In last month’s mid-term elections, a relatively unknown man named George Santos was elected to represent New York’s 3rd district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans will have a very slim majority of 4 seats in the House come January 3rd. An article in yesterday’s New York Times about Santos caused my jaw to drop. Apparently, Mr. Santos is a consummate liar and literally nothing on his resume is to be believed! A few snippets from the NYT article …
George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.
His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.
But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.
There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.
His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.
Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.
And while Mr. Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could The Times could find, records of his properties.
But wait … it gets even worse!
Records show that Mr. Santos’s mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a Rio suburb where she was employed as a nurse. After Mr. Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.
In 2008, when Mr. Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by The Times. Police and court records show that Mr. Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Mr. Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.
The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Mr. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.
That period in Brazil overlapped with when Mr. Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Mr. Santos …
The first question is … why are we only learning of this now??? How did he manage to bamboozle the Republican Party into the nomination, and why didn’t the Democratic Party do their opposition research homework? The next question is … will he be allowed to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3rd, just two weeks from now? The chairman of New York’s Democratic Party has called for an ethics investigation, but given the slim Republican majority in the House, best guess is that nothing much will happen … for now, at least. Mr. Santos is yet another example of what the Republican Party has become. He should fit in really well with Marge Greene, Loren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and some of the others he’ll be serving with, eh?
I urge you to read the entire article … it’s a bit lengthy, but it is an eye-opener, a jaw-dropper!
I leave it to you to … connect the dots.
Why is Scott Pruitt still the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? In fact, I might even ask why Scott Pruitt is still a free man, for he has violated enough laws to have gotten most people put in jail by now. The Washington Post refers to him today as a ‘swamp monster’, and I would agree that seems a fairly good assessment.
As EPA administrator, Pruitt reversed and delayed numerous environmental rules, relaxed enforcement of existing rules, and halted the agency’s efforts to combat climate change. Wait a minute … isn’t it called the Environmental PROTECTION Agency? How is any of this considered protecting the environment? Oh … I remember now … that new ‘alternative’ vocabulary.
Pruitt made frequent use of first class travel, as well as frequent charter and military flights. As EPA administrator, Pruitt leased a condo in Washington D.C. at a deeply discounted rate from a lobbyist whose clients were regulated by the EPA. Pruitt further caused ethics concerns by circumventing the White House and using a narrow provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to autonomously give raises to his two closest aides of approximately $28,000 and $57,000 each, which were substantially higher than salaries paid to those in similar positions in the Obama administration, and which allowed both to avoid signing conflicts of interest pledges.
But Pruitt’s failings in ethics and judgment are only part of a much larger problem: Pruitt has failed at the core responsibility of his job. He’s not protecting the environment. Pruitt has become a one-man public-health risk to the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. From day one, he has worked to gut the EPA and hamstring its ability to protect the environment and public health. He works on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry and other industrial polluters, not the American people. That’s the greatest scandal — and the reason, first and foremost, he’s got to go.
Earlier this week, the 
Jared Kushner’s sister, Nicole Kushner, addressed a ballroom full of wealthy Chinese investors to consider investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a New Jersey real estate project to secure what’s known as an investor visa. The EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign investors to invest in U.S. projects that create jobs and then apply to immigrate, has been used by both the Trump and Kushner family businesses. There were a series of slide shows and presentations, and the brochure carried the line: “Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”
And then there is Ivanka herself, who is a web of conflicts of interest. When Kellyanne Conway used an interview to promote Ivanka’s product line, sales soared, despite a number of retailers reportedly boycotting her products. And not coincidentally, Ivanka’s company won three new trademarks for its products from China on the very day she dined with President Xi Jinping at her father’s Palm Beach club. Since Trump’s win in November, global sales of her merchandise have more or less gone through the roof.
While Donald Trump is exempt from conflict of interest (with the exception of receiving gifts from foreign states without the consent of Congress under the Emoluments Clause, but that is a whole other post), Jared and Ivanka are not exempted. Naturally, the family being no stranger to lawsuits and legal entanglements, they have followed the recommendations of their attorneys to try to avoid conflict of interest charges.
Cummings/ Chaffetz 
Filosofa's Word 