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WaPo has a solid rundown of the state of the Santos story after last night’s interview in The New York Post and another live interview Santos did last night. I want to give you a quick assessment of where this story likely goes next, what matters and what does not. On the endless list of fabrications in Santos’s resume and biography, his response has essentially been “LOL, whatever.” Yeah, I lied. Sorry. But who cares?

Narrowly speaking, he’s right. There’s no law that says you have to be honest with voters about your background or almost anything else. There’s no federal recall. The recourse to this behavior is either at the ballot box in two years or in the hands of his colleagues in the House who could expel him from the body. But expulsion is extremely rare. Only five members of the House have ever been expelled and three of those were tied to secession in 1861. In essence, it’s happened twice in U.S. history. It’s slightly more common for the House to refuse to seat a new member.

Absent getting shamed out of office for being an inveterate liar and weasel, the issue will come down to potential criminal conduct. So let’s run down the most likely points of vulnerability on that front.

[Ed. Note: A couple hours after initial publication The New York Post put up a substantially expanded version of this interview article, along with a more skeptical and charged slant. That subsequent version included questions I said were left out in this post. -jm]

Embattled weasel George Santos has given what amounts to a softball/clean bill of health interview to The New York Post. It wouldn’t be right to say the piece ignores the scandals surrounding Santos. They basically ask and give him the opportunity to admit he lied about various stuff. But the editors do as much as they can to soften the edges of Santos’s comically gagged tale.

He says he “never worked directly” for Goldman or Citi. Claiming he did was a “poor choice of words.” He says a company he worked for did business with Goldman and Citi. On graduating from Baruch College he admits he never graduated from any college. “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume. I own up to that … We do stupid things in life.”

It’s almost a cliche at this point: The story of a once vibrant and proud mid-sized city paper, now hollowed out to almost nothing by distant corporate owners slashing jobs amidst the decline of local news. This morning I saw this version of the story published by The Boston Globe about The Providence Journal. In this case I feel a bit more connected to the story. The ProJo bills itself as the oldest continuously published daily in the United States — and, more to the point for me, I lived in Providence for six years as a graduate student in 1990s. So I feel some sense of connection and identification with it.

It’s a sad, familiar and in many ways embarrassing story. The ProJo once had a dozen bureaus throughout the tiny state of Rhode Island and its own bureau in D.C. Now it’s down to just a dozen reporters total. The Globe itself, seeing the opening, is staffing up its Rhode Island presence and in so doing likely hastening the ProJo’s steep decline which has brought circulation to just under 30,000, print and digital — barely a tenth of its one-time circulation.

George Santos’s criminal history in Brazil turns out to have several comedic elements to it and provides some additional color about the man who would win election to Congress 14 years later. Truthfully, it has some of the madcap qualities of an old Three’s Company episode.

In 2008, when Santos was 19, he was living in Rio de Janeiro with mother, Fatima, who was working as a home health aide. In his mother’s purse, George found two checks belonging to Délio da Câmara da Costa Alemão, an 82-year-old man then in his mother’s care. (Fatima Devolder, Santos’s mom, later told police the man had asked her to return the checks to his bank.) George took the checks to a local clothing store where he bought shoes and clothes, identifying himself as “Delio.” The store clerk, Carlos Bruno Simoes, became suspicious after Santos left the store and tried calling the numbers on the checks but got nowhere. It was a big deal for Simoes since, as the guy who accepted the embezzled checks, he had to reimburse his employer for Santos’s fraudulent purchases.

But then Simoes caught a break.

Let me start by saying that I suspect (I think?) this is just a matter of having a sloppy attorney or poor communication within the Santos “camp,” if we can dignify it with that term. But it still jumped out at me after a reader sent in a copy of Santos’s attorney’s defiant statement attacking The New York Times. It’s a very Trumpian statement from lawyer Joseph Murray. You’ve probably read it. “George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, first generation American and Republican,” it says, among a list of other claims and attacks.

Pretty par for the course. The full statement is on Santos’s Twitter page. Murray or Santos sent it to basically every publication and it’s been reprinted in numerous articles. But if you look closely there are actually two versions of the statement. The one that showed up in most press reports is slightly different (emphasis added): “George Santos represents the kind of progress that the Left is so threatened by — a gay, Latino, immigrant and Republican …”

This isn’t the kind of question I’d normally imagine myself asking. I’m not a “let’s see the birth certificate” kind of guy. But given the mounting evidence that the Rep.-elect George Santos is a perfidious and pathological lying weasel, I think we need to ask.

And I’m not asking just because …. Here’s the specific reason this comes up.

TPM Reader LC asks the following and I’ll try to answer …

I’m loving your coverage of George Santos in NY-3, and I’m wondering: Why are we only hearing about all this now? Don’t political candidates do oppo research? Obviously none of that was done, not even a little bit, since George Santos’s entire identity would collapse in the face of a not particularly vigorous sneeze. My question for you or your readers who may know – who is normally responsible for making sure oppo research happens? Is that the candidates themselves (Robert Zimmerman in this case), or DNC/RNC.

The first thing I would say is that contrary to what some readers are telling me, this part of the story is hardly being ignored. It’s almost the first part of every discussion I hear about this. For some it’s a failure of the Democratic Party; for others it’s a failure of journalism, gutted local news and so forth. But I want to start on the question itself: who is responsible for making sure the oppo research happens?

Yesterday I joked — well, maybe half-joked? — that with all we’ve learned about Rep.-Elect George Santos, is he even gay? Being an “openly gay” Latino Republican has been a central part of his campaign pitch. He doesn’t fit the mold of a Trumper and that, he argues, “scares the left.” Now, it’s a fairly complicated and inevitably subjective and personal matter whether someone is gay or straight. But The Daily Beast managed to dig up the fact that until just two weeks prior to announcing his run for office he was married to a woman.

One additional fact about this reinstatement filing Rep-Elect George Santos (R-NY?) filed today for his Florida-registered company. When he registered the company in May 2021 he listed a company called D&D International Investments as his registered agent in the state. When he refiled today he listed himself as the registered agent.

That’s significant.

This morning we noted that incoming congressman and apparent flimflam artist George Santos (R-NY) has a rather sketchy background with numerous false claims in his bio and a company which dissolved for failure to file an annual report just three months ago. The story was first reported yesterday in a gobsmacking exposé in The New York Times.

Rep-Elect Santos had registered the Devolder Organization LLC in Florida back in May 2021. On his congressional disclosure form he reported $750,000 in income from the company and between $1 million and $5 million in dividends. This compares with $55,000 in income he reported two years earlier from a different employer when he ran for the same seat in 2020. But the company was dissolved in September 2022, the same month as the disclosure form was filed, because the company never filed an annual report. Just today, Florida records show that Santos has filed documents to have his company reinstated. You can see the filing below the fold.