The far-right domestic terrorist leader who was the lead organizer of the plot to kidnap and assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been sentenced to just under 20 years in prison for his role in the plot. Barry Croft, of Delaware, who said he wanted to foment a civil war in the US was, according to the government, the “spiritual leader” of the group, much “some sheikh in ISIS might be.”

On Monday George Santos gave an interview to the New York news outlet City and State. It’s a softball interview in which Santos continues to blame “elites” at The New York Times for making him lie about his resume. He basically minimizes all his lies to nothing. He was someone who “put a little bit of fluff in their resume” and dared any member of Congress to go through the scrutiny he has and come out any better. As you can see, its just a speedball of deflection and lying. But he’s a pathological liar who won’t stop lying. That’s kind of old news. As I noted yesterday, the real story is the list of potential criminal issues which may and I’m increasing thinking will bring him down. The big one is the money. Where did he get the money? Since he won’t shut up, we’re getting more information from him, all of it preposterous. Let’s run through where things stand.

WaPo has a solid rundown of the state of the Santos story after last night’s interview in The New York Post and another live interview Santos did last night. I want to give you a quick assessment of where this story likely goes next, what matters and what does not. On the endless list of fabrications in Santos’s resume and biography, his response has essentially been “LOL, whatever.” Yeah, I lied. Sorry. But who cares?

Narrowly speaking, he’s right. There’s no law that says you have to be honest with voters about your background or almost anything else. There’s no federal recall. The recourse to this behavior is either at the ballot box in two years or in the hands of his colleagues in the House who could expel him from the body. But expulsion is extremely rare. Only five members of the House have ever been expelled and three of those were tied to secession in 1861. In essence, it’s happened twice in U.S. history. It’s slightly more common for the House to refuse to seat a new member.

Absent getting shamed out of office for being an inveterate liar and weasel, the issue will come down to potential criminal conduct. So let’s run down the most likely points of vulnerability on that front.

Morning Memo (our morning briefing), Where Things Stand (our evening Editors’ Blog update), and The Weekender (our weekend newsletter) will all return in 2023.

In the meantime, we hope you’ll join us in celebrating the most wonderful time of the year: The Golden Dukes.

[Ed. Note: A couple hours after initial publication The New York Post put up a substantially expanded version of this interview article, along with a more skeptical and charged slant. That subsequent version included questions I said were left out in this post. -jm]

Embattled weasel George Santos has given what amounts to a softball/clean bill of health interview to The New York Post. It wouldn’t be right to say the piece ignores the scandals surrounding Santos. They basically ask and give him the opportunity to admit he lied about various stuff. But the editors do as much as they can to soften the edges of Santos’s comically gagged tale.

He says he “never worked directly” for Goldman or Citi. Claiming he did was a “poor choice of words.” He says a company he worked for did business with Goldman and Citi. On graduating from Baruch College he admits he never graduated from any college. “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume. I own up to that … We do stupid things in life.”

It’s almost a cliche at this point: The story of a once vibrant and proud mid-sized city paper, now hollowed out to almost nothing by distant corporate owners slashing jobs amidst the decline of local news. This morning I saw this version of the story published by The Boston Globe about The Providence Journal. In this case I feel a bit more connected to the story. The ProJo bills itself as the oldest continuously published daily in the United States — and, more to the point for me, I lived in Providence for six years as a graduate student in 1990s. So I feel some sense of connection and identification with it.

It’s a sad, familiar and in many ways embarrassing story. The ProJo once had a dozen bureaus throughout the tiny state of Rhode Island and its own bureau in D.C. Now it’s down to just a dozen reporters total. The Globe itself, seeing the opening, is staffing up its Rhode Island presence and in so doing likely hastening the ProJo’s steep decline which has brought circulation to just under 30,000, print and digital — barely a tenth of its one-time circulation.

George Santos’s criminal history in Brazil turns out to have several comedic elements to it and provides some additional color about the man who would win election to Congress 14 years later. Truthfully, it has some of the madcap qualities of an old Three’s Company episode.

In 2008, when Santos was 19, he was living in Rio de Janeiro with mother, Fatima, who was working as a home health aide. In his mother’s purse, George found two checks belonging to Délio da Câmara da Costa Alemão, an 82-year-old man then in his mother’s care. (Fatima Devolder, Santos’s mom, later told police the man had asked her to return the checks to his bank.) George took the checks to a local clothing store where he bought shoes and clothes, identifying himself as “Delio.” The store clerk, Carlos Bruno Simoes, became suspicious after Santos left the store and tried calling the numbers on the checks but got nowhere. It was a big deal for Simoes since, as the guy who accepted the embezzled checks, he had to reimburse his employer for Santos’s fraudulent purchases.

But then Simoes caught a break.

Let me start by saying that I suspect (I think?) this is just a matter of having a sloppy attorney or poor communication within the Santos “camp,” if we can dignify it with that term. But it still jumped out at me after a reader sent in a copy of Santos’s attorney’s defiant statement attacking The New York Times. It’s a very Trumpian statement from lawyer Joseph Murray. You’ve probably read it. “George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, first generation American and Republican,” it says, among a list of other claims and attacks.

Pretty par for the course. The full statement is on Santos’s Twitter page. Murray or Santos sent it to basically every publication and it’s been reprinted in numerous articles. But if you look closely there are actually two versions of the statement. The one that showed up in most press reports is slightly different (emphasis added): “George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, immigrant and Republican …”

This isn’t the kind of question I’d normally imagine myself asking. I’m not a “let’s see the birth certificate” kind of guy. But given the mounting evidence that the Rep.-elect George Santos is a perfidious and pathological lying weasel, I think we need to ask.

And I’m not asking just because …. Here’s the specific reason this comes up.

The last several years have offered especially fertile ground for conspiracy theories big and small. Some have become so engrained in our collective consciousness that it’s hard to remember they were once just whispers in the swampiest corners of the internet.

Others are just downright dumb, so memorable in their convoluted chaos that they’re worthy of several celebratory cheers.