Tag Archives: George Santos

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George Santos and Al Sharpton: Two Peas In a Pod?

Maybe there’s a way back for the lyin’, cheatin’ opportunist, George Santos. 

The embattled Congressman should look for inspiration to Al Sharpton, who gave the eulogy at the funeral for Tyre Nichols.

Sharpton is the poster child for redemption, at least in liberal Democratic circles. His prominence is illustrated by the NY Times’ decision to have his picture featured with its Wednesday, Feb. 2 “Today’s Headlines” story on the funeral, Memphis Gathers in Grief at Tyre Nichols’s Funeral.

Sharpton’s infamous rise in public notoriety has been well documented. As NPR put it in 2014, “Sharpton built a career as an incendiary racial avenger who for decades was drawn to interracial controversies as if they had some irresistible gravitational force.”

Still, he has recovered as an ally of liberals, even securing a political alliance with former president Barack Obama.

President Obama stood with the Rev. Al Sharpton at Sharpton’s National Action Network conference in April 2014 (Frank Franklin II/AP)

A 1987-1988 case that drew national attention revolved around Sharpton’s involvement with 15-year-old Tawana Brawley. A Black woman from New York, Brawley accused six white men of raping her and leaving her in a garbage bag smeared with and covered with racist words written in charcoal.

Sharpton accused government officials of trying to cover up for the rapists because they were white and led the way in spurring a national uproar over the case.

He was later rebuked and fined after a grand jury concluded that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she may herself have created the appearance of an attack.

In 1991, Sharpton stirred up black fury in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, NY when a Jewish driver hit and killed a black boy, Gavin Cato, with his car.

At the boy’s funeral, Sharpton vilified Jewish “diamond merchants” who killed black children in Brooklyn.

Days of anti-Semitic riots culminated in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian Jew who had nothing to do with the incident, being stabbed to death in the midst of a mob of about 30.

The New York Post reported that after the driver of the car was cleared of charges and left for Israel, Sharpton flew to Tel Aviv to slap the driver with a civil suit. When a passer-by at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport recognized Sharpton, she shouted, “Go to hell!”
“I am in hell already,” Sharpton replied. “I am in Israel.”

In December 1995, during a Harlem protest stirred up by Sharpton, a black man entered Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned clothing store, took out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set a fire that killed himself and eight other people.

Sharpton was accused of having spurred the devastation by delivering and facilitating incendiary racist and anti-Semitic comments on black radio stations and at the protest.

In Sept. 2013, the New York Post reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had written in a previously secret diary, “Al Sharpton has done more damage to the black cause than [segregationist Alabama Gov.] George Wallace. He has suffocated the decent black leaders in New York. His transparent venal blackmail and extortion schemes taint all black leadership.”

The Democratic Party, while jumping at every opportunity to lambaste George Santos for his cavalcade of lies, continues to embrace Sharpton. President Joe Biden has even solicited Sharpton’s advice and met with him in the White House.

Like Nadia Vulvokov in the Netflix series Russian Doll, I expect Sharpton will continue to show up repeatedly at Democratic Party venues.

So, hey, in politics anything is possible. If he plays it smart, George Santos may enjoy a similar resurrection with the Republican Party. He could even run for president.

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Fess Up, New York Times. You Didn’t Break the George Santos Story

Read almost any story about the fraud perpetrated by a lying George Santos before his election to the House of Representatives from New York’s 3rd congressional district and you will see the blockbuster news attributed to the New York Times (NYT).

Certainly, the NYT made no effort to disabuse readers of that presumption. 

In its Dec. 19, 2022 blockbuster story exposing Santos’ lies, “Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction”, the paper attributed its discoveries to “…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,…”

In a print introduction to a Jan. 5, 2023 podcast on the story, the NYT repeated this claim. “George Santos, the Republican representative-elect from New York, ran for office and won his seat in part on an inspiring personal story. But when Times reporters started looking into his background, they made some astonishing revelations: Almost all of Mr. Santos’s story was fake.”

But it wasn’t the NYT that broke the fraudster’s story. 

It was the North Shore Leader, a local Long Island weekly newspaper with a circulation of about 20,000. And the North Shore leader exposed Santos well before the November election.

The leader has now raised the issue in a story titled “The Leader Told You So: US Rep-Elect George Santos is a Fraud – and Wanted Criminal”.

“In a story first broken by the North Shore Leader over four months ago, the national media has suddenly discovered that US Congressman-elect George Santos (R-Queens / Nassau) – dubbed “George Scam-tos” by many local political observers – is a deepfake liar who has falsified his background, assets, and contacts,” the story says.

Either the NYT failed to give credit where credit was due or the mighty publication utterly failed to check reporting done by a tiny local paper less than a 1-hour drive from the NYT Building on W. 41st St. in Midtown Manhattan.

By the way:

Neither the North Shore Leader nor the NYT newspapers have reported on another interesting journalistic matter tied to Santos. The NYT did report that Santos once told associates he was (in the NYT’s words) “a journalist at a famous news organization in Brazil,” but didn’t go deeper. According to ta Jan. 10, 2022 report by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Gregory Morey-Parker, who briefly lived with Santos in New York eight or so years ago, told CJR’s Jon Allsop that Santos claimed to have been working at the time for Globo, the Brazilian media behemoth, as a reporter covering human-interest stories out of the US.

According to Morey-Parker, Santos also claimed to be an executive at Globo. When Allsop put this to Ali Kamel, the director-general of journalism at Globo, he described it as “a crazy story” and “a lie, pure and simple.” (Santos’s office did not return a request from Allsop for comment)

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George Santos: It Takes a Con Man to Know a Con Man

George Anthony Devolder-Santos

A review of the campaign finance records of Republican George Anthony Devolder-Santos, the beleaguered winner of New York’s 2022 3rd Congressional District race, reveals that his biggest single contributor was FTX.US, part of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto empire.

According to OpenSecrets.org,  a nonprofit that tracks data on campaign finance and lobbying, the employees and owners of FTX.US contributed a total of $29,000 to Santos’ campaign. 

FTX halted withdrawals in November and filed for bankruptcy after customers rushed to pull their holdings from the cryptocurrency exchange.

FTX.US made contributions totaling $21,882,932 in the 2022 election cycle, with 81.44% of that going to Democrats. 

The Oregonian has reported that a $500,000 contribution to the Democratic Party of Oregon PAC came from Nishad Singh, director of engineering at FTX. Pressure is building for recipients of contributions from FTX-affiliated donors to return the money. The Oregon Democratic Party hasn’t yet said it will do so. The PAC had $691,532 cash on hand as of Nov. 28, 2022, according to OpenSecrets.org.

FTX has started trying to claw back payments made by its former management to politicians, The Guardian reported on Dec. 22, 2022. 

FTX “intends to commence actions before the bankruptcy court to require the return of such payments, with interest accruing from the date any action is commenced”, the company said, sharing an email address – FTXrepay@ftx.us – that recipients could use to voluntarily return money.

“Recipients are cautioned that making a payment or donation to a third party (including a charity) in the amount of any payment received from a FTX contributor does not prevent the FTX debtors from seeking recovery from the recipient or any subsequent transferee,” FTX added in a statement.

Given the current scandal over Santos’ lying about his personal, academic and professional background, it’s surprising that another significant contributor to his campaign was PACS and individuals associated with prominent companies that apparently didn’t look into Santos’ background.

This includes Fisher Investments, Forman Capital Investments and Majority Committee PAC, a Leadership PAC associated with Rep. Kevin McCarthy, (R-CA), who now wants Santos’ vote to become Speaker of the House. 

Liar-elect Santos also raised a substantial portion of his $2,933,614.16 in contributions reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from out-of-district and out-of-state sources, including Patriots Always Triumph, a Leadership PAC affiliated with Rep. Patrick Fallon (R-Texas).

Fortunately, it looks like most Oregonians showed some good sense. Only three people in Oregon contributed a total of $240 to Santos, according to the FEC. 

Whew! We don’t own this one.