2022 Midterms

[Brooklyn]

https://images.dailykos.com/images/1152 ... 1673665166



This is the best Republicons got.

[Farfromgeneva]

Anyone surprised by this story is not paying attention in life

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Byron TauUpdated Jan. 14, 2023 9:01 am ET

Mr. Santos was hired in 2020 to raise capital for the company, Harbor City Capital, and landed at least one significant investment from a wealthy investor, the people said. When the investment failed to deliver on the promised returns, according to one of the people, Mr. Santos sought to reassure the investor by saying he had personally raised nearly $100 million and had invested his own family’s money in Harbor City.

Mr. Santos, a 34-year-old freshman Republican member of Congress from Long Island, is facing calls to resign from Democrats and a number of New York Republicans amid investigations into his campaign finances and lies he told during his campaign, pertaining to his education, work history, wealth, ancestry and other matters. The Republicans’ narrow majority in the House made his vote crucial for the election of Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

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The SEC alleged that Harbor City’s CEO and founder, J.P. Maroney, ran the company as a Ponzi scheme since 2015 and defrauded more than 100 investors out of more than $17 million. Mr. Maroney didn’t respond to requests for comment.Photo: Eric Lee for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Santos has admitted to lying about working at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. but has defended his experience in the financial-services sector, saying in one interview: “I did work in the industry for a number of years.”

Mr. Santos’s financial-industry experience, according to his résumé, included a job in 2017 with a company that organized conferences for money managers and private-wealth investors, as well as his 2020 stint at Harbor City Capital. Harbor City has been in receivership since soon after the SEC accused it of being a Ponzi scheme in a 2021 civil lawsuit. Mr. Santos was paid for work he did at Harbor City, according to the receiver, Katherine Donlon. She declined to comment further on Mr. Santos’s work for Harbor City.

The SEC declined to comment on Mr. Santos’s role at Harbor City. Mr. Santos has denied wrongdoing and previously said in interviews that he wasn’t named as a defendant in the SEC’s lawsuit against the company. A spokesperson for Mr. Santos didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.

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People who raise money from investors and are paid in the form of commissions generally have to be brokers and be registered to work with a licensed brokerage firm. The SEC routinely brings civil-enforcement actions against people who conduct the work of brokers but aren’t licensed to do so; it has filed no such action against Mr. Santos. A search of a database maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, doesn’t show Mr. Santos registered as a broker. The terms under which Mr. Santos was paid for his work at Harbor City couldn’t be determined.

Those raising money for smaller businesses or investment managers are sometimes called “finders,” and they are often paid for recruiting investors. Since the companies seeking the capital are private, the deals often don’t involve audited financial statements or other disclosures that investors in the public markets rely upon.

Mr. Santos didn’t disclose any income from Harbor City on the financial-disclosure forms that federal candidates are required to file when running for office, as earlier reported by the Washington Post.

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At Harbor City Capital, Mr. Santos’s job was to bring in investors for the company’s financial offering, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Harbor City said in a 2020 press release that Mr. Santos would serve as regional director of its New York City office and “will represent Harbor City Capital Corp primarily with domestic and international family offices, institutional investors, and high net worth clientele.”

Harbor City promised investors returns from investing in digital marketing campaigns. Such advertising campaigns typically aren’t investor-funded but rather paid for by corporations through their ad agencies as part of their standard marketing budgets.

In investor material viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Harbor City was offering what it alternatively called “secured bonds” or “fixed income strategy” investments. Harbor City promised investors high yields of up to 20% with a secured principal—in some instances claiming that investors “can’t lose” or that their initial investment was “100% safe.” At times the company described the investment vehicle as “digital marketing arbitrage,” suggesting that Harbor City was able to take advantage of inefficiencies in digital advertising to deliver guaranteed returns.

At the time Mr. Santos worked there in 2020, Harbor City proposed using a financial instrument known as a Standby Letter of Credit, or SBLC, to protect investor principal, offering extremely high returns with what the company assured investors was almost no risk, investor materials show.

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In its 2021 lawsuit, the SEC said Harbor City and its affiliates had no underlying business activity or revenue and appeared either to be paying dividends to other investors or diverting funds for the personal use of Harbor City’s chief executive officer and founder, J.P. Maroney. Mr. Maroney didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

The SEC alleged that Mr. Maroney, a Florida businessman, ran the company as a Ponzi scheme since 2015 and defrauded more than 100 investors out of more than $17 million. In connection with the SEC’s lawsuit, numerous investors provided sworn statements in Florida federal court describing the same pattern: investing in Harbor City and receiving a handful of the promised distributions of returns before they abruptly stopped. The investor recruited by Mr. Santos experienced just that pattern, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

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Mr. Maroney has said in a court filing that he is the subject of a continuing criminal investigation into Harbor City’s activities, but no criminal charges have been made public. The Harbor City receiver has taken possession of a multimillion-dollar property, as well as Mr. Maroney’s four Jet Skis and his Mercedes automobile in an attempt to recoup money for investors, according to court documents.

Mr. Santos has been facing numerous inquiries about his campaign-financing and business activities since his deceptions came to light, most prominently through reporting by the New York Times. The district attorneys in Queens and Nassau counties, as well as federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York, are investigating the congressman, according to people familiar with the matter.

Brazilian authorities said they intend to reopen a criminal investigation into Mr. Santos over charges that he committed check fraud in 2008 in Brazil—a case that had been suspended because police had been unable to find him. Mr. Santos previously said he hasn’t committed any crimes.

—Dave Michaels and Mark Maremont contributed to this article.

Write to Byron Tau at [email protected]

[Seacoaster(1)]

The hits keep coming about George; now it's about a veteran and his dog:

https://patch.com/new-york/oysterbay/di ... s-gofundme

https://twitter.com/JSweetLI/status/1615482882146836481

He's on the House Small Business Committee.

[Kismet]

Sadly, Santos is an example of NO SHAME politics and systemic prevarication and deception - his is merely on steroids - now turning into a MAGA darling, hiring Bannon associates on staff and sadly he is likely just warming up. Not sure what it is going to take to get him out of Congress

Watch his former roommate's interview on CNN last night

https://crooksandliars.com/cltv/2023/01 ... tent=69796

and then this about bilking a Navy Vet after raising $$$ for a GofundMe to treat his sick service dog.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congre ... -rcna66405

Here's hoping the Feds or state and local prosecutors indict him soon so McCarthy will then be forced to make him to resign.

I still want to know if he's really a US citizen (and perhaps what his real identity is) because if it turns out he isn't then he would be immediately ineligible to serve.

Historian Michael Beschloss on Twitter today upon hearing Santos will serve on Science, Space and Technology Committee -
"Hope that Santos does not claim to have a BS in Science."

and we all thought former Chicago mayor Harold Washington took the cake

"Let's not be overconfident, we still have to count the votes."

The Economist nails it today

"George Santos is the Congressman America deserves - He is the right man for a democracy where winning matters more than anything else"

UPDATE: Justice Dept has asked the Federal Election Commission to hold off on any enforcement action against George Santos — the clearest sign to date that federal prosecutors are examining Santos’s campaign finances.

[Seacoaster(1)]

Just more questions:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/george-sa ... t-personal

[Seacoaster(1)]

George "assassination attempt" allegations, need for police protection, and a mugging in the "middle of Fifth Avenue"!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V43vAK0TNE

[Seacoaster(1)]

The story never, ever gets better:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -to-exist/

[Seacoaster(1)]

More on the Remarkable Mr. Santos, who quarterbacked the Chiefs to victory last night:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/nyre ... ticleShare

"Representative George Santos has spent his campaign money in plenty of conspicuous ways, from lavish hotel stays in Las Vegas and Palm Beach, Fla., to an unusual slew of payments for exactly $199.99 — two cents below the threshold where receipts would be required.

But deep within Mr. Santos’s campaign filings, The New York Times found another eye-catching number: $365,399.08 in unexplained spending, with no record of where it went or for what purpose.

The mysterious expenditures, which list no recipient and offer no receipts, account for nearly 12 percent of the Santos campaign’s total reported expenses — many times exceeding what is typical for congressional candidates. Fellow New York House members, for example, failed to itemize between zero and 2 percent of their expenses this past cycle.

Without explanations for each expenditure in the reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, it’s impossible to determine if Mr. Santos spent campaign funds on legitimate election-related purposes.

Election law experts said that the $365,000 in unexplained expenses was not necessarily illegal but suggested a pattern of remarkable sloppiness, if not an attempt to cover up improper spending that violated campaign finance laws.

The unexplained spending is among a litany of irregularities found in nearly every aspect of how the Santos campaign handled its finances, The Times found.

Several donors said in interviews that the Santos campaign or associated groups misrepresented how much they gave. Campaign finance documents show discrepancies between what the Santos campaign reported having spent and what recipients, such as other Republican candidates, reported having been given.

When the campaign has amended its filings, as it has 36 times, some payments have gone up or simply disappeared. And though other New York candidates list $26,000 in donations from Mr. Santos, the contributions do not appear in his filings at all, The Times’s analysis showed.

Bill McGinley, a lawyer for one of the donors and a former general counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, examined some of Mr. Santos’s contribution reports and said they were “all over the place and do not make any sense.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he added.

The shifting costs of a sushi meal

Mr. Santos, a Republican elected in November, is facing several criminal and ethics inquiries after revelations that he lied about his upbringing, education and work history. His fabrications have led to numerous calls for his resignation and suspicion over how he raised and spent his campaign money.

The unexplained $365,000 in his campaign disclosures is a vivid example.

Mr. Santos launched his second bid for a New York House seat in early 2021, just months after he lost to Representative Thomas R. Suozzi.

From the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Santos spent extravagantly, traveling far outside his district to attend fund-raisers and other events, though he had no declared primary challenger. In the first three months of 2021, for example, he reported spending more than $5,000 on airfare and hotel stays in West Palm Beach and Washington, D.C.

By late 2021, as Mr. Santos built his campaign war chest, his spending continued to pick up. He spent nearly $90,000 in December, making trips to Kansas and Michigan, according to reports filed in January 2022.

Those two trips were memorialized in several itemized expenditures dated to Dec. 19. The filings show that Mr. Santos spent $266.66 on five different Ubers and taxis, as well as $828.78 on stays at the Hyatt Regency in Wichita, Kan. He also itemized $140.54 he spent on food, including $60.54 at Tokyo Sushi and Grill in Auburn, Hills, Mich.

But by April 2022, Mr. Santos seemed to have adopted a new accounting strategy. He added more than $250,000 in more than 1,200 payments to “Anonymous,” nearly all for $199.99. Some of the payments, reported earlier by The Washington Post, were added to older spending reports; none had any description other than the dates.

Mr. Santos also used the April filings to change some of his previously recorded expenses, retroactively raising the cost of some of them to $199.99. The cost of the five Uber and taxi rides from Dec. 19 rose to $445.22, and the Tokyo Sushi and Grill bill had gone up to $199.99. There were also three new expenses on that date, each for $199.99, paid out to “Anonymous.”

In May, Mr. Santos changed his reports again. He wiped out all the individual line items paid to Anonymous, as well as the meal at Tokyo Sushi, but the filing still included the $250,000 in spending, with no further details, dates or explanation.

In the latter stages of the campaign, Mr. Santos itemized small sums spent for gas, lunch and office supplies. But he also continued to spend money without providing receipts or identifying the date or recipient, with the unitemized spending growing to $365,399.08.

Campaigns do not need to itemize or provide receipts for expenses of less than $200. But if they spend more than $200 with a single vendor — even spread over several transactions — they would be required to go back and itemize each expenditure.

If Mr. Santos were to suggest that the unexplained $365,000 was spent in increments of $200 or less, he would have had to do business with more than 1,800 separate entities — many times more than the roughly 270 he listed in itemized reports.

Experts said that would be implausible and called the spending concerning, particularly in concert with his other campaign finance issues.

Saurav Ghosh, a director with the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, said that it “beggared belief” that each of the expenditures would have been made at different vendors and that none of them would have totaled more than $200, adding: “It again falls into the category of reporting that is so ludicrous that it’s completely wrong, and suggests that they’re covering up how they actually spent their money.”

Mr. Santos’s director of communications declined to comment. Joe Murray, his lawyer, said that it would be inappropriate to comment given ongoing investigations into Mr. Santos.

The degree to which Mr. Santos has seemingly stretched campaign finance rules underscores the challenge that the F.E.C. faces in its effort to monitor hundreds of federal campaigns and an exploding number of political committees across the country each election cycle.

While the agency flagged scores of issues in Mr. Santos’s campaign filings, such as excessive contributions and unexplained increases in the number of itemized disbursements, it does not appear to have looked into the $365,399.08 that Mr. Santos said he spent without any explanation. And even if it did, the spending would be difficult to parse.

“I don’t know how you even determine that it’s a lot of different expenditures,” said Kenneth Gross, the former head of the F.E.C. general counsel’s enforcement division. “You’re just stabbing around in the dark.”

The unreported $95,000

The Santos campaign’s accounting of the political donations it received is also littered with discrepancies. Some donors say the amounts reported by the campaign do not match what they gave.

Several donors interviewed by The Times received letters from the F.E.C. asking them to explain donations that appear to be above the legal threshold.

But the issues went beyond that. In one case, the campaign reported 24 separate transactions from one donor that totaled nearly $20,000, in excess of what is legally allowed. All are linked to the donor’s former address, but they use different versions of the donor’s name — making it appear as if the money is coming from two different people. Some of the contributions incorrectly refer to the donor’s having a spouse. The donor, who asked not to be identified, said his own records indicated that he gave around $13,000 to the campaign and an associated committee in six transactions through that period.

Another generous Santos donor, Andrew Intrater, said that his personal financial records show that he donated around $250,000 to the campaign and various Santos-connected political groups during the 2022 cycle. But not all the donations in the filings matched Mr. Intrater’s records, he said.

Mr. Intrater gave $175,000 to Rise NY PAC — a voter registration effort he later learned was run by Mr. Santos’s sister and Nancy Marks, his campaign treasurer — only to later discover that $95,000 of that was not reported by the group in the financial reports required by the state. (The PAC recently updated its filings to reflect the missing donations, which go back to 2021.)

Mr. Intrater also made another $25,000 donation to a Santos-affiliated political entity called RedStone Strategies. Mr. Intrater made the donation after a RedStone representative, at Mr. Santos’s prodding, told him and other donors that RedStone was raising $1.5 million for a hefty television ad buy on behalf of Mr. Santos.

But it turned out that these donations — in fact the entire entity — were never registered and disclosed with the F.E.C. as would be required for such activity. The Times has reported that there is no sign that this group, which used the same co-working space address as Mr. Santos’s campaign and business headquarters, actually spent any money on advertising or other political activity.

Mr. Intrater says he has provided information about the donations to the Department of Justice.

Another mystery revolves around fees that Mr. Santos paid to WinRed, the donation-processing digital platform used to collect mostly small-dollar contributions to candidates.

WinRed charges a standard fee (as of last year, 3.94 percent) on every donation, which is paid by the campaign or committee that receives the money. But Mr. Santos seemed to suggest a different arrangement that was reported earlier by NBC News.

Mr. Santos, who received $796,238.26 from WinRed, according to that company’s F.E.C. filings, should have paid roughly $33,000 in fees. Instead, his filings to regulators show payments adding up to more than $206,000 — an appropriate fee only if Mr. Santos had taken in roughly $5 million.

The overpayment leaves roughly $173,000 in fees unaccounted for.

In a statement, WinRed said it “proactively reached out to the campaign to ensure its agency fees were being reported accurately.”

Paul S. Ryan, an expert in campaign finance law, suggested that Mr. Santos may be “inflating the payments to WinRed and pocketing them for personal use,” something that he said the F.E.C. might not notice because WinRed expenses are so common among candidates.

“The best way to avoid scrutiny is to file reports that appear plausible on their face,” he added.

The accounting problems extend to Mr. Santos’s reported generosity to other candidates, records show. During the campaign, his primary campaign committee and leadership PAC gave more than $180,000 to other campaigns and committees. But the amounts and names listed on his filings did not always match what his recipients recorded, The Times’s analysis found.

Mr. Santos’s leadership fund, GADS PAC, reported sending two donations of $2,900 each in July of last year to Michelle Bond, a Long Island Republican who lost a primary challenge to Representative Nick LaLota. But Ms. Bond’s records show a single donation of $5,000 from the PAC in August, $800 less than what Mr. Santos had reported.

Mr. Santos also sent two separate $2,900 contributions from his leadership PAC to Blake Masters’s unsuccessful Senate bid in Arizona, according to filings from Mr. Santos and Mr. Masters.

Mr. Santos’s campaign reported making another donation, of $2,000, to Mr. Masters, but that amount does not show up in Mr. Masters’s filings. That contribution lists an address in the Florida Panhandle that does not appear to exist.

Mr. Masters’s campaign confirmed it had no records of such a payment.

The inconsistent bookkeeping extended to other contributions made by Mr. Santos.

New York State campaign finance records show that state and local candidates and committees reported nearly two dozen donations from Mr. Santos and his PACs between 2020 and 2022, totaling more than $26,000. But Mr. Santos’s own filings with the F.E.C. show no record of the donations."

[Brooklyn]

Lightfoot loses in Chicago!


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... r-AA1843pP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfEBkW9 ... =emb_title




Run off in April. This is going to be VERY interesting.