The political scene in New York State is being rocked by revelations aiming to remove newly elected Congressman George Santos from office, even before Congress is sworn in. Santos’s now-contested victory over Democrat Robert Zimmerman, was one of the five New York Republican gains, which shifted the partisan majority in Congress. If Santos is dumped—and Tulsi Gabbard has already roasted him face to face on national television, telling him to resign—the Republican House majority will slip from four to merely three votes.
Two questions arise from this uproar, which whirls around admittedly convincing evidence that Santos is a con-man, with an uncontrolled habit of pathological lying about his academic and business life. Since he ran for office in 2020, the Democrats have to answer for the fact that they failed to bring any of this up during that election campaign and did nothing to just drive him from politics. The second question comes from the extensive investigations done by the New York Times and the Daily Beast into the business background of Santos (largely fictional), and his ties to his sister’s operation called Rise NY PAC.
According to the Dec. 29 Daily Beast, Rise NY PAC “also counted among its contributors the financier Andrew Intrater, cousin and money-manager to the sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.… Intrater and his wife were also two of the largest donors to both (District 1 former Congressman) Zeldin and Santos.”
This reference to a “sanctioned Russian oligarch” implies that the investigation on this matter would already be under the watchful eye of such Department of Homeland Security operations as its “kleptocracy” division. Among the few employments Santos in fact had, and didn’t just invent, was trading luxury items, like yachts, between international investors, a form of “finance” transaction heavily penetrated by DHS and other branches of U.S. security.
The question here is: how broad-sweeping could an “investigation” into Santos become? On Dec. 14, prior to its first exposé on Santos, the New York Times ran a story on a Manhattan “gala” organized by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “Three incoming House freshmen … attended a conservative gala in Manhattan on Saturday – along with white nationalists, right-wing conspiracy theorists and European representatives of far-right parties with authoritarian roots,” the Times stated. The three freshmen were Santos, Cory Mills of Central Florida, and Mike Collins of Georgia.
Looking at Santos’ “background,” one cannot help but wonder if he was an asset of intelligence operations from the beginning who is now being unmasked to continue the legacy of, for example, the Jan. 6 investigation.