The story arc of expelled George Santos from Congress went from “That’s pretty entertaining” to “Oh, wow, he’s really on Cameo” to “Please, no more” in record time.
That’s probably why, so far, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for a Santos redux, nor on eastern Long Island, where he’s trying to run for Congress again, this time as an independent in the district that includes Congress. Hamptons – or literally anywhere else.
On Monday, Santos’ new campaign committee submitted its first quarterly filing to the Federal Election Commission. And the committee reported, somewhat comically, that it had no donors, it had raised no dollars, and no dollars had been spent.
Santos has since provided some curious explanations for the lack of fundraising. He told The Daily Beast that he would not raise any money until he was confirmed on the general election ballot as an independent candidate, a task that would require him to obtain the signatures of 3,500 voters in New York’s 1st election.st District by the end of May. And he told the New York Daily News that he was trying to fight unfair media narratives. “If I raise money, you’re going to say I’m doing it to scam or to fund my lavish lifestyle or whatever you want to write,” he said, referring to credible allegations that he already used contributions to finance his lavish budget. way of life. (In addition to a House ethics investigation that found “substantial evidence” of criminal misconduct by Santos, he also faces 23 criminal charges, including stealing donor identities and spending their money without their consent. Santos has denied any wrongdoing, and a trial date is tentatively set for September.)
The $0 fundraising quarter for Santos’ 2024 campaign received some well-deserved media attention this week, but a separate report on the zombified remains of Santos’ 2022 campaign has been released. Also submitted to the FEC on Monday. This report revealed a pile of unpaid debts owed to an eclectic collection of characters from the Santos Expanded Universe, none of whom are presumably thrilled to learn that, from a strategic standpoint, he doesn’t have the plans to replenish its fundraising coffers anytime soon.
There is, for example, about $6,000 in newly recorded debts owed to the consulting firm of Santos campaign treasurer Jason D. Boles. It is his current campaign treasurer, to be clear.
Being in debt to your own treasurer, the person responsible for keeping track of your finances, is a dynamic that could charitably be described as… not great. And yet, in a brief phone interview Tuesday, Santos told me that Boles remains by his side. (Boles, for his part, responded “no comment,” hung up on me in the middle of a question about Santos, and did not respond to my email question.)
“He’s still my treasurer, and I don’t think I need to express or explain to you what my strategy is to make sure I pay all my consultants,” Santos told me. “The only thing I can tell you is that everyone who worked for me was always paid. Obviously the circumstances here are a bit extenuating, but yes, everyone will get paid eventually.
On the one hand, it is not uncommon for political campaigns to continue filing FEC reports well after the actual campaign has ended; there are often debts and obligations left to pay — legal fees, consulting, media production, that sort of thing, said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Campaign committees can use available cash or solicit more contributions to repay past debts.
On the other hand, the debts and obligations reported during the Santos 2022 campaign have increased. bigger since he won his race, a decidedly less normal situation. Of the $781,932.07 in debts and obligations currently owed, $630,000 are believed to be purported personal loans from Santos to his own campaign. When I first arrived in Santos and mentioned my debts and obligations, he assumed that was why I was calling. “It’s just my loans that are outstanding,” he replied.
I told him I was actually calling about money his campaign owed him. other people, much of which was not disclosed until the second half of 2023, including to his former campaign manager ($4,000); a pair of field operators ($42,500); its treasurer ($6,015, a debt just incurred); his law firm ($68,727.79); and his favorite restaurant, Queens-based Italian restaurant Il Bacco ($10,000 for “catering services” dating back to Santos’ victory on election night in 2022).
Most of the above, without the ongoing costs of food service, “would be somewhat routine if it were any other candidate,” Maguire said. But “when you have a campaign that has been mired in such financial chaos, much of which remains unresolved, it raises some questions.”
One such question: Why would Boles, the treasurer (who works for a campaign consulting service called RTA Strategy Inc.), willingly partner with George Santos, given his reputation? “You would think that someone experienced in campaign finance compliance would have known what they were getting into,” Maguire said.
It’s not as if Boles’ predecessors left glowing reviews of his work. Former Santos campaign treasurer Nancy Marks pleaded guilty in October to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States; she admitted to fabricating campaign donations for Santos and said a $500,000 personal loan Santos allegedly gave to her campaign was fake, an attempt to make her candidacy appear stronger. After Marks left, the Santos campaign briefly mentioned in its FEC filings another treasurer, Tom Datwyler, who quickly swore up and down that he never agreed to work with the volatile congressman. As with many Santos-related issues, the story was far more complex. According to the Daily Beast, Datwyler allegedly used a high school friend named Andrew Olson to sign on as treasurer in his place – a simple attempt to take the pressure off Datwyler himself. Boles took over and conducted a campaign audit starting in May 2023.
According to documents filed with the FEC, Boles’ company was paid on time by the Santos campaign…until now. It cannot be reassuring to Boles that, above all else, Santos’ 2022 campaign is always repaying individual contributors – about $21,000 in the most recent period – leaving almost zero margins for repaying debts. The 2022 campaign now brings in just $6,290.60 in cash, which includes leftover change from another zombified Santos campaign committee dating back to his unsuccessful 2020 campaign.
Perhaps Boles, who is also Marjorie Taylor Greene’s treasurer, is motivated by a sense of patriotic duty to help MAGA’s most obnoxious wives, as a sort of exercise in “taking over the libraries.” Who knows how many more unpaid FEC filing cycles this sense of duty will last.
As for the other debtors: Former Santos campaign manager Gabrielle Lipsky did not respond to my email asking for the $4,000 she is owed. The last time the Santos campaign repaid its debts to Lipsky was in September, when it wrote a check for $3,500, leaving a balance of $4,000.
And then there is Il Bacco. In late 2022, the Santos campaign said it paid the restaurant $8,000 in “outstanding debt.” But Boles first noted that $10,000 in debt remained owed to Il Bacco — an amount referred to as “election night catering” — in an October 2023 filing with a parenthetical that reads: “ THE TREASURER HAS BECOME AWARE OF A PREVIOUS DEBT IN THE CURRENT PERIOD. (This parenthetical was used a total of seven times in the Santos campaign’s October filing, back when the Santos campaign was still paying its treasurer on time.)
I was hoping Il Bacco ownership could talk to me about the fact that the Santos campaign owed the company at least $10,000 for at least a year and a half. Santos was a regular at the restaurant and, mysteriously, repeatedly paid exactly $199.99 for meals during the 2021-2022 campaign, just below the threshold where a receipt would be required by the FEC. Alas, Il Bacco owner Joe Oppedisano made his case for Fifth when I called him, deferring all questions to Tina Maria Oppedisano, his daughter and the restaurant’s director of operations. I finally contacted Tina Maria, who politely informed me that she simply couldn’t answer questions about Santos.
I tried to tell Santos about Il Bacco, but he quickly grew tired of my requests. “I’ll ask you: Do you have anything other than trying to distort and sensationalize an FEC campaign report? » he refuted. When I asked why he had just donated $400 to Rep. Lauren Boebert without confronting his former campaign manager, treasurer or favorite restaurant, he replied: “My personal funds have nothing to do with campaign funds. Period.”
Technically— an extremely important qualifier when talking about George Santos and his finances — he’s right. Campaign obligations and personal obligations are not the same thing. The problem for Santos is that even if he can forgive the personal loans he claims contributed to his campaign, that won’t solve the problem of individuals and businesses still owed money. To repay debts, money must materialize.
“I don’t understand how his answer makes sense,” Maguire told me. “If he’s not raising money and his campaign is in heavy debt, how is he going to pay off that debt through his campaign? There will be no more donors. He already has net negative donors. If he thinks his new campaign is going to help him, well, this one isn’t going to raise any money either.”
Maguire was careful to include a caveat in his analysis, namely that Donald Trump faces even more criminal charges than Santos, that he has his own very common cash flow problems and that he “just achieve record fundraising.”
The point being: money can materialize in American politics. But if Santos has any hope of relieving his previous campaign debts, he will need to raise money – and effectively. I’m skeptical of a real Santos revival, given his dark reputation, even among other global MAGA stars.
Still, “we have no idea the madness that awaits us,” Maguire said, speaking generally but also about Santos’ potential return to politics. “I’ve been doing this long enough to see people who in a normal world shouldn’t be able to raise a lot of money, go on to raise a lot of money.”
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