Former US congressman George Santos released from prison after Trump commutes his 7-year sentence
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George Santos spent 84 days in federal custody after reporting to prison in July. He was originally slated to be released in September 2031.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Michael Gold and Grace Ashford
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NEW YORK - Former representative George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn, was released from a federal prison on the night of Oct 17 after US President Donald Trump commuted his seven-year sentence
His lawyer Joseph Murray said that Santos was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey after 10pm on Oct 17. “A great injustice has been corrected,” Mr Murray said.
In a social media post, Mr Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats.
Calling the former member of Congress “somewhat of a rogue”, Mr Trump said he believed that Santos’ sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.
The President also suggested he had been moved by Santos’ accounts of being in prison, which he published in a regular column in a local Long Island newspaper.
“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Mr Trump wrote on social media. “Therefore, I just signed a commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, immediately. Good luck George, have a great life!”
Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He served fewer than three months of his 87-month sentence.
He will also no longer be required to pay more than US$370,000 (S$479,000) in court-ordered restitution to his victims, according to a copy of the commutation posted online by Mr Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney.
Santos’ commutation – which cuts his sentence short but does not wipe out his conviction – is part of a blitz of grants of political clemency that Mr Trump has doled out to his political allies or other figures who have been embraced by his right-wing supporters.
For months, it looked as if Santos, who rose to political prominence as an adherent to Mr Trump’s Maga (Make America Great Again) movement, would not be granted similar favour.
Even as the President gave sweeping pardons to those charged in connection with the 2021 attack on the Capitol
His commutation is the latest startling twist in an outlandish political odyssey that saw Santos move from a little-known conservative from Long Island to an infamous example of deceit and political fraud.
When he won his seat in 2022, Santos was heralded as a sign of a shift in Republican politics.
Young, Brazilian-American and openly gay, Santos seemed to signal an expansion of the party’s tent. His victory, in a Democratic-leaning district in Long Island, was celebrated for helping Republicans narrowly win control of the House.
But Santos’ congressional career was imperilled almost immediately after The New York Times and other media outlets reported that his ascent was built on a spectacular web of lies.
Santos claimed that he was descended from Holocaust refugees.
His mother, he said, had been in the World Trade Centre on Sept 11, 2001. He claimed to be a college volleyball star. And he boasted of extensive Wall Street experience that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.
None of that was true.
As more of Santos’ claims were exposed to be false or misleading
When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of multiple criminal schemes, ranging from fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits and lying on official forms to using his political campaign to enrich himself, swindling money from donors for personal expenses and using one donor’s credit card to steal US$11,000 for his personal use.
After a congressional ethics investigation found that Santos improperly spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans purchases, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to expel him from Congress in December 2023
He became the first person in history to be expelled from the House without being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.
Less than a year later, Santos, who had for more than a year denied all wrongdoing, pleaded guilty in his criminal case. He acknowledged his involvement in various other schemes, including lying to Congress, stealing money from campaign donors
At Santos’ sentencing, the acting US attorney for the Eastern District of New York at the time, Mr John J. Durham, described the conviction as a warning.
“To Mr Santos and other dishonest individuals of that ilk, who lie, steal identities and commit frauds to get elected to public office,” he said, “public officials who criminally abuse our electoral process will end up in a federal prison.”
A spokesperson for the Eastern District declined to comment on Oct 17.
Santos’ lawyer, Mr Murray, thanked Mr Trump in a statement in which he called him “the greatest president in US History” and said that he was “so proud to be an American”.
Santos’ commutation may cause a political headache for many of his Republican colleagues, especially on Long Island, where four congressional seats have been hotly contested battlegrounds in recent elections.
Representative Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican who was among those leading the charge for Santos’ expulsion, decried the commutation on the evening of Oct 17.
In a social media post, in which he did not address Mr Trump, Mr LaLota wrote that Santos “didn’t merely lie – he stole millions, defrauded an election, and his crimes (for which he pleaded guilty) warrant more than a three-month sentence”.
Santos remains more popular among a cadre of far-right Maga politicians outside New York, a few of whom publicly pushed for his release.
“THANK YOU President Trump for releasing George Santos!!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a brash Maga adherent, wrote in a social media post on the night of Oct 17.
Ms Greene was one of the first to call for a commutation, sending a letter to the Justice Department in August.
Around that time, Mr Trump, who had by that point issued numerous pardons to staunch supporters
But in an interview with Newsmax, Mr Trump said that he had not yet been asked.
“He lied like hell,” Mr Trump said at the time. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 per cent for Trump.”
In his post on Oct 17 announcing Santos’ commutation, Mr Trump once again cited their shared political views, this time as a justification for his release.
He suggested that Santos’ transgressions – which include crimes Santos acknowledged in court that he committed – paled in comparison to those of Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who has admitted that he misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War era.
“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction and Intelligence to Always Vote Republican!” Mr Trump wrote.
In a statement to the Times, Mr Blumenthal dismissed Mr Trump’s comments. “This rant is fabricated nonsense,” he said. “There’s no excuse for commuting George Santos’ sentence.”
But Mr Trump indicated that his position had not been swayed only by politics. He was moved in part by Santos’ reports that he had been held in solitary confinement.
Since entering custody in a federal prison in southern New Jersey, Santos, rarely one to shy away from the media spotlight, had been writing a regular column about his time in prison in The South Shore Press, a newspaper on Long Island.
In September, Santos wrote that he had been moved into the “Special Housing Unit” after his lawyer reported to prison officials that he had received a death threat against him.
Ms Greene has also said that she had received a letter from Santos saying that he was in solitary confinement.
In his accounts, Santos described isolating conditions, once likening being in solitary confinement to a “slow-motion form of torture”.
He said that prison officials told him that he would remain in special housing until a full investigation into the threat against him had been finished.
And Santos, who campaigned as a law-and-order candidate, repeatedly renewed his calls for clemency.
On Oct 13, the South Shore Press published a direct letter from Santos to Mr Trump. Describing his experience as “unlike anything most Americans could ever comprehend”, he appealed to the President on a personal basis.
“Mr President, I have nowhere else to turn,” Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”
Santos spent 84 days in federal custody.
According to the Bureau of Prisons website, he had been scheduled to be released in September 2031. NYTIMES
