisan committee, has found should warrant George Santos being kicked out of the House. In the last round, he didn't vote to expel Santos, and he didn't vote to protect him either.

He voted present. And this time, he himself is leading the charge. We've passed that due process point, and it's time for members of Congress to make a personal decision as to whether or not Phil gets the evidence is substantial. Fascinating. So where does all of this leave the math around expulsion for when this comes to a vote? Expulsion requires a two-thirds majority. That's

a lot. Most things in the House are done by simple majority. How close is the House with all these Democrats who are flipping and Republicans who are flipping towards expulsion to actually expelling Santos? Yeah, it is an incredibly high bar. And it was made an incredibly high bar on purpose because this is an incredibly significant decision. But by our calculation, even if every single Democrat were to vote to remove Santos, you would still need more than 70 Republicans to do the same in order to have that motion carry. Mm-hmm. And how many of those 70 Republicans have publicly said they're ready to vote to expel? So what we can say, we know that in the last expulsion resolution, 24 Republicans voted to remove Santos.

Since that time, a little over a dozen have publicly said that they have changed their mind and would now support an expulsion resolution. That brings us to just under 40, but that's not 70. And so I think the question really is, you know, for all of the rest of the Republican conference who have now gone home from Washington, many of them are probably with their families, you know, over the Thanksgiving holiday, thinking this over, you know, what kind of decision are they going to make when they return to Washington? Well, what would be the best and the strongest argument for House Republicans to protect Santos, given the incredibly damning revelations of this House ethics report? Well, there's sort of a historical one and a political one. Historically, if Santos were to be removed based on this ethics report,

he would be only the sixth member in congressional history to be removed from the House of Representatives. Three of those were expelled for supporting the Confederacy. And the other two were expelled for after they were criminally convicted. Santos, of course, has not been criminally convicted. His trial is currently set for September of 2024. What about the political case for sparing him? Well, Republicans have been struggling since they took control of the House in 2022 with the fact that their majority is so, so, so narrow.

Just a couple of votes. Losing Santos' vote would make that majority even narrower. Mm-hmm. So the fear for Republicans is that they will lose this seat because if Santos is removed, and if I'm remembering the rules correctly, there's a special election for his seat, which you have, Grace, told us, is a moderate swing district on Long Island if I'm remembering the rules correctly, there's a special election for his seat,

which you have, Grace, told us is a moderate swing district on Long Island. I'm guessing the fear for Republicans is that a Democrat scoops that seat up and the Republican majority becomes one vote smaller. Yeah, I think that's the nightmare scenario, that a Democrat is able to take advantage of this kind of black eye for the Republican Party on Long Island. And then not only do they win the special election, but then they

are in a good position to come in and win the general as well. Well, Grace, given this complex math, given the uncertainty that Santos will be expelled when the House votes later this week, given the reality that many Republicans don't want to lose even a single member of their majority. I'm curious what it's going to really mean if this vote fails. Because, as you told us,

Santos is going to leave Congress at the end of his term. So what would we really take from the fact that he's not expelled, but instead has been basically browbeaten into leaving on his own? Well, I think it would be a real inflection point. The House Ethics Committee in its report said that Congressman Santos's behavior warranted public condemnation, was beneath the dignity of the office, and had brought severe discredit upon the House. That was in their words. If the majority of House members

read that same report about, you know, all of that conduct, all of the times that he blatantly stole from the campaign, lied to donors, enriched himself, and they say, lied to donors, enriched himself, and they say, no, actually, we're okay with that. That says something. Mm-hmm. I think it's another in this series of moments where we as a country, as a political system, are redefining what's allowable and what we can accept. I have one last question for you, Grace. allowable and what we can accept. I have one last question for you, Grace.

You've now been covering Congressman Santos for the entirety of his career in Congress, which isn't that long, but you've gotten to know it arguably better than anyone, and you've gotten to know him arguably better than anyone. And now this report is out, and we're reaching this potentially historic moment in Santos' career, I wonder if you've gotten any closer to understanding what might be the biggest question of all about George Santos, which is why he has done all the things that he has done. I think because he can. You know, I think one could argue that up until this month, even, he has been really, really successful in creating the reality that he wants, in talking people into, in turning nothing into something, in getting people to believe whatever he tells them.

And it seemed like he was going to be able to continue to take that as far as he could. Yes, there is this criminal investigation going on. Yes, he is facing some real charges. But, you know, in another way, you know, a trial is just another opportunity to tell a story. And Congressman Santos is great at telling stories. Congressman Santos is great at telling stories. I think that, you know, the kind of closest you can get to answering that question is that he thought that it would work because it had worked for a long time. Until it didn't.

Well, Grace, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Michael. On Friday evening, during a profanity-laced tirade on X Spaces, Representative Santos said that he expects the House to expel him in the coming days. But instead of appealing to his colleagues for leniency, Santos lashed out at them, calling them, quote, hypocrites and felons who have extramarital affairs, get drunk with lobbyists, and skip votes. Santos said that if he is removed from the House, he would consider it, quote, a badge of honor. I know I'm going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,

because people are so quick to judge and ask and demand for political expediency. And this is what this is. It's political expediency. So I've had it. I'm very well resolved as a human being. So like, throw this at me, hit me with your best shot at this point. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, Hamas released 40 Israeli hostages, many of them children, that it had taken into Gaza during its October 7th attack on Israel. The releases, which began on Friday, involved a series of handovers that required Israel to free an even larger number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Those exchanges are part of a deal brokered by Qatar and the U.S.

that requires a days-long pause in fighting that is set to end today. This deal is structured so that it can be extended to keep building on these results. That's my goal. That's our goal, to keep this pause going beyond tomorrow. But in a speech on Sunday,

President Biden said he hoped that the truce could be extended, an idea that Hamas says it is open to. We've seen this is the day-by-day approach, hour-by-hour process. Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is being taken for granted. But the proof that this is working and worth pursuing further is in every smile and every grateful tear we see on the faces of those families who are finally getting back together again. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper and Rochelle Banja. It was edited by Mark George, contains original music by Brad Fisher, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell,

and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.