George Santos - jewish fraudster gets elected to Congress (Another one!)

[yankeedoodle]

He says that he's a jew:
Congressman-elect George Santos campaigned as a Jewish Republican. Was he lying?
https://www.jta.org/2022/12/19/politics/congressman-elect-george-santos-campaigned-as-a-jewish-republican-was-he-lying

On Sunday night, George Santos joined the Republican Jewish Coalition on Long Island, where he was just elected to Congress, for a menorah-lighting to mark the first night of Hanukkah. He'd been invited as one of just two freshmen Republican Jews elected to Congress in November.

On Monday morning, The New York Times published a blockbuster expose alleging that much of what Santos, 34, had said about his education, his wealth, his business experience, and even where he lives is false or at least questionable.

Not addressed in the article: Was he lying about his Jewish background? As with so much else in his personal narrative, there's little to suggest truth beyond his own past comments.

The Times noted that Santos, 34, has identified to Jewish Insider as Jewish through his mother and Catholic through his father. Both parents were born in Brazil. Santos has said on Twitter that he is a practicing Catholic — and it is not unusual for some Americans to identify as ethnically Jewish and religiously Christian.

"Whether my mother's Jewish background beliefs, which are mine or my father's Roman Catholic beliefs, which are also mine, are represented or not," he told Jewish Insider after his election, "I want to represent everyone else that practices every other religion to make sure everybody feels like they have a partner in me."

His campaign biography begins, "George's grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII. They were able to settle in Brazil, where his mother was born."

That story could well be true. Many European Jews fled to South America during the leadup to the Holocaust. But Santos' mother, Fatima Devolder (Santos sometimes goes by the name George Devolder), died in 2016 in New York. Nothing in her online obituary, which often is posted by family, indicates any Jewish background. Fatima is one of a number of Roman Catholic appellations for the Virgin Mary, derived from what the church claims are apparitions of Jesus's mother in 1917 in the Portuguese city of the same name. Devolder is a Flemish/Dutch name, which at least validates Santos's claim that his mother has Belgian ancestry, but the Flemish people are overwhelmingly Catholic.

Matt Brooks, the RJC CEO, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a text, "I asked him about this. He identifies as Jewish."

Santos was a featured speaker last month at the RJC's annual Las Vegas event, billed as one of two freshmen Jewish Republicans in Congress. (The other is Ohio's Max Miller.) He campaigned heavily among Orthodox Jews living in New York's 3rd District, encompassing parts of northern Long Island and a part of Queens. "It was an honor to address fellow members of the Jewish community in #NY03," he tweeted Nov. 3 after attending a Chabad event also attended by Israeli Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau.

At Sunday's Hanukkah event, Santos joined Lee Zeldin, the outgoing New York Jewish congressman who gained traction among New York's politically conservative Orthodox Jewish voters.

Santos did not return emails sent by JTA to multiple addresses or messages sent through a number of social media platforms. His sister, Tiffany, also did not reply to an email, nor did his lawyer, Joe Murray.

Santos' claims about his religious and ethnic origins are minor compared to the revelations in the Times expose, which offered new details as well as ones published previously elsewhere and uncovered by Democratic Party opposition research. There are no records of Santos attending the institutes of higher learning he claims to have attended, or of working at some of the financial brokerages he claims have employed him. A charitable institution he started has no evidence of being charitable. He has repeatedly identified with the far right, and then attempted to scrub such expressions from his social media.

Santos faces outstanding charges in Brazil for allegedly stealing a checkbook from a man in the care of his mother, a nurse, and then cashing checks, according to the New York Times' report. He has twice been evicted. His financial reporting as a candidate is missing required information, omissions that could bring legal jeopardy. The Times sought Santos out at the address where he is registered to vote; the person there said she did not know him.

It's not the first time a politician has campaigned as identifying as having a Jewish background that evaporates under scrutiny. In 2018, Julia Salazar, a progressive Democrat who won a seat in the New York state legislature, said she identified as Jewish in part because of her father's Jewish roots; her brother said their father was not Jewish.

Salazar and her defenders said that she identified as Jewish and it was untoward to demand proof. The RJC's Brooks sounded a similar note regarding Santos. "He considers himself a Jew. That's good enough for me," he texted.




His opponent says that he's a fraudster. 
The Democrat who lost to an alleged fraudster says he tried to warn you
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/19/2022/the-democrat-who-lost-to-an-alleged-fraudster-says-he-tried-to-warn-you

Republican Congressman-elect George Santos is engulfed in the scandal of a lifetime before even taking the oath of office after the New York Times reported huge portions of his biography appeared to be "Catch Me If You Can"-style fiction.

But the scale of his alleged deception is so glaring — even cursory fact checks seemed likely to find holes — that it's already spawned a secondary scandal: How did both news outlets and Democratic opposition researchers in the largest metro area in America miss this until after the election?

"We always knew Santos was running a scam against the voters in our congressional district," Robert Zimmerman, Santos's Democratic opponent in the race, told Semafor. "And we raised many of these issues and questions, but we were drowned out in a governor's race, where crime was the focus."

While his campaign didn't have the full story, Zimmerman pointed to bread crumbs that were publicly available during the race that the press failed to follow in time to give voters a clearer picture of Santos.

A Cook Political Report evaluation of the race quoted a "senior House GOP aide" saying they were concerned about his business background, and were "not touching him with a 10-foot pole." A DCCC opposition research book largely focused on his ties to January 6th ralliers and his position on abortion, but did note his purported animal rescue group did not appear to be registered with the IRS.

The Leader, a local news outlet that covers Long Island's North Shore, reported Santos' filings in 2020 were $5,000 and then leaped to $11 million. The article quoted an anonymous Republican leader asking: "Are we being played as extras in 'The Talented Mr Santos'?"

The New York Times expose ended up going much further, finding no evidence to support his claims he worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, graduated from Baruch College, or that he was a landlord who'd been hurt by pandemic policies protecting renters from eviction, among many other revelations. Reporters also found no support for a claim he had "lost four employees" in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, in which a gunman killed 49 people.

In campaign ads, Santos portrayed himself as trying to "save his family's dream" after growing up in an immigrant household, and emphasized a tough stance on crime, in line with other New York Republicans.

With the race now over, Zimmerman is calling for an immediate investigation by the House Ethics Committee and by the US Attorney's Office as well.

Democratic sources expect him to run again, but Zimmerman is hedging for now when asked about his future plans. "Today is not the day to talk about my political agenda," Zimmerman told Semafor.

Santos did not return requests for comment. His attorney Joe Murray told Axios earlier: "George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, immigrant and Republican who won a Biden district in overwhelming fashion by showing everyday voters that there is a better option than the broken promises and failed policies of the Democratic Party." He offered no apparent rebuttal to any of the New York Times story's individual claims.

[yankeedoodle]

Congressman-elect with fabricated resume also lied about having Nazi refugee grandparents
https://www.jta.org/2022/12/22/united-states/congressman-elect-with-fabricated-resume-also-lied-about-having-nazi-refugee-grandparents
When The New York Times reported earlier this week that virtually the entire resume of George Santos, recently elected as a Republican congressman from Long Island, appeared to be a fabrication, it left untouched one detail: his claim to Jewish heritage.

On his website, Santos said his maternal grandparents were refugees from the Nazis when they arrived in Brazil. He also said that he counted as his own his mother's "Jewish background beliefs" as well as his father's Catholicism.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on Monday that Santos' claim that his mother was Jewish had no evidence and was suspicious given her name, common among Brazilian Catholics, and her online obituary, which did not mention any Jewish identity.

"I asked him about this. He identifies as Jewish," the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which had been feting Santos as one of two new Republican Jews in Congress, told JTA at the time.

Now, the Forward has identified records indicating that Santos' grandparents had not in fact fled Ukraine or the Nazis in Belgium. Santos' claim to be the descendant of refugees of anti-Jewish persecution, it appears, is also a lie.

Both of Santos' maternal grandparents were born in Brazil, according to the records identified by the Forward, which also obtained a 1954 Brazilian newspaper article reporting that his great-grandfather immigrated from Belgium in 1884. The great-grandfather was listed in church records on the occasion of his daughter's marriage in 1928, according to the Forward, which obtained a photograph of the family in Brazil that appears to be from the early 20th century.

Jewish Insider, meanwhile, obtained records from a Brazilian national civil identification database further undermining Santos' story. And CNN scrutinized multiple databases about people persecuted by the Nazis and found no record of Santos' family.

"There's no sign of Jewish and/or Ukrainian heritage and no indication of name changes along the way," Megan Smolenyak, a professional genealogist, told CNN after researching Santos' family history.

Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat who conceded to Santos after losing by 8 points, told the Forward that Santos' apparent fabrications about his Jewish heritage was especially galling, even amid a string of apparently false claims about his career, education and even address.

"That he would actually lie about the Holocaust to try to promote himself, it's not offensive — it's sick and obscene," Zimmerman told the Forward. "It's one of the most vile things you can do, to actually use one of the world's greatest tragedies, the death of 6 million, as a political stunt."

There are many reasons why someone might lie about being Jewish. Some people falsely claim Jewish identity out of a desire to identify with those who are oppressed. There can also be opportunistic reasons, to derive benefits available to Jews. And a small group of people simply lie a lot, about all kinds of matters, according to researchers who found that 5% of people report telling half of all lies. (That finding was recently reported in a New York Times article about the former chief of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, who resigned from a subsequent role after his own fabricated resume was exposed.)

Santos has not offered any insights about what drove his many apparent lies, which troubled some but were not reported in full until after his election. He did not respond to JTA's efforts to reach him through multiple pathways on Monday and has not commented publicly since.

But it is clear that laying claim to a Jewish identity could easily have been seen as a selling point in New York's Third Congressional District, home to a large and growing Orthodox Jewish population. Zimmerman is Jewish.

For now, the Republican Jewish Coalition, which hosted Santos at a Hanukkah party the night before the New York Times story broke, has adjusted its earlier nonchalance about Santos' background.

The group "is aware of the claims being made against Congressman-elect George Santos, and we have reached out to his office directly to ascertain whether they are true," CEO Matt Brooks said in a statement Wednesday. "These allegations, if true, are deeply troubling. Given their seriousness, the Congressman-elect owes the public an explanation, and we look forward to hearing it."

Meanwhile, scrutiny of Santos' claims is continuing, with new information calling into question his self-identification as having been openly gay for more than a decade. The Daily Beast broke the news Thursday that Santos had not disclosed a marriage to a woman that ended in divorce in 2019, and said it had been unable to find a marriage record for the man Santos says is his husband.