Santos’s campaign has pivoted, saying that previously reported personal loans weren’t actually from personal funds.
Caught in between several complaints over potential financial improprieties, Republican Rep. George Santos (Recent York) has modified course on the $705,000 that he previously claimed to have loaned to his campaign, now saying that the cash wasn’t actually entirely from personal funds.
On Tuesday afternoon, Santos’s campaign filed 10 amended campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). They showed, amongst other things, that a $500,000 loan and a $125,000 loan that the campaign had previously indicated were personal loans weren’t from “personal funds of the candidate,” with that box on the shape left unchecked within the amended filing. The forms don’t make clear where the cash got here from.
Prior to the brand new filings, which were likely made in response to an unusual amount of FEC inquiries sent to the Santos campaign, there had already been a flurry of questions surrounding the private loans. Officials and experts questioned where the cash got here from when Santos was 1000’s of dollars in debt to creditors and landlords just two years before the loans were reportedly made.
Now, there are questions on which a part of the financial filings constitute a misrepresentation of the reality from the serial liar, and concerns over where the $625,000 got here from if not from Santos’s personal checking account.
The latter query specifically could cause much more problems for Santos, because the source of the funds could potentially point to criminality, a minimum of one expert has said.
“If the candidate’s personal wealth wasn’t the source of the loan, then what was?” Brett G. Kappel, an election lawyer who advises politicians on campaign finance, said to The Recent York Times. “The one other permissible source can be a bank, and they’d require collateral for a loan of this size. If a bank wasn’t the source of the funds, then the one alternatives are illegal sources.”
Kappel said that the campaign’s financial filings were a number of the strangest he’d ever seen. “This one is within the bizarre category,” he said.
Jordan Libowitz, spokesperson for watchdog group Residents for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), also identified the weird nature of the documents.
“I actually have never been this confused taking a look at an FEC filing,” Libowitz said. In response to Libowitz, while some inexperienced candidates do sometimes struggle with following campaign finance laws, Santos’s filings are particularly strange.
If Santos is found to have broken the law, Republicans have vowed to remove him from Congress, though House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has spent the last weeks defending Santos — who voted for McCarthy for speaker — despite his questionable claims.
Santos is facing a litany of other problems, starting from the legal to the political. The Campaign Legal Center filed a criticism with the FEC against him earlier this month alleging that the campaign likely violated several campaign finance laws, including with the private loans; House Democrats had also identified the loans in a criticism filed with the House Ethics Committee earlier this month, and said that the financial disclosures themselves were likely filed improperly.
The Recent York Times moreover uncovered two weeks ago that a bunch called RedStone Strategies reportedly raised over $800,000 for Santos’s campaign. However the FEC has no record of RedStone as a political group, and the organization appears to share a reputation with an organization, RedStone Strategies LLC, which has ties to Santos. Apparently, a donor gave $25,000 to RedStone Strategies just days ahead of a $125,000 loan that Santos made to his campaign that the brand new filings now say weren’t from Santos’s personal funds.
The embattled lawmaker can be facing credibility issues. Republicans will not be trusting him with top committee assignments, especially ones that involve intelligence information — though they’ve seated him on two committees, the Committee on Small Business and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
In the general public sphere, Santos is doing even worse. Polling from Siena College conducted last week found that 76 percent of suburban Recent York residents — a demographic that makes up a majority of Santos’s district — view him unfavorably, while 59 percent of Recent York residents want Santos to resign.
