A Long Island newspaper publisher on Saturday recalled an alarming early meeting with then-Republican candidate for the House George Santos, whose behavior he described as “pure evil.”
The North Shore Leader newspaper is currently calling for Santos to resign — or be expelled from the House.
Something was off with him “right from the start,” publisher Grant Lally recounted on MSNBC about his meeting with Santos, whom he described as a “grotesque fraud.”
The candidate at the time was seeking support from the newspaper in the 2020 meeting with Lally. But the Leader lashed him last year as a “fake” and a “fabulist”— and “bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy” — and endorsed his Democratic rival for the House seat.
A recent editorial in what Lally describes as the “mostly Republican” newspaper crowed: “Told you so.”
“I asked him a lot of questions, a lot of pointed questions, a lot of personal questions — not an unfriendly meeting at all. But he was really a weirdo right from the start.” Lally told MSNBC host Cori Coffin about his meeting with Santos.
“He was evasive. He was also just basking in the attention he was getting, which I thought was very weird for a guy who at the time was only 31 years old, but claimed to be a multimillionaire financier,” said Lally.
The Leader’s take on Santos three years ago has since been supported by press reports on Santos’ string of lies about graduating from college, graduating summa cum laude (with a made-up grade point average), and working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, to name just a fraction of his fibs.
Santos has also claimed that the mysterious company he launched in 2021, the Devolder Organization, somehow amassed millions of dollars in under two years.
“We felt very vindicated [by other media] because we had called him out as a fake,” said Lally. Santos’ lying was “beyond our wildest expectations,” he added. “We didn’t think someone would lie about attending Baruch College. We didn’t think someone would lie about working at Goldman Sachs.”
Lally regretted that the story wasn’t picked up by other media at the time. Had it been, “we wouldn’t have to deal with this sociopath in the U.S. Congress right now,” he added.
Lally referred to a recent story that Santos allegedly stole $3,000 from a disabled American veteran who needed that money for surgery on his service dog. Santos put up a GoFundMe appeal, raised $3,000, then allegedly took the funds and disappeared.
The “dog didn’t get its surgery, and the dog died. This is pure evil,” added Lally, who is convinced there will be “pretty close to a unanimous” vote to kick Santos out of the House.
“No one can support him at this point. You can’t support this level of evil by anyone,” he said.
Check out Lally’s full interview here:
