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businessinsider.com
Video shows George Santos calling himself Anthony Devolder at a 2019 event, raising questions about his name
Alia Shoaib
A recently surfaced video clip from 2019 shows Rep. George Santos introducing himself as Anthony Devolder, prompting questions about why the congressman has previously gone by different names.
In the video posted by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, Santos addresses a panel during an event in New York City featuring conservative commentators who are part of the LGBTQ community.
"My name is Anthony Devolder. I'm a New York City resident. I've recently founded a group called United for Trump, so if you guys want to follow, that would be awesome," Santos says.
—PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) January 13, 2023
In the video, Santos addresses Brandon Straka, a self-described former liberal who launched the Walk Away campaign to encourage Democrats to leave the party and calls him an "idol to all of us."
He then directs a question to Straka and fellow panelist transgender YouTuber Blaire White about educating transgender people away from "the narrative that the media and the Democrats put forward."
The New York congressman has admitted to lying about his college and work history and has previously listed his full name as George Anthony Devolder Santos.
However, his full legal name cannot be confirmed as his birth certificate has not been made public, and it is not clear why he has gone by multiple variations of that name.
Other resurfaced clips and social media posts reveal that Santos had gone by the names Anthony Devolder and George Devolder until as recently as 2020.
He ran for Congress in New York for the first time in 2020 under the name George Santos before losing to the Democratic incumbent Thomas Suozzi.
In a video taken during his 2020 campaign, also shared by Patriot Takes, a speaker introducing him expresses confusion about why he changed his name from Anthony Devolder to George Santos.
CNN also uncovered social media posts from 2020 in which Santos goes by the name George Devolder.*
Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu took to Twitter to address Speaker Kevin McCarthy and raise concerns about Santos' many names.
—Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 14, 2023
Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost also tweeted weighed in on the controversy and questioned, "which is the fake name."
—Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) January 13, 2023
Santos has been accused of fabricating significant elements of his resume and numerous facts about his life and family history.
In an interview with Rep. Matt Gaetz on Thursday, the congressman claimed that he has lived "an honest life" and has "never been accused of any bad doing."
Santos has also faced calls to resign from other Republicans.
Ah they all go to the same orgies Ford. Politics puts pro wrestling to shame. But enjoy the dirt talking.
forward.com
George Santos' latest doozy: Records show his mom wasn't in NYC on 9/11
Newly obtained documents from the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services show that U.S. Rep. George Santos’ mother, Fatima A.C.H. Devolder, was not in the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on 9/11, as he has claimed.
The Forward reviewed more than 90 pages of Santos’ mother’s immigration paperwork, from 1988 to 2012. The records confirm previous news reports that the congressman lied about key aspects of his family history, and reveal new details about his story. The idea that his mother survived the 9/11 attacks is one of several instances in which Santos has falsely claimed connections to tragic events.
Santos’ troubles began in December, when The New York Times revealed that the newly elected congressman fabricated large swaths of his resume. Shortly after, the Forward broke the story that those lies included the prominent claim on his campaign website that his grandparents had fled anti-Jewish persecution in Belgium and then Ukraine before World War II. In fact, his grandparents were born in Brazil in 1927 and 1918.
Since then, stories of deceit and criminality have become daily media fodder. Allegations include campaign finance law violations to stealing a former roommate’s scarf. Prosecutors in Queens and Long Island are investigating whether any of the lies violated the law, and local Republicans are among those who have called for his immediate resignation. But House Republican leaders have resisted those calls, and on Tuesday announced he would serve on two House committees: Small Business and Science, Space and Technology.
While Santos has admitted to embellishing his resume and not being Jewish, he still maintains many outright falsehoods, including that his mother was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and that the “ash cloud” caused her death 15 years later, in 2016.
“George’s mother was in her office in the South Tower on September 11, 2001, when the horrific events of that day unfolded,” his campaign website states. “She survived the tragic events on September 11th, but she passed away a few years later when she lost her battle to cancer.” Previously, the site’s “About George” section had also described George’s mother, Fatima A.C.H. Devolder, as a financial executive.
https://forward.com/wp-content/uploa...1/image-12.jpg
An extract from Fatima A.C.H. Devolder’s paperwork. Courtesy of U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services
But immigration records dating back to the 1980s paint a different picture. Devolder came to the United States in 1985 at the age of 21, they show. Two decades later, she wrote on a form that she spoke “little English.”
The records show that she wasn’t a bean counter, but a bean picker. As a young woman with a ninth grade education, she came to the United States on a Seasonal Agricultural Workers visa and worked on a South Florida bean and squash farm for $2.50 an hour. Later, she moved to New York and worked as a home aide and housekeeper.
The documents were released to a researcher named Alex Calzareth who requested them under the Freedom of Information Act, and shared with the Forward. They also place Devolder in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of Niterói on Sept. 11, 2001.
Three months before the attacks, Devolder filed a request with the U.S. Consulate in Rio for a replacement green card, saying hers had been stolen after she returned to Brazil in June 1999. The situation was apparently not resolved, and another application was filed in early 2003. At that point, she stated that she had not been in the United States since 1999.
The 2003 application, filled out by hand by Devolder, lists her father, Paulo Devolder Horta, as having been born in Rio in 1918, and her mother, Rosalina Horta Devolder, as having been born in Rio in 1927. This echoes genealogical records unearthed by the Forward in December, and directly contradicts what Santos himself continues to claim — that his grandparents fled the Nazis for Brazil in 1940.
The files also show that Santo is not lying about some aspects of his background. He speaks often of having grown up in a basement apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and a medical form dated November, 1988, indeed lists Devolder’s address as a Jackson Heights basement on 85th Street, down the block from the elevated subway tracks. Santos had been born four months before.
But Devolder’s residency application suggests she soon moved to a second-floor apartment in another Queens neighborhood, Rego Park. Over the next 14 years, she would claim several modest addresses in western Queens, belying the rags-to-riches story Santos sold to voters.
The only luxurious address that appears is an apartment in the Beresford, the iconic co-op overlooking Central Park West. It’s where Devolder worked as a housekeeper.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Andrew Silverstein is a New York-based freelance writer and the co-founder of Streetwise New York Tours.
newrepublic.com
George Santos, Member of Anti-Trans Party, Wore Drag Under the Name Kitara in Brazil
Prem Thakker
27–34 minutes
George Santos has positioned himself as a proud, unabashed conservative—on social issues and all. He has expressed support for Florida’s regressive “Don’t Say Gay” law that bars teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in school. Accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom our kids,” Santos peddled right-wing talking points that equate discussing sexual orientation or gender identity with children as tantamount to sexual abuse. Such talking points often go further, holding that drag shows, or even LGBTQ people generally, groom and abuse children.
It now appears Santos has participated in drag himself.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/k0Ku54f6Z0w/hq2.jpg
A 2008 photo from Brazil depicts Santos, known at the time as Anthony, in a drag costume under the moniker Kitara Ravache.
NEW: I just spoke by phone with Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who was friends with George Santos when he lived near Rio. She said everyone knew him as Anthony (*never* George), or by his drag name, Kitara, and confirms this photo is from a 2008 drag show at Icaraí Beach. pic.twitter.com/1MeeDR1O2O
— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) January 18, 2023
The photo comes from Santos’ old friend Eula Rochard, a Brazilian drag queen who spoke with journalist Marisa Kabas. According to their conversation, Rochard met Santos when he was a teenager, and they bonded over both being gay and enjoying drag. After Rochard had seen a news story about Santos, Rochard shared the photo to her social media to prove the old connection.
“Me with the American Republican deputy at the Niterói parade as I had said he wouldn’t leave my house there’s the proof for those who called me a liar,” Rochard wrote on Instagram (in rough translation from Portuguese).
To be clear, it’s great that Santos enjoyed drag, and made a friend while doing it. And in any abstract sense, it doesn’t matter! What matters is that Santos has positioned himself among a political movement incredibly antagonistic towards drag queens and others who enjoy drag, one that stokes transphobia and hate towards all LGTBQ people. Santos will try to have it both ways—and Republicans who have decried drag as a moral crisis will too: Either drag truly is an existential threat to our children (wrong) and Santos should be removed from Congress (correct), or drag is absolutely fine (correct) and Santos should not be removed from Congress (wrong).
This fucking scumbag stole $3K from a vet trying to raise money to save his dog, he also stole a fucking scarf from his roommate he wore at a "stop the steal" rally....
He needs to have his little balls kicked up to his throat!
Things were better back when Santos was president in the 1990s... :)
George Santos Planned ‘Engagement Party’ With Man While Married to Woman
Two years into his mysterious marriage to a woman—and five years before they divorced—George
Santos invited friends to celebrate his engagement to a man, The Daily Beast has learned.
“Good evening everyone! As you all may already know Pedro and I have decided to join our toothbrushes!
Lol and a very few friends have been selected to share this special moment with us!” Santos wrote in
a 2014 Facebook “engagement dinner” invitation.
The invitation was shared with The Daily Beast by Santos’ old roommate, Greg Morey-Parker, and the
boyfriend, Pedro Vilarva, confirmed that the future congressman planned the celebration.
At the time, Santos—who ran for Congress in New York as an “openly gay” Republican—was already
married to a Brazilian woman, according to public records. The New York City Marriage Index database
shows the couple acquired a marriage license in December 2012, and as The Daily Beast reported
last month, they divorced in 2019.
Full story at:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/george...-vieira-santos
talkingpointsmemo.com
CEO Of Santos-Linked Ponzi Scheme Claimed To Seek Funding In Belarus, Russia
Josh Kovensky
Rep. George Santos (R-NY) got funding from the cousin of a Russian oligarch, worked for a firm whose founder said he sought capital investments in Belarus and reportedly connected said firm with said cousin.
What’s not to like?
Over the month since The New York Times flagged George Santos as a serial fabulist, TPM has taken an intensive look at the swirling mess around Santos, his lies, his past business activities and his campaign filings. Other publications have too.
Questions continue to persist over Santos’ sudden increase in wealth, which saw him go from living with roommates and being unable to make rent to having hundreds of thousands of dollars to pour into his own campaign in 2022.
As we’ve sought answers, we’ve repeatedly stumbled across bizarre and unexplained connections to the former Soviet Union in Santos’ past, many relating to his involvement with an investment firm called Harbor City Capital, which the SEC later alleged was a “classic Ponzi scheme.”
The potential ties to Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan and at least one oligarch from the region lack any real coherence. Instead, they fuel further questions about how Santos made his money, and with whom he went into business before he became a political entrepreneur.
“The Office of Congressman George Santos R-NY03 does not comment on campaign or personal matters,” a spokesperson said by email.
Here’s a few episodes about which we have questions.
Harbor City Fundraising
Harbor City Capital founder JP Maroney touted a trip to both Russia and Belarus in social media posts from 2015, announcing that he would travel to St. Petersburg and Minsk, among other locales, for a “European Capital raising tour.” Per court documents, Harbor City was a young company, founded only the previous year.
“I’ll be in Europe for the first two weeks in November raising capital. We’ve already got meetings set up with over 50 investors over there,” Maroney said in one 2015 video posted on Facebook.
It’s not clear whether Maroney succeeded in raising any money for Harbor City on the trip, which, he said, also included stops in Paris, Brussels, Vienna and Berlin.
Harbor City has played an outsized role in questions about Santos’ claims of wealth, and about the myths that he constructed around his supposed past as a master of high finance. Santos started working for the firm in 2020, the same year he first ran for Congress, and bragged about being the “head guy” at Harbor City “for New York City.” The SEC described Harbor City as a “classic Ponzi scheme” in an April 2021 complaint against the firm and Maroney.
In a November 2015 email exchange included in the SEC’s lawsuit and first reported by the Daily Beast, Maroney allegedly dodged questions from a jilted investor by saying that he was traveling in Belarus, a former Soviet republic that’s come to exist as an appendage to the Russian state.
Maroney didn’t return questions from TPM about what the Eastern European fundraising tour yielded, or why he was seeking investments from outside the United States. Maroney’s wife posted pictures on Facebook of her and JP on a trip that same year, including photos in Minsk, Vienna, Paris and Berlin.
In an interview with TPM, Scott Rauland, acting U.S. ambassador to Belarus from 2014 to 2016, expressed bewilderment about why Harbor City would be fundraising in Belarus. During Maroney’s 2015 trip, Belarus was undergoing a thaw in its relations with the West, Rauland said, before returning to the Russian fold after 2020.
“He’s dependent entirely on Russia for his survival,” Rauland said of Belarus’ leader. “So that sets the stage for screwy financial things to happen.”
It’s not clear what Maroney’s trip ultimately yielded for Harbor City, if anything.
“It’s not a bad place to go fishing if you’re looking to get oligarch money,” Rauland added.
Enter Mr. Intrater
The reports of Harbor City’s purported fundraising attempt in the former Soviet Union come as many ask: How did Santos go from being unable to make rent payments to having hundreds of thousands of dollars to pour into his 2022 campaign? How was Santos able to form relationships with the wealthy donors who backed his campaign?
One such wealthy donor was Andrew Intrater, the American financier cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Intrater and his wife contributed a combined $23,600 to Santos’ 2020 and 2022 congressional campaigns, and donated an additional $31,100 to GADS PAC — Santos’ leadership committee — and Devolder Santos Nassau Victory. Intrater also contributed $80,000 to Rise NY PAC, a New York-registered committee operated by Santos’ sister.
It’s not clear how Intrater and Santos first met. A GOP operative who worked on Santos’ campaign told TPM that the two had a “preexisting relationship,” but its origins remain unclear.
However, Intrater himself appears to have put money into Harbor City, and, in 2020, Santos claimed to Harbor City colleagues that Intrater’s investment firm was a “client” of his, the Washington Post reported Monday.
According to a declaration attached to the SEC’s complaint, another company linked to Intrater deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars in Harbor City. The declaration includes this helpful chart:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Qj...vLucNJf02FPNOg
The biggest single deposit listed is $625,00 from FEA Innovations,a company registered to Intrater, the Post first reported. Public corporate filings show that FEA Innovations, a Mississippi-registered firm, has Intrater as its sole officer.
It’s not clear where the $625,000 deposit from the Intrater firm to Harbor City went.
Other investors listed as having provided deposits have filed lawsuits or other grievances against Harbor City; Intrater did not return a request for comment regarding whether he planned on seeking restitution.
Mother Jones reported on Wednesday that an unidentified person close to Intrater claimed that Santos swindled the fund manager out of the deposit, promising a “return on his investment.” After this article was published, the New York Times reported that Intrater told the SEC in May 2022 that Santos’ false representations about Harbor City had a hand in influencing him to invest both in the business and in Santos’ political career. Intrater also told the Times that, having changed his opinion of Santos since his many lies emerged, he has reached out to the DOJ with information on the embattled congressman.
Per the SEC, Harbor City leadership spent investor funds on luxury expenses, fancy cars for the company’s leadership and other benefits.
Ties to Russian Oligarch
Intrater’s cousin Vekselberg has been a source of fascination and speculation since the Trump-Russia scandal, largely because of the relationship between Intrater and Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Intrater’s firm, Columbus Nova, paid Cohen more than $500,000, and Intrater and Vekselberg also reportedly met with Cohen at Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
A person who did months of due diligence on Columbus Nova in the mid-2000s related to an investment the firm was pursuing told TPM that, at least back then, Vekselberg was not just a primary investor in the fund: he was its sole investor.
“The way it was presented to me was that Vekselberg was a control freak — he was portrayed as Dr. Evil without the being evil part,” the person said. “He controlled everything, all of his money. I can’t see all of a sudden Columbus Nova saying ‘let’s get a lot of outside investors’ because it wouldn’t be of interest to him.”
It’s not clear how the makeup of funds at Columbus Nova may have changed over the years. Columbus Nova told the Washington Post in 2018 that Renova Group, Vekselberg’s firm, was its largest client. Renova Group was sanctioned by the U.S. government that year, part of an effort to punish those close to Putin for meddling in the 2016 election.
In 2017, before the Trump-Russia scandal, Renova described Columbus Nova as one of its companies, though the firm now denies that. Columbus Nova did not respond to TPM’s questions about how much of its fund comes from Vekselberg. Renova did not return TPM’s request for comment.
The person said that in the mid-2000s they did four months of investigating to ensure that Columbus Nova was on the up and up. At the time, the person said, the firm was synonymous with Vekselberg. The person found no evidence of suspicious activity, but plenty of near-cinematic displays of the oligarch’s wealth.
The person described Veskselberg’s well-known trove of Fabergé eggs, one of which this person said he would give Vladimir Putin every year for his birthday, gold mines, oil money, an office in midtown Manhattan like something out of a “James Bond set” replete with slick glass and metal, modelesque assistants and Don Perignon-slugging financiers.
The person remembered thinking, “Well okay, he’s got a lot of glue,” adding that Vekselberg’s people were “stressing his connection to Putin.”
Vekselberg, who was born in what’s now Western Ukraine but who moved to Moscow for university and stayed there, has faced repeated allegations of work for the Russian government over the years, including a 2010 claim from the FBI that a group he sponsored was attempting to steal U.S. technology for use in Russia. The Treasury Department sanctioned Vekselberg in April 2018, and U.S. prosecutors seized a yacht belonging to him in April 2022.
Lots of Smoke
A close read of filings related to the SEC’s Harbor City case and interviews with former Santos campaign staffers turn up other mystifying episodes.
The SEC, for example, also listed in its declaration supporting civil charges against Harbor City an entry stating that the company used $426,000 of the money deposited for “payments to one individual wired to the National Bank for Foreign Economic Activity of the Republic of Uzbekistan.”
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/7j...4vu0XsxZK146FQ
Among all of these fresh questions, the animating mystery remains unsolved: where did Santos get the money to run for Congress?
One former Santos campaign staffer replied cryptically when posed this question.
“I just know that there are people, international people, who have come through at some events,” the person told TPM. “There have been some connections made.”
Feds File Criminal Charges Against George Santos: Report
Rachel Olding
Tue, May 9, 2023 at 5:39 PM EDT
In this article:
https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/imag...OMMITTEES.jpeg
George Santos
Politician and member of the U.S. Congress representing New York's 3rd district
Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against serial fabulist Rep. George Santos (R-NY), according to CNN.
Three sources familiar with the matter told the network that Santos is likely to appear in federal court in New York on Wednesday for charges that remained under seal on Tuesday.
The news appeared to catch Santos by surprise. “That’s news to me,” he said when reached by phone Thursday evening by Associated Press reporter Farnoush Amiri. “You’re the first to call me about this.”
While the specific charges weren’t immediately known, Santos has been under investigation by a slew of agencies, from local district attorney’s offices to the Department of Justice to the Federal Election Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Federal regulators have also reportedly been looking into Santos’ assets and more than half a million dollars in loans he supposedly distributed to his 2022 campaign for New York’s third congressional district.
Santos reportedly had no assets and was making $55,000 a year at an investment firm prior to his first congressional run in 2020, according to financial disclosures. But just two years later, he claimed assets between $3.5 million and $11.5 million, and he claimed to have loaned his campaign $700,000 from his company, the Devolder Organization, before dissolving the firm in Sept. 2022.
The Daily Beast reported in January that Santos’ political operation later filed a flurry of amended campaign finance reports, telling the feds, among other things, that a $500,000 loan may not have, in fact, come from his personal funds. And later that month, the FEC notified the treasurer for the Santos campaign that they “may have failed to include the true, correct, or complete treasurer information” when they erroneously named a new treasurer in campaign filings.
Separately, Santos has been accused of lying about everything from his dog charity to his alleged Jewish ancestry to his mother’s 9/11 death and his claim of being a former high-flying banker and college volleyball champ.
The DAILY BEAST