Trump Commutes Sentence of Former Congressman George Santos
Category: News & Politics
Via: hallux • last year • 4 commentsBy: Meridith McGraw Follow , Annie Linskey Follow - WSJ
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON—President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of Republican former Rep. George Santos, who reported to prison earlier this year after pleading guilty to federal charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social on Friday evening, saying that he signed a commutation that would release Santos from prison immediately. “George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” he wrote.
In 2024, Santos admitted that he participated in a scheme to submit false campaign-finance reports and artificially inflate the amount he raised. Santos was sentenced to just over seven years in prison, and began serving his sentence in July.
A Trump loyalist, Santos flipped a Democratic district in New York during the 2022 midterms. But his term was cut short when he was expelled from Congress in late 2023.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) led calls for Santos’ sentence commutation and wrote a letter to the Justice Department’s pardon attorney seeking his release. “THANK YOU President Trump for releasing George Santos!!” she wrote on social media following the president’s announcement.
Santos’ surprising election victory and biographical boasts drew scrutiny from the media and investigators, ultimately exposing much of his professional life and education as fiction.
When the House voted in December 2023 to expel Santos, it was only the sixth expulsion from the chamber and the first of a member who wasn’t a convicted felon or a member of the Confederacy. The move came after a bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation found “substantial evidence” of wrongdoing.
More than 100 House Republicans joined nearly all Democrats to vote for his formal removal, exceeding the two-thirds threshold required. Republican leadership at the time was vehemently opposed, in part because it meant one less seat for the party when they already had a narrow majority.
“The victims of his crimes still have not been made whole, including the people he stole from and the voters he defrauded. He has shown no remorse,” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R., N.Y.), one of the Republicans who served on the Ethics Committee during the Santos investigation. “The less than three months that he spent in prison is not justice,” he added in a statement.
Trump has been quicker to use his clemency powers than other recent presidents, who typically wait until the end of their terms to grant pardons that could be viewed by the public as controversial. Trump has pardoned Devon Archer, the former business partner of Hunter Biden; Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who had been convicted of fraud in federal court; and Todd and Julie Chrisley, former reality TV stars who were sentenced in 2022 for conspiracy to defraud banks.
Between his two nonconsecutive terms, the president used his clemency powers to benefit more than a dozen lawmakers, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They include former Republican officials, such as Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, former California Congressmen Randall Harold “Duke” Cunningham and Duncan Hunter, among others.
Most, but not all, have been Republicans. He pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, in February.
Trump sidelined the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which has played a key role in the clemency process in past administrations. Instead he has centralized pardon authority in the White House , The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.
Shortly after Santos won his 2022 bid for Congress, reports emerged that he lied about his family background, education, finances and work history. He claimed that he was a star player on his college volleyball team, founded a charity that rescued 2,500 dogs and cats and that his mother was at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. None of those things proved to be true.
He was repeatedly accused of misrepresenting his heritage—at times memorably so. He has said he’s Jewish, but later explained that he was Catholic but had embraced a Jewish identity while running for office.
He admitted that he never graduated from Baruch College, as he had earlier claimed. He also said that he never was an employee of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group , as he previously claimed on his campaign’s website.
His victims included elderly individuals suffering from cognitive impairment whose credit-card information he stole. None of them have been repaid, according to prosecutors.
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George Santos is to George Soros as Leticia James is to Donald Trump. O what to do, what to do … ?
gee, I wonder what kind of secrets george may be holding onto about trump ...
George is straight and smart, Trump is gay and goofy.
Trump is trying to lock down the delusional - conman - weirdo vote for 2028.
Oh wait, he already has that.