Washington (Trends Wide) — Brazilian security forces will re-submit fraud charges against representative-elect George Santos, the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office told Trends Wide, as the New York Republican officially assumes office in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday. under a cloud of suspicion over his dubious resume.
Prosecutors said they will seek a “formal response” from Santos in connection with a checkbook stolen in 2008, after police suspended an investigation into it because they could not find it for notification for nearly a decade.
Authorities, after verifying Santos’ location, will make a formal request to the US Department of Justice to notify it of the charges, Maristela Pereira, a spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office, told Trends Wide. The prosecution told Trends Wide that the application will be submitted at the reopening this Friday.
Trends Wide previously confirmed that Santos was charged with embezzlement in a Brazilian court in 2011, according to case records from the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice. However, court records from 2013 state that the indictment was shelved after court summonses went unanswered and Santos could not be located.
Trends Wide has contacted a lawyer for Santos for comment. The reinstatement of the fraud charges was first reported by The New York Times.
According to the newspaper, citing court records it has reviewed, the criminal case stems from a visit Santos made to a small clothing store in Niterói, a city on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where Santos spent almost US$700 of the stolen checkbook using a false name.
In an interview with the New York Post last week, Santos denied having been charged with any crime in Brazil: “I’m not a criminal here, not in Brazil or in any jurisdiction in the world. Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”
Representative-elect George Santos, right, in a screenshot on Capitol Hill in Washington. File, Archive
He will take office despite the controversy
Santos, who helped Republicans win a narrow majority in the House of Representatives last year by taking a seat from Democrats, will take office on Tuesday despite admitting he lied about parts of his resume, after The New York Times revealed for the first time that Santos’s biography appeared to be partly fictional.
Trends Wide confirmed details of that information about his college education and employment history and uncovered even more falsehoods by Santos, such as that he was forced to drop out of a New York private school when his family’s real estate assets collapsed and that he represented Goldman. Sachs at a major financial conference.
Santos’ claims that his grandparents fled the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees and that his mother died for being present in the South Tower during 9/11 have also come under scrutiny, Trends Wide’s Kfile has found.
In interviews with WABC radio and the New York Post on December 26, Santos admitted to lying about attending Baruch College and New York University, as well as misrepresenting his employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but at the time he said he still intended to serve in Congress.
Two days later, Trends Wide reported that the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York had begun investigating the finances of Santos, who is facing questions about his estate and the more than $700,000 worth of loans he took out for his successful campaign 2022.
The same day, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office announced that it was also investigating Santos’s false claims.
“No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at the time.
The district attorney’s office did not specify what inventions it was exploring, and the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.
Trends Wide has contacted a representative for Santos for comment on the investigations.
Santos’ reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) contain a number of unusual expenses, including exorbitant expenses for air travel and hotels, as well as a number of expenses one cent below the dollar figure for above which the FEC requires campaigns to save receipts.
“Campaign expenses for staff members, including travel, lodging and meals, are normal expenses of any competent campaign. The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any illegal expenditure of campaign funds is, in the At best, irresponsible,” Santos’ lawyer Joe Murray said in a statement to Trends Wide on Saturday.
— Trends Wide’s AnneClaire Stapleton, Julia Vargas Jones, Marcia Reverdosa, Camilo Rocha, Rodrigo Pedrosa, Kyle Blaine, Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck, Pamela Brown and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.
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Washington (Trends Wide) — Brazilian security forces will re-submit fraud charges against representative-elect George Santos, the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office told Trends Wide, as the New York Republican officially assumes office in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday. under a cloud of suspicion over his dubious resume.
Prosecutors said they will seek a “formal response” from Santos in connection with a checkbook stolen in 2008, after police suspended an investigation into it because they could not find it for notification for nearly a decade.
Authorities, after verifying Santos’ location, will make a formal request to the US Department of Justice to notify it of the charges, Maristela Pereira, a spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office, told Trends Wide. The prosecution told Trends Wide that the application will be submitted at the reopening this Friday.
Trends Wide previously confirmed that Santos was charged with embezzlement in a Brazilian court in 2011, according to case records from the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice. However, court records from 2013 state that the indictment was shelved after court summonses went unanswered and Santos could not be located.
Trends Wide has contacted a lawyer for Santos for comment. The reinstatement of the fraud charges was first reported by The New York Times.
According to the newspaper, citing court records it has reviewed, the criminal case stems from a visit Santos made to a small clothing store in Niterói, a city on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where Santos spent almost US$700 of the stolen checkbook using a false name.
In an interview with the New York Post last week, Santos denied having been charged with any crime in Brazil: “I’m not a criminal here, not in Brazil or in any jurisdiction in the world. Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.”
Representative-elect George Santos, right, in a screenshot on Capitol Hill in Washington. File, Archive
He will take office despite the controversy
Santos, who helped Republicans win a narrow majority in the House of Representatives last year by taking a seat from Democrats, will take office on Tuesday despite admitting he lied about parts of his resume, after The New York Times revealed for the first time that Santos’s biography appeared to be partly fictional.
Trends Wide confirmed details of that information about his college education and employment history and uncovered even more falsehoods by Santos, such as that he was forced to drop out of a New York private school when his family’s real estate assets collapsed and that he represented Goldman. Sachs at a major financial conference.
Santos’ claims that his grandparents fled the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees and that his mother died for being present in the South Tower during 9/11 have also come under scrutiny, Trends Wide’s Kfile has found.
In interviews with WABC radio and the New York Post on December 26, Santos admitted to lying about attending Baruch College and New York University, as well as misrepresenting his employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but at the time he said he still intended to serve in Congress.
Two days later, Trends Wide reported that the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York had begun investigating the finances of Santos, who is facing questions about his estate and the more than $700,000 worth of loans he took out for his successful campaign 2022.
The same day, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office announced that it was also investigating Santos’s false claims.
“No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it,” Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly said at the time.
The district attorney’s office did not specify what inventions it was exploring, and the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.
Trends Wide has contacted a representative for Santos for comment on the investigations.
Santos’ reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) contain a number of unusual expenses, including exorbitant expenses for air travel and hotels, as well as a number of expenses one cent below the dollar figure for above which the FEC requires campaigns to save receipts.
“Campaign expenses for staff members, including travel, lodging and meals, are normal expenses of any competent campaign. The suggestion that the Santos campaign engaged in any illegal expenditure of campaign funds is, in the At best, irresponsible,” Santos’ lawyer Joe Murray said in a statement to Trends Wide on Saturday.
— Trends Wide’s AnneClaire Stapleton, Julia Vargas Jones, Marcia Reverdosa, Camilo Rocha, Rodrigo Pedrosa, Kyle Blaine, Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck, Pamela Brown and Carolyn Sung contributed to this report.
