In this free public bonus episode, stepping sideways off our usual beat, Jack plays host to extra special guest Marisa Kabas - writer, reporter, MSNBC columnist, and author of The Daily Santos at her journal The Handbasket - and chats with her about the object of their mutual obsession: one-man pile-up, dumpster-fire, and lie-factory, Rep. George Santos (NY-R) IF THAT EVEN IS HIS NAME!!! Content Warnings Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Marisa Kabas on Twitter: Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) / Twitter Marisa's journal The Handbasket, including The Daily Santos: The Handbasket | Marisa Kabas | Substack (Seriously good stuff: thorough and witty!)
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome to another episode of I Don't Speak German.
It's a very special episode.
We have no Daniel this time, I'm afraid.
Daniel's off having fun somewhere, I don't know.
He doesn't tell me anything.
But you'll have to make do with me.
But to compensate, I do have a very special guest.
For this episode, which is kind of a bonus episode.
It's a bit of a sideways one.
It's off our usual beat.
But it's something I really wanted to talk to somebody about, because it's on a subject that I'm absolutely fascinated, almost to the point of obsession by.
So I was very lucky indeed, and delighted to be able to get on the show.
Writer, reporter, MSNBC columnist, writer of the sub-stack The Handbasket, and writer of a long series of posts now which have been absolutely essential for this whole thing, which I'm about to introduce, called The Daily Santos, and that gives you a clue, because this episode is going to be about a gentleman called George Santos, supposedly.
Anyway, last week that was a joke, now it's a question.
But yeah, we're very lucky to have on the show Marissa Cabas.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so happy to be here.
You were on Twitter the other day asking people what they wanted in terms of Santos coverage.
And I noticed that several people asked you for a primer, you know, an intro.
And I understand that because the subject is now so complicated.
with this avalanche of revelations and stories and substories that have come out about Congressman George Santos.
And I thought maybe we could get started on this episode if you gave the listeners something like that, sort of an intro to George Santos and who he is and what's been going on with him.
Sure, I'd be happy to.
And as you said, I am also obsessed with this story, if that hasn't come through in my coverage.
And I'm actually coming to you live from Long Island, from George Sandoz's district right now.
I just got back to my parents to do some reporting.
So yeah, this story has a number of points it could start, but let's start with Election Day last year.
George Santos is elected as the Congressman to New York's 3rd Congressional District.
He is a Republican, which is unusual for this district.
It's pretty Democratic-leaning George Biden won it, and it's been represented by Democrats for a while now.
And everyone was really surprised when this guy, George Santos, won.
He had run two years previously and lost, and no one really knew that much about him.
And so the fact that he won this huge upset race, I think, prompted a lot of people to dig in further, which is a little bit opposite.
It should have been before the election.
But I think really no one was expecting him to win.
And so not only did he win, he won by a good seven or eight points.
And so journalists started digging in further to see what his deal was.
And this bombshell New York Times story comes out in mid-December.
That basically says his education background, or his supposed education background, his professional background, possibly his personal and religious background, that it's all a lie.
And that he is a complete fabrication as far as who he is as a person, as a candidate.
And over the last few weeks it's just a bomb that keeps going off and every day it seems like there's a new revelation about something that he lied about and yet he's a sitting member of Congress and it's this very Strange situation where there's really not a good mechanism to get rid of him at this point, especially because Republicans now hold a majority in Congress, albeit a very slim one.
And so that's where we are now.
The sheer volume of stories that have been coming out about him, and it's slowed down a little bit now, maybe the last couple of days, but for a while there it just seemed like every day there was another new story about this guy.
But the initial stories were kind of enough by themselves, weren't they?
Because he claimed to have gone to several colleges that it turned out he hadn't been to, they'd never heard of him.
And worked at financial institutions that he hadn't worked at, and all sorts of things like that.
Yeah, I mean, the clip of the news stories for a few weeks there, like you said, was just overwhelming.
And that's part of the reason why I started writing this Daily Santos feature on my newsletter, because someone sort of dared me to.
They were like, you should just write a newsletter about this guy every day.
And I said, you know what?
I have all this knowledge floating around my head.
I might as well share it with people.
And it's been enough to sustain a newsletter almost every day for the last two weeks.
And, you know, it has slowed a little bit, but I think it's just the calm before another storm, because there's no way this is the end.
No, there's the old adage, isn't there?
About every rat you see, there are ten other rats that you can't see.
And that's certainly been true so far.
As I say, the stories keep coming.
What's your favourite, would you say, of the Centaur stories?
Oh man, there's a lot of good ones, but I think the whole volleyball thing, for those of your listeners who aren't aware, he lied about being a college volleyball player.
And I think that one's my favorite because it has a lot of layers in that when we first learned about this revelation a couple weeks ago, we thought he just sort of randomly picked volleyball and Just claimed that he was a star in it.
But then it turns out he had a former boss who was a star volleyball player at the college that he had claimed to have attended, Baruch College in New York.
And so he, and the former boss was Brazilian, so he kind of was lifting the life story of this guy that he once worked for.
And then to top it all off, he claimed that he had a double knee replacement.
As a result of being such a prolific college volleyball player.
So I think, yeah, that's my favorite.
And you actually broke the story about George Santos apparently having performed in drag in Brazil, didn't you?
Yes, that's right.
I had seen a photo floating around and I wasn't sure if it was real.
You know, you can't believe everything you see on the internet.
I'm sure everyone knows that by now.
And so I reached out to the person who posted it.
I hope so.
Yeah, right?
And I reached out to the person who had supposedly posted it to verify the story.
And her name is Eula Rochard.
She is a well-known drag queen in Brazil, in a city right near Rio.
And she knew George as a young man who enjoyed dressing in drag.
And it was a story that I think some people were maybe hesitant to tell.
But I thought it was an important piece of context, given that he ran as this far-right Republican, and he's aligning himself with these people who have actively wished violence on people who perform drag.
Yeah, absolutely.
The point of the story, as you've been at pains to point out on your newsletter and on Twitter, is not that there's anything wrong with performing in drag.
Drag's great.
The problem is that he's, if it is indeed him in those photos, and it certainly looks like him, and I think he's now admitted to having admitted, that's not the word, but he's said that he did dress in drag at least once.
Very carefully worded statements, which make it sound like maybe it was a one-time thing.
Right.
But the point is the hypocrisy, isn't it?
Because he's very much on that.
I mean, the Republican Party as an organization is now firmly behind the scapegoat, drag, scapegoat, trans people thing.
But he's very much aligning himself with the right of the Republican Party, isn't he?
Absolutely.
All his allies are the most extreme of the extreme Republicans.
He's not trying to pass himself off as some sort of moderate Republican, if that even exists anymore.
But he's out there with Matt Gaetz, and he's out there with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and those are the only people in Congress right now who will touch him with a 10-foot pole.
And he's fine with that.
He is happy to have their endorsement.
As far as I can find, he has never once condemned the violence sent towards drag shows that's been going on for months now in this country.
And so he is complicit in the violence.
And just finding out that he himself had once been part of this community and actually looked really happy doing it, it's just very sad on a lot of levels.
Yeah, it is.
The whole thing has a sort of pull of sadness over it, doesn't it?
He is fascinating, and there is something tragic about him, even as he is quite despicable in many of the things he's done.
One of the stories that came out recently was almost parodic in how despicably he's alleged to have behaved, which was the story about Sapphire the dog.
Could you maybe outline that for the listeners?
Sure.
So a story was broken by Jacqueline Sweet at Patch.com about a homeless veteran who in 2016 had a dog, a rescue dog, and she badly needed surgery.
But being that he was homeless and didn't have much money, he couldn't afford the surgery.
And he was connected to this organization that could help pay for surgery.
And it turned out to be George Santos's Pet Rescue Organization.
And just some context there, when the first New York Times story came out, that was one of the things that was proven to be false.
The charity wasn't an actual registered official charity with the government, you know, as far as tax purposes.
It was sort of just this loose organization.
As far as we've seen, he would post GoFundMes sometimes to raise money.
And that's what he did in this scenario for Sapphire, the dog.
And What happened was they hit their goal $3,000 and it seemed like surgery would go ahead and then George kind of disappeared with the money and the dog was never able to get the surgery.
The owner was very frustrated.
He shared messages between him and George or I believe he was going by Anthony at the time And Anthony was very dismissive of his worries and he blew him off and the dog ended up dying.
And this veteran said that he was on the verge of suicide as a result of losing his, you know, only friend in the world.
Like you said, it's pretty much the most despicable thing you could possibly think of.
But it's almost, as I say, it's almost parodic.
It almost sounds made up, like for some sort of comedy thing, because it's not just an unhoused person.
It's a veteran, and it's a man who's got health problems himself, and his only friend is his dog, and the dog is sick.
It's almost like something somebody made up, as indeed is a lot of this.
It's almost like something out of a satire.
Yeah, I mean, it made me think of when Dr. Oz was running for Senate last year, and the story came out about him using dogs for scientific experiments.
And it was so over-the-top crazy that you're just like, really?
We've reached the point in this campaign where he killed dogs, and now we're at this point in the Santos story where it's kind of a similar thing, and it just...
People are very protective of their pets, and I get it, and so I just can't believe that this is where we're at.
It's just crazy to me.
Yeah, I know.
It seems to be a motif now with the modern Republican Party.
Dog murderers.
Which is not a good look, really, for voters.
Some of the things that he's... Santos, and it's interesting you raised the question of his name there.
When he was running the ostensible pet charity, his name apparently to everybody was Anthony DeVolder.
And indeed, his former roommate has come forward and said that he knew him as Anthony DeVolder, his mother's name was Fatima DeVolder.
Stuff like that.
I mean, there does seem actually now to be genuinely a question about what this man's name is, doesn't it?
Yes, as far as I know, and I've seen documentation of his identity, but I do need to verify it, but my understanding is that his name is George Anthony Devolder Santos.
So he has multiple names, which is, from my understanding, very common, especially in Brazil, that his family is Brazilian, to have both your mother's maiden name and your father's last name.
So he has these four names, but what's unusual about him is that he's used every possible combination of these names over the years, and that obviously looks really suspicious.
Yes, and there's another one floating around as well.
Apparently he also used the name Zabrowski at one point.
Yes, and also his drag room.
So there's quite a few names.
Indeed, yeah, yeah.
Some of the stories he's told, I mean, some of them seem pretty explicable on the surface, like claiming he's been to elite colleges and claiming to have been a volleyball star.
As insane and laughable as that is, you can understand why somebody would lie about that.
And claiming to have worked for financial institutions that apparently he hasn't worked for on things.
That's padding the resume.
He himself, when he first started to come clean about some of this, he called it embellishing his resume, didn't he?
Right.
Not lying.
Embellishing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, But some of it is bizarre.
Some of it's very tasteless.
Some of it's really... I mean, it's not even nice to say.
Like, some of it he's claimed that his... Well, he sort of implied that his mother died in the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, which is now... That's now definitely known to not be the case.
And he's claimed He's claimed Jewish heritage, or he's actually claimed to be Jewish.
On the campaign trail, he claimed to be Jewish, didn't he?
And that his family escaped the Holocaust, which, to tell a lie about that, it's, you know, I don't even like saying that.
Right.
It's interesting, because as a woman who is Jewish, and from his district, and descended from Holocaust survivors, so that's my actual story.
And to see someone appropriating that to run for office is just, it's just one of the most sickening things I've ever seen.
And it is interesting though, in this time of anti-Semitism, to see someone Act like pretending to be Jewish is advantageous.
That's been a really weird thing to watch, especially within the Republican Party and how they have aligned themselves with white supremacists and Nazis.
And now all of a sudden, they're like, well, if you want to win in this district where there are a lot of Jewish people, oh, this guy says he's Jewish.
We don't need to Actually, check that out at all.
Let's just take him at his word.
And he's created, you know, between the Judaism and his mom, pretending his mom survived 9-11, he is creating this avatar of what he thought the perfect candidate would look like from this district.
Because it has a lot of people who work in finance downtown who either knew people in 9-11 or work nearby.
And it's a lot of Jewish people.
And college education is very important.
Sports are important.
The way you dress is important.
The car you drive.
He lied about where he lived in the district to say he lived in one of the fanciest streets in the whole district.
And he wanted to be someone Desperately, that he just wasn't, and now it's all crashing down around him.
Yeah, and it's actually quite anti-Semitic, I think, to fashion an identity as a Jewish man, apparently the assumption that that's just going to get the Jewish people in the district to vote for you, because apparently that's Jewish people just vote for the Jewish person on the ballot.
That's just, you know, you don't need to actually appeal to them politically.
Well, the interesting thing is that his opponent was Jewish as well, the Democrat Robert Zimmerman.
And so part of me also felt like it was this cynical attempt to cancel out that part of Zimmerman, that he couldn't campaign on the fact that he was Jewish in a very Jewish district.
And Zimmerman was gay as well.
So you had two gay Jews running for the same office.
One was a Democrat and one was a Republican.
And so it just felt like this really cynical ploy to kind of undermine Zimmerman and, and appropriate a big part of his heritage and, and that just adds another layer to how gross it is.
Yeah, that really is very cynical and insulting.
And One of the interesting things is that a lot of this was, it appears to have been, or some of it anyway, appears to have been known before the election by a surprising number of people.
Apparently his own election team did a dive on his background, you know, in an apparent attempt to preempt the opponents doing the same thing, and found some of this.
And he was actually told by somebody working on his campaign not to run, wasn't he?
Yes, there were a number of people on his campaign that found out through a pretty routine background check that they ordered themselves, and a number of people quit from his campaign, and it sounds like by all accounts it was pretty chaotic there, but he He's so used to lying and this is just the life that he's created for himself that he was going to forge forward no matter what.
And he didn't really care if he didn't have a lot of allies, which I guess is how he's handling the situation right now.
He's sort of an island, but he doesn't seem that bothered by it, which blows my mind.
Yeah, it is a bit surprising, really, that the Democrats didn't find some of this out and use it against him in the election.
At least one would think that they would do their oppo research, as it's called.
Yeah, it's hard to understand.
His opponent and just Democrats in general claim that they did a healthy amount of research.
And there was a report issued by the Democratic Congressional Committee before the election about Santos and about him being a little shady and having some questionable things in his past.
But the fact that no one was able to package that all together and Give it to a reporter or present it in some way on social media that was compelling.
And that's a failure on their part because we're seeing now how hooked everyone is on this story and how appalled they are by who he is.
And to add on top of it, his opponent was a PR professional and public relations was his thing.
And he says he couldn't pitch this story and he couldn't get someone to pick it up.
And I Just find that impossible to believe.
Yeah, yes indeed.
So he's in Congress now, he's been sworn in.
He switched his support to Kevin McCarthy for the role of Speaker of the House, didn't he?
Once he got there and once it became apparent that McCarthy was going to need every vote that he could get to get the job.
Yep.
Yeah, he realized pretty quickly that if he wanted to stay and not ruffle any more feathers than he already had, he needed to get in line with McCarthy.
And so far that's serving him really well because McCarthy is mostly sticking by him despite everything.
Yeah, it really is, because the Republican majority in the House is slim, so the Republicans need every vote.
And, you know, this is not me being original.
Many people have remarked upon this.
McCarthy has really made himself hostage to that far right edge, that MAGA edge of the Republican Party that Santos is now insinuating himself with.
Yeah, absolutely.
He's at the mercy of the Matt Gaetzes of the world.
And even though I don't think Santos is actually part of that crew, and I don't think he has any actual power, I think in some ways Gates, Green, Boebert, etc.
They kind of take pleasure in aligning with this complete pariah who is just a complete thorn in Kevin McCarthy's side and has completely ruined what should be a really exciting time for him, which is getting elected Speaker of the House, and which is what he always wanted.
Yeah, but he's doubling down on supporting Santos, isn't he?
He's given him committee assignments.
He has, yeah.
He is serving on the Small Business Committee and the Committee on Science and Technology, which is, they're not the most prestigious ones, but at the same time they're still House Congressional Committees and they make important decisions and I think the other people on the committee probably resent having to serve with him.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think if I remember rightly, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, that's the committee that deals with issues around climate change.
So it's not ideal, is it?
I'd be surprised if really George Santos He hadn't had any political opinions in the normal sense, but certainly he ran on some quite far-right opinions.
If you look at his campaigning, at one point he actually does the, not in so many words, but he does the Nazis were socialists thing, because he brings up the Holocaust as an example of how his family escaped it, and he therefore knows the horrors of socialism.
Yeah, it's all very insulting.
And he thinks people are stupid.
And in some ways, I mean, the fact that he was able to win, it certainly says something about voters, and it says something about how engaged people were in this particular election.
And You know, going back now and talking to people who voted for him, it doesn't seem like people actually knew all that much about him.
He was just the Republican, and there was a popular Republican running for governor, that was Lou Zeldin, and he kind of helped Just lift all the Republicans across the sea, and that's why they performed so well.
And Santos got lucky in that regard, but at the same time, he won by a lot, and a lot of people seemed to buy what he was selling.
Yeah.
Part of his victory is to do with the redistricting, isn't it?
Because I think the boundaries of the district were redrawn and what was a pretty safe Democrat area became a purple area.
It became more up for grabs.
So there's that.
But there's also, I mean, you have to give it to him.
He's quite He's quite slick, you know.
He's quite a good speaker.
He presents himself quite well.
Although he does have... I mean, maybe it's just me reading this into him based on what we found out, but he does have a slyness about him.
But even so, he's not bad at doing the whole candidate thing.
Yeah, I think he was better as a candidate than he is now as an actual congressman.
I think on the campaign trail, you're just constantly, you know, moving forward.
There's not as much attention on you, most races.
And you're mostly just dealing with voters and small turnout events.
And now that he's under this intense scrutiny, I, you know, I'm not at all impressed by his answers to things and his ability to deflect is really amateurish.
So I don't think he was ready for this.
No, that's true.
When he's actually pressed about his lies, he doesn't do terribly well.
In fact, he tends to make it worse.
For instance, with the whole, oh, I never said I was Jewish.
I found out that we had Jewish heritage, so I said I was Jew-ish, which frankly made it even worse, I think.
So much worse.
I mean, I said at the time, no one in this district has ever said that.
That's not a thing that people say.
I had A number of friends who were not Jewish growing up and I would say maybe they were like honorary Jews or they knew a lot about Judaism by virtue of living here, but I had never once heard any of them refer to themselves as Jewish, which is not a thing.
Yeah, no, and again, it's insulting.
Oh God, and I've just remembered one of the other things he said was that he had friends and employees that died in the Pulse nightclub shooting as well, which is another one of those cringy, tasteless lies that you don't even like saying, isn't it?
Yeah, it's really, it's just so sick.
And he had worked for a Florida-based company, so he claimed that some of the employees were present at the Pulse nightclub shooting.
He claimed multiple employees were killed that night.
Um, and it's, I saw someone who was an actual survivor of the shooting reacting to it at the time, and he was just beside himself.
He's like, how dare you use the tragedy that took my friends from me and almost took my life to, um, just score cheap political points?
I mean, what is, what is that even supposed to say about you?
I don't even understand why you would say that, like what he thought he was going to achieve with that.
Yeah, it's inexplicable, isn't it?
That's one of the things that makes me think that this is probably, I mean, probably shouldn't speculate about the psychology of somebody that I've never met, but it's almost impossible not to following this chap.
It's one of the things that makes me suspect that he might be an actual pathological liar, one of those people that just does it because they don't seem to be able to help themselves.
He strikes me as like one of those, they come up every now and again, don't they?
One of these people that just Insinuates themselves into some group of people or some society or social group based on complete fabulous lies like the guy that went around New York society pretending to be Sidney Poitier's son and the guy that claimed to be one of the Rockefellers and things like this.
And yeah, it's pretty terrifying.
Yeah, it actually just made me think of this other story that didn't get nearly as much attention.
But there was a writer for the TV show Grey's Anatomy, which is about medical, it's a medical drama.
And it was found out that she was also a serial liar and fabulous.
And she had, she had gotten to the point where she lied about having cancer and illnesses.
And it was it was, you know, this web that hurt a lot of people.
But What I thought of is that she had lied about her friend being killed in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh a few years ago.
And that she had gone there to help clean up the carnage.
And it was like, it's a very similar sort of lie to the Pulse shooting.
And it's just, I think you're right.
There's people who just lie and lie and lie, and they don't even think anything of it.
It's just another lie.
What I was trying to get at there was that people like that will turn their ability to lie and con people to their advantage, but I think they're not fundamentally doing it for the money or the material advantage.
They're doing it because it's just who they are, and I definitely get that vibe from George.
Well, what I've heard from a lot of people is that he just always wanted to be famous.
He just had this desire to be famous since he was young.
And so he was willing to hitch his wagon to anyone who might be able to help him reach that point of power and influence.
Well, he certainly achieved that.
I mean, albeit most of his appearances on TV now are him being chased down corridors in Congress by hordes of reporters asking him desperate questions.
But he's on TV!
He's on TV, exactly.
And I think probably there's a part of him that enjoys the attention to even that, actually.
Oh, yeah.
So there's all that, but I think the thing that will... Well, he's showing no signs of resigning, and it doesn't seem that McCarthy or anybody else in the Republican Party is interested in trying to subject him to any consequences.
Obviously, it's not to their interest to do so, so they're not interested in doing so.
So What will bring him down, if indeed anything does, if indeed the Third New York Congressional District isn't stuck with him for two years, what will bring him down is probably the money, don't you think?
Because there's a lot of very weird stuff going on in his finances.
Yes, and that's where the real story is, you know, the stuff about volleyball and drag, it's all interesting and adds to the lore of this very wild character, but the money is where he's going to get into legal issues, and so I've been trying to look into that for weeks, and it's
It's exposed a lot about how opaque the campaign finance system is, and it shows that there's a lot of creative accounting that you can do to get away with it.
But someone that I've been keeping a close eye on is his campaign treasurer.
She's a woman named Nancy Marks, and she's been getting more attention.
She's been this sort of She's been a player in the local scene with Republicans for many years, for decades, but sort of was not acknowledged publicly ever.
And she is in charge of the finances for so many campaigns, so many political action committees, and a number of LLCs.
And she appears to be moving money around between her campaigns, her PACs, and her LLCs.
And Santos has been involved in that, and it's only a matter of time before that is finally unraveled.
Yeah, indeed.
But there does seem to be some very mysterious, shady stuff going on with him, doesn't it?
For instance, the thing in his campaign finance accounts about consistently spending $199.99, which is one cent below the threshold where you have to explain what the money's been spent on.
Yes, yes, particularly at one Italian restaurant.
He did, he spent a lot of $199.99 at this one restaurant in the district.
And there's some, there's potentially some financial stuff tied up with the owners of that restaurant.
The brother of the owner of the restaurant was arrested for trying to smuggle humans.
Out of the country.
So it's, I mean, it's like where there's smoke, there's fire.
I think it's like where there's fire, there's fire at this point.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's about $50,000 he spent somehow at this restaurant, isn't it?
Yeah.
And maybe I'm being unfair and racist or something, but, you know, I've seen too many movies.
It's hard not to start thinking, you know, an Italian restaurant in New York, large amounts of money.
Hmm.
Oh, well, I mean, it's not, you know, the funny thing is, I was very familiar with this restaurant before this whole situation, because it was known as a place that was sort of like a mafia or mafia adjacent hangout.
I mean, they, One reporter at sleep went to the actual restaurant and dined there to get the full George Santos experience.
And he talked about having his car valet parked.
And I knew from people who've been there that that's what you do.
You get your car valet because You know, they keep an eye on it and there's all these guys with really nice cars and it's a whole kind of scene.
So the fact that he picked this restaurant was actually very funny to me.
Yeah, yeah.
I was suddenly getting Goodfellas backflash.
Your instinct wasn't wrong.
Yeah, it's depressing when stereotypes turn out to probably be true, isn't it?
I don't like that.
But yeah, there's even more to it because There really is a question of where a big lump of money just appears in his campaign, and there's a real question about where it came from.
I still think we don't know who paid off Brett Kavanaugh's debts.
I wonder if we're ever going to know where this $700,000 came from that Santos claims he paid into his campaign from his own business.
His own business, which apparently has never had any clients.
Right.
We have no idea what his business, the Devolder Organization, ever did.
All we know is that it's registered in Florida and it suddenly had $700,000 to give to George Santos.
And, you know, there's speculation that it's linked to the cousin of a Russian oligarch.
There's been stories about this, Viktor Vekselberg.
And it's Yeah, like I said before, there's definitely a lot of creative accounting that went on, and we may not know.
We may not ever know where it came from.
So, that's pretty much where things stand at the moment.
I dare say that 14 news stories about George Santos have broken while we've been talking, but as of this conversation, that's a fair summary of where we stand with the guy.
He's being called upon by a lot of people in his district to stand down, isn't he?
He is.
He is wildly unpopular here, and I think everyone's just completely embarrassed.
A bunch of local Republicans held a press conference two weeks ago calling on him to resign.
He doesn't have a single ally left in the district, and so I don't know what his long game is, but I think everyone here is desperate for him to finally just put them out of their misery.
Yeah, he is under multiple investigations, including, of course, we didn't mention this, including in Brazil, where he is accused of, what is it?
Is it Czech kiting?
Yeah, yeah.
Check fraud.
His mother was a home health aide for an elderly man and Santos, as a younger man, he took these checks and forged them and used them to pay for clothing, which is so interesting because clothing and appearance and kind of costuming is such a big part of his story now.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so, I mean, just on the level of your gut feeling, what do you think is going to happen next for George Santos and the rest of us that are involuntarily tied up in his life story?
I think if I knew what was next for George Santos, I'd be a very wealthy woman.
I don't know!
Every twist and turn is just as shocking as the one before.
I think that the most important thing is to not I mean, part of the reason why I started doing the newsletter and becoming really obsessed with it is because I didn't want this behavior to be normalized.
I didn't want it to just be like, oh, there goes George, the lying congressman with no repercussions.
We need to stay on this guy because as funny as it is and as much ridiculous content as it's created, It's very serious and there are more than 700,000 people in this district who are currently more or less without an honorable representative and that is a serious miscarriage of justice.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I'm obsessed as well.
And as you will have been able to hear from listening to this, everybody, I'm prone to laughing at the guy and the story because some of it is outrageous and ridiculous.
I first became aware of it from Glenn Greenwald, I'm promoting George Santos on Twitter.
And since then, really, I've been obsessed and very amused.
But as you say, it is ultimately a very serious story, and it can't be normalized.
It seems like we've been saying this about various people and things happening in politics over the last few years.
This is not normal, and this cannot be allowed to become normal.
No, no, it can't.
And I think it's just tough because as we're focusing so much on this one guy, there are a million other guys and gals in Congress who are trying to subvert democracy.
And so it's just like playing a game of fascist whack-a-mole at all times.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
This is the problem, isn't it?
You know, people like Santos, they and to a lesser extent, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she's almost as grotesque in her own way.
They're kind of they do need attention, but they're kind of the the sticky out bit that we can all see.
And it does.
The potential is for us to lose track of of what's going on below them.
Exactly.
Yeah, well, that's fantastic.
Thank you ever so much for that summary of Representative George Santos, possibly, George Santos.
Where can people find you on the internet, Marissa?
I can be found at Marissa Cabas on Twitter, that's M-A-R-I-S-S-A-K-A-B-A-S, and my newsletter is thehandbasket.substack.com, and you can also find my columns on MSNBC.com.
Okay.
And you know where to find all my stuff, listeners, and thanks for listening once again.
And Daniel and I will be back together for another episode very soon.
So, cheers.
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