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.
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[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.
