Disgraced Republican former House Rep. George Santos, 37, was expelled from the House of Representatives in 2023 by a vote of 311 to 114. The vote included over 100 Republicans. Santos initially faced 23 felony fraud charges: He stole the personal identity and financial information of his campaign contributors and then repeatedly charged their credit cards without authorization. He then diverted the funds to his personal bank account, his own campaign and other political campaigns. He also targeted elderly donors. He defrauded his political donors by directing a consultant to claim, falsely, that their donations would be used for campaign ads. Instead Santos transferred their funds to his personal bank accounts and spent the money on personal luxury items like designer clothing. While he was employed in 2020-2021, Santos applied for and fraudulently collected more than $24,000 in unemployment benefits from the state of New York, falsely claiming he was unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Santos intentionally filed fake financial disclosure statements with the House of Representatives in which he vastly overstated his income and assets and failed to disclose his other sources of income.
After his lies and frauds were discovered, Santos plead guilty in 2024 and was sentenced to over seven years in prison. He served less than three months of his sentence when convicted felon/sexual abuser/President Trump commuted his sentence, springing Santos from prison, relieving him of probation and having to pay any fines or restitution to any of his victims.
With this commutation, Trump has now pardoned or commuted the sentences of most of the Republican congressmen who have been convicted of felonies in the 21st century. On his first day in office, Trump, who declared himself “the president of law and order,” also pardoned approximately 1,600 violent participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, many of whom also had other charges pending against them for crimes including rape, manslaughter, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, production of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking. Trump himself was close friends for 15 years (pdf) with serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for her crimes on behalf of Epstein. In recorded interviews, Epstein allegedly told the interviewer (pdf) that Trump liked to “f— his friends wives.”