One of Congress’ most controversial members, New York Rep. George Santos, was charged with criminal theft in 2017 in Pennsylvania’s Amish country after nine bad checks were made out in his name to dog breeders with the memo lines reading “puppies,” Politico reports.
According to the publication, $15,125 worth of checks written in his name were given to dog breeders, and then days later Santos held an adoption event at a Staten Island pet store with Friends of Pets United, an animal rescue charity that he claims that he “founded and ran” from 2013 through 2018. (He said that he saved 2,500 dogs through the charity, but this assertion has not been substantiated.) However, Santos claimed someone stole his checkbook, so the charges were dropped and his record was expunged.
The charges were filed in York County, Pennsylvania; a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said it couldn’t comment on expunged cases, according to the AP.
Incredibly, Santos is also being investigated by the FBI for yet another dog-related incident. He allegedly set up a GoFundMe in order to raise money for a life-saving surgery for a dog owned by disabled veteran Richard Osthoff; Santos raised $3,000 and then took the cash for himself. This experience with Santos drove Osthoff to contemplate committing suicide, he said. Santos, meanwhile, has dismissed Osthoff’s claims as “fake.”
Ironically, earlier this week, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney called Santos a “sick puppy” at the State of the Union, perhaps not knowing just how deep that insult cut. “He shouldn’t have been there,” Romney opined.
This is also not Santos’ first incident involving a checkbook, either. Brazil authorities are reopening a 2008 case in which Santos was accused of spending $700 at a Niterói clothing store using a stolen checkbook and a pseudonym. Santos confessed to the shop owner that he committed fraud in 2009, but his story changed again a year later, when he and his mother told the police that the checkbook had belonged to a man his mother used to work for, and that Santos had stolen it and used it to make the illicit purchases. While a judge approved the charge in 2011 and ordered a response from Santos, Santos was no longer in Brazil, but in the United States.
He alluded to the charge when he told The New York Post in December: “I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world.”
On Thursday, he blamed Nassau County Republicans for his “embellished resume”, explaining on Newsmax: “I would have never gotten the nomination from Nassau County GOP if I had not concluded college. That was really the main driver because of the way and the nature of their politics over there, it’s just plain and simple.”
“To say that I deceived, and it was a campaign of deceit and deception is just not fair. That’s just the political spin that the Nassau County GOP wants to create on this narrative,” he added.
“I’m human; I’ve made mistakes,” Santos said in Thursday’s interview. “I’ve made peace with those mistakes, and I’ve come clean on those mistakes.”
Although he continues to deny any legal wrongdoings, he has admitted to “embellishing his resume.” On top of the FBI’s probe into Santos’ GoFundMe scheme, the New York representative is facing other numerous probes: a federal investigation into his finances, a House Ethics Committee investigation, Nassau County and Queens County district attorneys’ investigations, and probes by federal prosecutors in New York as well as by the New York attorney general. Last week, Santos paused his committee assignments in light of ongoing investigations.
Of his many tall tales, some of the highlights are falsely claiming that his mother died on 9/11, that he was a star volleyball player at Baruch College (where he did not attend), that he was a male model, and that his “grandparents survived the Holocaust.”
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