The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened.

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how the story began. “We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things,” Lally told her. “He was so well known, at least in the more active political circles, to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamtos.” Lally explains how redistricting drama in New York State turned Santos from a “sacrificial” candidate—to whom no one was paying attention—to a front-runner. At the same time, Malone thinks, “the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues” enabled his penchant for fabrication. “[There’s] lots of crazy stuff that’s popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, Eh, who’s gonna check?” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Trump years were a frenzy of daily, deliberate fabrication. So perhaps the revelations about Congressman George Santos' self-fashionedings aren't as shocking to us as they should be. But you've got to give him credit. His laws are extra. They've ranged from the injuries he got on the Constitution. college volleyball team, by the way, a sport he never played at a college he never attended, to alleged criminal misrepresentation on campaign finance. He's gone from punchline to pariah,

even in his own party. He's a national joke, he's an international joke, but this joke's got to go. He is a stain on the House of Representatives. He's a stain on the third congressional district. Mr. Santos, haven't you done enough harm? Most of us first learned about Santos from reporting in the pages of the New York Times. But the story really emerged months earlier in a newspaper called The North Shore Leader. They were sounding the alarm, except nobody really heard it. Staff writer Claire Malone, who covers the media and politics, wanted to find out how the story actually started. So I went out to Long Island to meet with Grant Lally, who is the publisher of the North Shore Learie, who is the publisher of the North Shore Learie.

and also with Maureen Daly, who is the managing editor of the paper. I'm Claire Malone. Are you Maureen? I am. Maureen, lovely to meet you. Yeah, I'm good. We're probably going to bring you into the conference. Okay. Do you mind if I go ahead or no, wherever you want to go?

Claire, what is the North Shore leader? What kind of paper is it? The North Shore leader serves kind of a wealthy, pretty white suburban area of Long Island, and it has about a circulation of 5,000, so it's pretty small. This is a cutting-edge story about a Christmas tree lighting. It says Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays across the top of the fold. And this is, I believe this is the Oyster Bay, downtown Oyster Bay, Main Street Association's holiday celebration they have up. So your four lead stories are World Cup Party. Thieves are very busy.

New Year's Eve and Glen Cove and Bayville lights the menorah. That's it. That's it. These are locally, I mean, this is, you know, I mean, and I guess our top story inside is, you know, the leaders. told you so. It said the leader told you so. U.S. repelect George Santos is a fraud and wanted criminal. And we published this just a couple days after the Times piece came out. So along with the Minowa lighting, they're watching the local politics pretty carefully. Yeah. So Grant Lally, the publisher, is a lawyer by trade, but he is also someone who's in politics. So he actually ran,

he's run three times for the same congressional seat that George Santos is now sitting in and Grant is pretty, you know, connected and involved in local Republican politics out there. I've already spotted two Reagan bus. So how many more? That was actually my dad did that. His dad sculptured? My dad sculptor. No way.

That one he didn't do. The Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah, that was, we had a sculpture, manufacture company at one time. No way. The paper has endorsed Democrats before. They endorsed incumbent Tom Swazi for this. seat previously, who is a Democrat. And in 2022, the paper endorsed Robert Zimmerman, who was Santos' Democratic opponent. I mean, when my dad bought the paper, there was somebody, and she passed

away, but, you know, she kind of came with the paper. She, she was Tom Swazzy's babysitter when he was a baby. So we could never endorse against Tom Swazzy. Right. That's amazing. When did you first become aware of George Santos? I got a telephone call from someone who had helped me out in my campaign and said she was working with George Santos and could we please meet and have lunch. What year is this? This was January of 2020. And it was down the street at the Carl Place Diner.

I went down, I had lunch with him. George Santos was sort of sitting back, glowing in the attention. and he was bizarre. It would be the best description. He was very boastful and very evasive. And I had run for this seat before, and we had the newspaper, so I was kind of, you know,

it was a dual role. He was looking for help and support and advice. And at the same time, it wasn't an interview, but, you know, I was sort of sizing him up for, you know, coverage in the future. Sure. And, I mean, I asked him at the time. I mean, very, you know, I'm friends from Brazil.

You know, I know a bit about Brazilian society, and he boasted about his finance, but being in finance and being a very successful, wealthy financier. He was only 32 at the time, maybe 31 at the time. So very young. And, you know, bragging about his millions and, you know, it didn't click. It didn't mesh with what, with truthfulness. I noticed that you guys didn't endorse him in 2020. Correct.

Yeah, did you know anything was concretely amiss, or was it more just a feeling? He was not a serious candidate in 2020. I mean, it was Tom Swazi. I mean, it was the same district I ran in, but Tom Swazi was well established. He was the former county executive. You know, Santos really ran that year as, you know, a throw as as a non-serious candidate. You know, he was just some guy running and, you know, it was a, he was Brazilian. Nobody's ever run a Brazilian before.

Sure. You know, so, you know, it was almost like. an outreach candidate. Let's see what he can do. And, you know, he was openly gay. I think he's the first person they ran in the county. He was openly gay. So it was really, you know, let's give him, let's give him a shot. Let's see what he can do. But no one at any level expected him to be competitive or certainly not to win. Sure. Fast forward two years. There's redistricting that happens with the third district. Two things. It's actually, this is the, this is actually the key to the whole thing this year.

is everyone expect, meaning everyone, all the political pros, all the political people expected that you have a one-party democratic government in New York State and you know, look at it, anytime you have a one-party government in any state, they will redistrict the lines to favor their party. And, you know, it's called gerrymandering. And in February of 2022,

the legislature came out with a map that was heavily gerrymandered to favor the Democrats, governor signed it and this district, the third district, became a, went from a three-county, reasonably competitive seat into a five-county, completely non-competitive seat that wrapped around through Queens, up through the Bronx, along the shore in Westchester, and then for whatever, and I still want to know who designed it, but shot a tentacle up to Westchester Airport, got to Westchester airport went halfway down the runway and stopped. It was not a competitive seat. Sure. And so he wanted to run for it and and nobody else wanted to. Not competitive favoring Democrats. It was a Democratic

seat. Right. No Republican could have won it. Doesn't matter whether red wavier or no red wavier, that was a Democratic seat. So he's running for it. No one else, no one else, no other candidate filed. And then the New York State Court of Appeals, the top court issued a decision throwing out the map, I mean, it was too partisan and that they also had not followed the proper procedures under New York law for a redistricting commission to meet. They basically, people boycotted and didn't allow the commission to meet. So the court of appeals threw it out, said there's no time. Legislature is actually enjoined and barred from trying to weigh in at that point. And the court issued a brand new map for New York State.

And at that point, the Republican Party around here has already canceled the local property. primary, right? And George Santos is the presumed candidate. They gave a very short window about 10 days for, if anyone else wants to jump in and wage a primary, you have 10 days to stand up a congressional campaign, raise a million dollars, go out and collect 2,000 signatures. Grant, did you consider it? You know, I talked to a few people about it. Because I saw that I could see instantly that the new district was a leans, a marginally Republican district. I was browsing the website and I saw, you know, there's one headline, mass thugs, Rob Storne-Huntington, you know, national crime.

Like, was crime a big issue out here? What were the things that were kind of resonating with Republican voters? I think crime definitely was. The biggest stories are the local, often the students, the success stories. But I'd say the second most important thing to the readers is the crime. So let's talk, you know, for listeners who would be unfamiliar, can you talk a little bit about, you know, the issues that, that George Santos brought up? Or was it mostly, he had an interesting biography?

I mean, what was it about Santos that resonated over the Democrats? What was interesting was he really didn't run, and this is part of what we saw, which really nobody else, you know, frankly, even in other parts of the region saw, is that there was no campaign. I mean, he did nothing. There was not a campaign office open,

not a lawn sign printed or put on a lawn, not a mailer sent to people's homes, not a TV commercial, on television, not a radio ad on written, nothing until Labor Day. So if you walked around in August, you have no idea. We have no idea who George Santos is. You wouldn't even know his name. And this is what we saw. We pulled his campaign filings, his campaign finance disclosures. And he claimed to have already spent over a million dollars on a congressional campaign. And some people run entire congressional campaigns on a million dollars or less. And he, by August, doing with nothing, claims he already spent a million dollars.

And that was a disconnect that we saw. And we said, there's something really wrong here. It's kind of like, you know, what did you do with the million? We gave you last week. Where to go? And you do look at the filings. And what is great with the FEC and with our system is you do have to record everything up to that $199. $19.99, that can go without being detailed. So there were so many expenses that were just $199.99. So I don't have to tell you what I spent that on. And that's just a red flag that kind of says, wait a second here. You know, you can't be buying everything for $199.99.99.

We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things, about bragging about his mansions. So you hear the story and you say... You hear these stories and we know we know everybody, meaning we know a lot of people in the district. And so Santos would tell one lie to one person, another lie to another person, and we would hear from both of those people, compare notes and realize, I mean, he's a total...

He's making all of this up. He's a total liar. And so when you know he's a total liar, then you start looking more closely. And look, he was so well-known, at least in the more active political circles to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamptos. Staff writer Claire Malone speaking with Grant Lally,

publisher of the North Shore Leader, which first raised the alarm about George Santos' congressional campaign. We'll continue in a moment. Did you talk to Democrats about the weirdness with Santos? You know, the D-Triple C, the Democratic posted a, I thought, very weak, a bit of research on Santos. So we looked at that. It was about 75 pages or so, but most of it was pretty much boilerplate, and it raised a lot of the questions that we had, but didn't really provide answers. He put down in, I believe it was February, of 2022, that he loaned his campaign.

He personally loaned his campaign $700,000. Now, this is a guy who had no assets, zero assets, just 18 months before. Yeah. And that was disclosed in his 2020 personal financial disclosures. They made like $55,000 a year. Yeah, I made $55,000. So where did a million and a half dollars in earnings come from? And by the way, do we know anything about that $700,000?

Look, I suspect. My suspicion is that it's fake, that he just put it down. It never happened, but he put it down on the reports to try to enhance himself So he could go to wealthy people on the North Shore, tell them he's Jewish, and tell them all sorts of lies, and say, I really need money. And I'm in, but I put 700,000 of my own money in. I'm wealthy like you are, but I really need your help too. How did this blatant of a lie happen? I mean, does some fault come to the local GOP, where they just never?

You know, look, congressional campaigns are, by law, separate legal entities. The local parties cannot, you know, finance cannot control congressional campaigns. So the story comes out in September. What's the reaction? What do you hear? Different reactions. Some people said, oh, we knew this all along. This is not surprising.

George Scamptoes. We've been calling him that already. So some people said, yeah, we understand it. Other people were hostile. We got a lot of negative pushback from some local Republican party officials. We had people outraged. What are you attacking our own for? And we will still get that.

We're hearing that on social media and all, you know, this was a Republican. Why would you say anything against him? And, you know, the truth is the truth. And we didn't write his history. He did. We exposed it, yes. but there was some feedback from the party, from lifelong people who worked to get people elected their whole life,

volunteered and all that, and there was a bit of a, you know, you shouldn't have done this. What is, I mean, this is kind of a bigger question, but like, we're obviously in the era of superpartisan politics. This is now very, you know, there's a lot of very Republican towns out here. What makes a Republican truly unelectable? If they knew in June what they know now, He would never have been the nominee. He was running as a sacrificial candidate,

and they couldn't find, when really it was hard to find anyone else to run. And then suddenly the New York State Court of Appeals transforms what was a guaranteed... Yeah, from cannon fodder into a congressman. Yeah, from cannonfire into a congressman. That's a great... Yeah, I like that.

I like that. That's great. That's the movie title. I mean, did the story just not get traction in the way that you thought it might? Well, Robert Zimmerman called. I know he tried very hard when we put these stories out to promote the stories to the daily newspapers. I don't know exactly what he did. He told me at one point he said 85,000 social media blasts out,

and he sent daily reports on what we had reported to the major daily newspapers. So as a media reporter, to me that's very, interesting. Okay, you write the story in September. You know, the Democratic candidate is aware of it. You get some pushback from local Republicans. Okay, the guy still wins in November. December comes, and the New York Times publishes this investigation to Santos that has some of the stuff that you guys had, but also goes a little further of lying about jobs, lying about a pet charity. It was a great journalism. I mean, the New York Times did great work on this. And it's also reflective that if you have the resources and you can put a team of reporters,

you can do the research and the background research and dig up these materials. I mean, and this was an easy bit of reporting. This was reporting in the United States and reporting in Brazil. When you saw that story, was there, or when you saw it, Maureen, was there any, like, saltiness or, oh, I wish we could have pushed it harder? Or was it sort of, oh, okay. No, no, I was actually very happy to see it come out because it really vindicated us because, I mean, George Santos was running around telling people openly that he was going to sue us and he was going to shut us down. Really?

For having published the expose that we published on him. Did you ever have any worry about that? No, no. Because everything was well-sourced and we had back up for everything we said. So George, did you ever hear from George Santos after that original September story? No, I have not supposed. spoken to George Santos, and he would not even speak to us after we endorsed Tom Swazzi in 2020. Have you guys talked to the New York Times, the people who broke the story?

Yeah, I mean, I've spoken to Grace Ashford and, you know. Yeah. You weren't credited in that story. Was there any bad feeling about that? You know, it's a competitive world. I'm glad that they followed through on the story we started. it would have been nice to be to be credited. To that end, you guys have been doing a lot of press around this story. Oh my God, it's killing me. It's just killing me.

Is it helping subscribership or circulation at all? Yeah, it definitely, the newspaper's gotten a lot of attention and good attention. So it's actually very gratifying to get that. The social media is just blowing out of the water. We're just constantly getting new subscribers. new followers and great comments, great, great follow-up, direct messages, congratulating us and thanking us for doing the story. It is disappointing that George Santos was elected, even though we had exposed these massive

issues with him, but he actually trailed Lee Zeldon by three to four points behind Lee Zeldon in this district. Lee Zeldon got almost 58% in this district. He got 54%. So it did have an impact. The shame of it is a lot of people, you know, just vote, you know, reflexively. They just vote one party or the other. And so, you know, they say you could run anything, anyone or anything on a ballot.

And they would still get 40% of the vote because people don't think about it. The depth and breadth of the lies are so tremendous, I don't know, What is to say about us that this guy has got all the way into Congress? I think it says basically we want to believe and we want to. We're always looking for that person to fulfill the check all the boxes for us. And maybe that's unrealistic. I come from Brooklyn, so we have that kind of, if it's too good, it's too good. What was the Ed Koch thing you were saying earlier?

Oh, well, Ed Koch always said that, picked your top 10 issues. If you agree with me on six of them vote for me. If you agree with me on 10, have your head examined. Have you noticed that people read less local news? Is it about the same? Like, has there been any change on? I think they read about the same. There's a real, we have a really loyal readership.

Our website traffic is up 31,000, I think, is that. It's amazing. Somebody asked me, I said, well, I know there's smoke coming out of the server. Grant Lally and Maureen Daly of the North Shore leader. Claire Malone covers the media for the New Yorker. Now, Claire, as we follow the Santos news, the daily pile-up of fabrications is glorious. I just wonder if you see his rise to Congress

as a Trump-related phenomenon, or is he merely pathological? I certainly think that George Santos perhaps thought that he could, maybe Donald Trump and his world famous fibbing kind of gave George Santos a permission structure to say like, well, listen, I don't know, like people who are Republican partisans are going to vote for a Republican. I think the difference is Donald Trump is an ingrained famous character in the U.S. culture for the past, who knows, 40, 50 years. And George Santos is a no one's ever heard of him guy. And so I do think it still does matter to, I think, to Republicans.

if someone comes out and they've just made up from whole cloth their resume. But I do think that the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues, ranging from domestic abuse to, you know, allegations of sex trafficking, you know, lots of crazy stuff that's popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, eh, who's going to check? You can find Claire Malone's reporting at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks so much for being with us.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breedda Green, Adam Howard, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and In Gofen in Putabwele,

with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Mike Cutchman, and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.