As the new year unfolds, so does the shadowy past of Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who has fabricated much of his resumé and life story. His lies and inconsistencies were placed center-stage just weeks before the new Congress convened by an expose in the New York Times, after which he confessed to some “embellishments” while dodging questions about others.
The freshman congressman has made many claims that wound up to be false, or at least dubious: that he was born, bred and educated in New York; that he worked at major financial institutions including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan; and that his family owned a multi-million dollar company. What’s clear is the biography he touted on the campaign trail doesn’t align with the paper trail he’s left behind.
Below is a timeline of claims Santos made — and the truth about them — leading up to his election to Congress.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced an amendment to the House rules on Tuesday to allow C-SPAN to independently operate cameras on the House floor during regular proceedings. A handful of Democrats plan to introduce a similar proposal this week.
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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
It’s Bad. Very Bad.
The House GOP’s brazenness, its lack of shame, and its full-throated embrace of interfering with ongoing criminal investigations has the effect of almost normalizing what is an extraordinary level of systemic corruption and abuse of power.
That would be true even if numerous House GOPers didn’t have vested personal interests in the investigations in question, but as we know an astonishing number of them are caught up in the investigations that they’re so loudly protesting and are now trying to sabotage.
As Greg Sargent noted yesterday, giving incoming Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) a select subcommittee to target the FBI and DOJ is basically creating a propaganda machine.
That resistance could serve as grist for Republicans and their allies in the right-wing media to scream “coverup” and paint investigations as corrupt. That could even be used to manufacture a fake rationale for impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland, and for attempts to use an obscure House rule to defund investigations of Trump.
Jordan himself was deeply involved in Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. But the list is long. Here is newly elected Rep. Daniel Goldman, the lead majority counsel in the first Trump impeachment, calling out Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), another GOP member already in DOJ’s crosshairs for his role in the election subversion effort:
Goldman: A member from Pennsylvania had his cell phone seized pursuant to a court order finding probable cause that he committed a crime. Yet he's indicated that he wants to be on this subcommittee so he can undermine a criminal investigation into himself.. pic.twitter.com/c7jqCfO4s9
No one is happier about the House GOP’s new remit to investigate the investigators than Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT). The former Interior secretary was widely regarded as the most ethically challenged member of the Trump cabinet. Quite an achievement. He went on a Deep State rant on the House floor:
Zinke: Despite the deep state's attempts to repeatedly stop me I stand before you as a duly elected member of the congress and tell you that a deep state exists… They want to wipe out the American cowboy pic.twitter.com/BrOiIltbMp
In return for his limited cooperation, the former CFO of the Trump Org received a relatively lenient five months in jail for on tax fraud-related charges. You’ll recall Allen Weisselberg testified against the Trump Org at trial, but never flipped on Donald Trump himself.
Also notable: Weisselberg finally came off the Trump Org payroll after his sentencing and received an undisclosed severance package.
DC Appeals Court Not Eager To Get Involved In Trump Defamation Case
Trump’s effort to fight off Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit against him wound up before the highest court in DC yesterday, and the judges didn’t want to get dragged into the melee.
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Santos Faces New Ethics Complaint
Two Democratic congressmen from New York filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee against Rep. George Santos (D-NY) over his serial fabrications while running for his House seat.
Rough Day To Be Flying
Godspeed to Morning Memo readers trying to fly today. The FAA’s NOTAMs system is down, causing flight delays and grounding airplanes across the country.
Jury Selection Finally Complete In Proud Boys Trial
The 10 classified documents were dated between 2013 and 2016, CNN reported.
“They were found in three or four boxes also containing unclassified papers that fall under the Presidential Records Act,” according to the CNN report.
Biden tells reporters he was “surprised” to learn of the classified documents found in his former DC office:
After I was briefed about the discovery, I was surprised to learn that there are any government records that were taken to that office. … But I don’t know what’s in the documents.
Progress?
I hesitate to call this a breakthrough, but I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few news outlets fronting the differences between the Mar-a-Lago case against Trump and the classified documents found in Biden’s former DC office. Again, I don’t think “but her emails” journalism is dead, but clearly there’s an effort to course-correct:
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) has jumped into the 2024 race for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat before Feinstein, nearing 90 years old and not expected to seek re-election, has announced her intentions.
Just in case it isn’t clear, the House GOP did pass a bill to strip some IRS funding (for the millionth time: the 87,000 IRS agents canard is a bogus GOP conspiracy), but the bill is not going anywhere in the Senate or getting signed by Biden.
We can all rest easy knowing accountability is in the unassailable hands of the newly minted Republican House leadership.
Steve Scalise says Republican leaders will sit down and talk to Rep. George Santos regarding his lies and fabrications. He says there will be an internal process; no commitments on what comes next for him.
Scalise’s remarks come the same day that Democratic lawmakers actually did something tangible about the fact that there’s a freshman member of Congress who was just sworn in after admitting he lied about basically everything he’s ever said and done.
The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.
The Republican Party filed a record number of lawsuits aimed at curtailing voting in 2022, with many aimed at restricting voting ahead of the midterms, according to a new report.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who until Sunday served as chief of security in the country’s capital Brasilia, according to the English-language Brazilian Report. Torres is a former justice minister under ex-President Bolsonaro. At the moment he is on “vacation” in the United States. Torres is at the center of suspicions that pro-Bolsonaro authorities were negligent or worse in security preparations for Sunday’s demonstrations.
The House GOP has passed its rules package and now the 118th Congress in the House is off to the races. But the rules package was never where McCarthy’s real concessions resided. The rules package wasn’t what signed control of the House over to the Freedom Caucus. That was contained in informal promises where McCarthy agreed to cede control over the committee that schedules votes, where he committed to backing the Freedom Caucus’s debt default plans and more.
I had assumed these were verbal agreements over hand shakes. But apparently not. According to the insider sheet Punchbowl News, in addition to the 55-page rules package hashed out between McCarthy’s supporters and the Freedom Caucus, there was an additional, secret three-page document spelling out the real agreement.
The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor has an interesting rundown of differences and similarities between the events of Jan. 8 in Brazil and Jan. 6 two years ago. The fundamental difference, which any expert would have told you in advance, is the role of the Brazilian military and security services. Less than 40 years ago, Brazil was under military rule. Military rule is not some fantastical dystopia there. It’s the reality that most of the country’s political class grew up in.
Brazil’s insurrectionists had studied Jan. 6 closely. You can see that in so many of the visuals. But there was a key difference. The focus of the insurrectionists’ plan, in advance and on the day of, was to build support within the military. They camped out around military bases. They tried to build links to military factions. Nor was this some vain hope. It’s generally agreed that the military and security services were and are sympathetic to Bolsonaro. But political sympathy is not the same as a willingness to intervene to overthrow the political order. Tom Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, told Tharoor: “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support.” Institutional support, in this case, being the army and the police.
