A federal judge in New York sentenced former Rep. George Santos to over seven years in prison Friday.
“Where is the remorse?” U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert asked Santos before sentencing him to 87 months behind bars and ordering him to almost $374,000 in restitution.
He was ordered to surrender by July 25.
Seybert handed down the sentence after Santos made a tearful plea for mercy and acknowledged he’d “betrayed the confidence” of his constituents.
The judge did not appear moved by Santos’ sobs. She said doesn’t like sending people to jail, but Santos was “fully deserving” of the lengthy sentence.
John J. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called the sentence “justice” after the hearing, and said Santos was “finally held accountable for the mountain of lies, theft, and fraud he perpetrated.”
Santos, 36, had pleaded guilty in August of last year to charges of committing wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Prosecutors had urged Seybert to throw the book at Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, to “reflect the seriousness of Santos’s unparalleled crimes.”
“From his creation of a wholly fictitious biography to his callous theft of money from elderly and impaired donors, Santos’s unrestrained greed and voracious appetite for fame enabled him to exploit the very system by which we select our representatives,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum, in which they asked Seybert to sentence him to 87 months in prison.
Prosecutors said that despite his guilty plea to the pair of felony fraud charges — and a teary expression of remorse to news cameras after the proceeding — Santos is “a pathological liar” who isn’t actually remorseful about his actions.
Prosecutors noted he’d recently launched a weekly podcast called “Pants on Fire with George Santos,” which they called “a perfect crystallization of his lack of genuine contrition and his tone-deaf efforts to continue turning lies into dollars.”
“It is abundantly clear that, without a substantial deterrent, Santos will continue to deceive and defraud for years to come. That is especially true given Santos’s craven efforts to leverage his lawbreaking as a springboard to celebrity and riches” while failing to pay restitution to the people he swindled, prosecutors said.
Santos’ attorneys had urged Seybert to sentence him to the minimum of two years. “His conduct, though involving dishonesty and abuse of trust, stemmed largely from a misguided desperation related to his political campaign, rather than inherent malice,” his attorneys contended in a court filing, noting that he had no criminal history.
“Moreover, the public nature of this case and Mr. Santos’s fall from a position of public trust serve as a stark warning to others who might contemplate similar offenses,” their filing said.
Asked this month on his podcast whether he planned to ask President Donald Trump for a pardon, Santos said, “You bet your sweet a– I would.”
In an interview with NY1 this week, Santos said he hadn’t reached out to Trump, but he added that he believes “the president is aware of my situation.”
“If he feels like I’m worthy of a commutation or of clemency or whatever the case is, he can make that decision,” he said.
Santos was elected to Congress in 2022, when he flipped a seat on Long Island from Democratic to Republican, helping cement a narrow GOP majority in the House.
Questions about his background emerged before he even started his term. The New York Times reported that he had lied about or embellished parts of his résumé and personal history. That led to other fabrications’ being revealed, including a claim that he was Jewish. He later said he was “Jew-ish.”
Those lies were later revealed to include campaign finance fraud. He was indicted in federal court on Long Island on a wide array of charges in 2023.
Prosecutors said he committed identity theft and swindled donors to enrich himself and live a luxurious lifestyle. Among those whose credit card information he used to make unauthorized donations were three “elderly persons suffering from some degree of cognitive impairment or decline,” prosecutors said.
He was also later hit with a scathing House Ethics Committee report that found he spent campaign funds on rent, luxury designer goods, personal trips to Las Vegas and the Hamptons, cosmetic treatments and a subscription to the adult content site OnlyFans.
The House voted to expel him in December 2023.
Santos claims to have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars since then, thanks in large part to personalized videos he was selling on the website Cameo.
In their sentencing memo, prosecutors suggested he might have been inflating those claims, as well.
“Santos represented to the Probation Department that he has earned approximately $400,000 during the first month of his career on Cameo and now receives $5,000 per month on average. Yet he represented in a financial statement to the government that his lifetime earnings from Cameo are only $358,256. Clearly, he is lying to someone,” the filing said.
They also said Santos told prosecutors that he’d been paid $200,000 by a documentary filmmaker but that he’d told the Probation Department the amount was $250,000.
Prosecutors noted that under the terms of his plea agreement, Santos had agreed to pay a $200,000 forfeiture and over $373,000 in restitution to his victims.
In a court filing this month, they said that “Santos has forfeited nothing and has not repaid any of his victims.”
In his interview with NY1, Santos said: “As of today, right now, I’m unable to pay anything. I don’t know if that’s going to change within the next 24 to 48 hours, prior to sentencing, because I am still working on trying to make some kind of meaningful attempt at restitution because it is my obligation.”
