George Santos has his stint in Congress lined up with a plethora of lies, from his personal background to his professional history to his religious identity. Lately, his finances are being scrutinized, and it appears that a substantial sum of money cannot be accounted for.
The New York Republican continues to be confronted with escalating examination about his peculiar spending and filing habits during his newest congressional campaign, including sums apparently spent on sushi and Uber rides.
In a report published by The New York Times, the newspaper scoured several months of Santos’s campaign spending disclosures, turning up strange expenditures and amounts that shifted from month-to-month. Noting that the then-candidate spent “extravagantly,” the report emphasized disbursements from late 2021 that were revised numerous times in the following months.
George Santos: “Ghost” expenses
In a filing from January 2022, the George Santos campaign revealed $266.66 that had been spent the previous month on five different Uber and taxi rides in a single day, as well as $60.54 at Tokyo Sushi and Grill in Auburn Hills, Michigan, part of the nearly $90,000 he reportedly spent that month.
However, in filings from the following April, the Republican’s campaign amended those amounts, now claiming to have spent $445.22 on the rides and $199.99 on the meal. Then in May, new filings wiped the amount spent at the restaurant, as well as other line items paid out to “Anonymous.”
The amount of $199.99 is significant and appeared frequently in Santos’s filings, as it is two cents below the amount at which the law requires political campaigns to provide receipts for expenses.
The report also noted that, by April of last year, the George Santos campaign had over $250,000 in spending from around 1,200 payments of $199.99 to anonymous sources. All of these individual items were wiped away in the May filing, though the $250,000 in unspecified spending remained.
By the latter months of his 2022 campaign, the congressman had a total of $365,399.08 in non-itemized spending. This, the Times calculated, would have required transactions with around 1,800 entities. The filings overall list only around 270 entities in itemized reports.
Santos’s string of lies and suspicious finances have prompted mass calls for him to step down, including demand from a group of his constituents who traveled from Long Island to Washington, D.C., to confront him in person, and from members of the Nassau County GOP. Santos has snubbed all those calls.
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