George Santos Says He’s “Pretty Much” Denying Wild New Criminal Charges

With everything going on in the world, you might have forgotten that there’s a Republican representative in Congress—let’s call him George Santos—who made up approximately 97% of his biography on the campaign trail and was charged with 13 federal counts in May, including wire fraud, money laundering, false statements to the House of Representatives, and stealing public funds. But in fact, he’s still very much around and on Tuesday, and was hit with 10 new criminal counts that are somehow even wilder than the original ones.

In the new indictment, prosecutors allege the first-term congressman from New York stole donor identities, used their credit cards to make more than $44,000 in charges, and wired some of the money to both his own personal bank account and campaign coffers. In addition, the government has accused Santos of falsely claiming to the Federal Elections Commission that he’d loaned his campaign $500,000 when he hadn’t loaned it anything and in fact had less than $8,000 in the bank. “As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” US attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, given how he’s approached previous allegations against him, Santos has denied everything, telling reporters: “I will fight this to prove my innocence. So yeah, I’m pretty much denying every last bit of charges.” He also seemingly tried to blame everything he’s been accused of on former campaign treasurer Nancy Marks, who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy last week. “I had no control over specifically campaign finances. I’ve made this abundantly clear,” he said. “I paid somebody, and by the way, according to the news—you guys, some of you people in the news reported—overpaid somebody, who’s put me in, at this point, in an array of trouble.”

Incredibly, Santos confirmed that he is “still running for reelection,” though if it’s up to a group of New York Republicans, the guy will be long gone before any ballots are cast. On Wednesday, GOP representative Anthony D’Esposito announced on X that he’ll be “introducing an expulsion resolution to rid the People’s House of fraudster George Santos,” telling reporters Santos is a “stain” on Congress and the state of New York. Fellow Republican Nick LaLota, who is cosponsoring the resolution (along with Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy, and Brandon Williams) described Santos in similar terms, calling him an “immoral” and “untrustworthy” person, and adding, “The sooner he’s gone, the better.”

Responding to the move to boot him from Washington, Santos said of his fellow Republicans: “If they want to be judge, jury, and arbitrator of the whole goddamn thing let them do it. They just want to silence the people of the 3rd congressional district.”