Former Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday, avoiding a trial that was set for next month on criminal charges including wire fraud, false statements, aggravated identity theft and theft of public funds.
Santos pleaded guilty to two counts — wire fraud and aggravated identity theft — and faces a minimum of two years in prison, NBC News reported, with sentencing set for Feb. 7. As part of the plea agreement, Santos will pay restitution of $373,749.97 and forfeiture of $205,002.97.
By pleading guilty, the expelled congressman from New York avoids potentially more severe punishment had he been found guilty at trial. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has noted that federal trial sentences “are roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same crime on average and sometimes as much as eight or ten times higher,” and that “only 2-3% of federal convictions are the result of trial.”
While guilty pleas are common, Monday’s proceeding highlights the outlandish if brief political tenure of Santos, whose brazen lies managed to stand out even in Washington. My colleague Steve Benen pointed out, upon Santos’ congressional expulsion last year, that “Capitol Hill has featured plenty of scandal-plagued members in recent generations, but successful expulsion votes have only happened three times since the Civil War.” The expulsion followed a House ethics report that said Santos “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”
In his criminal case, Santos was accused of “stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the [Federal Election Commission] and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign,” Eastern District of New York U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in announcing a superseding indictment last year. “Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” Peace said, adding that Santos “allegedly led multiple additional fraudulent criminal schemes, lying to the American public in the process.”
Also on Monday, a federal judge dismissed the civil lawsuit Santos brought against talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, ABC and Disney for copyright infringement and related claims. The suit stemmed from Kimmel’s use of videos on his late-night show made by Santos on the Cameo website, where celebrities record personalized messages for money. Kimmel had a segment called “Will Santos Say It?” in which the host sent a number of what he called “ridiculous requests.”
“I didn’t say they were from me. I just wrote them and sent them to find out: Will Santos say it?” Kimmel explained to his audience ahead of the segment in December 2023.
Rejecting Santos’ claim, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York wrote that a reasonable observer would understand that Kimmel showed the videos “to comment on the willingness of Santos — a public figure who had recently been expelled from Congress for allegedly fraudulent activity including enriching himself through a fraudulent contribution scheme — to say absurd things for money.”
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