George Santos recounts his brutal 41-day solitary confinement at FCI Farriton—black mold, expired food, and psychological torment—while exposing Warden Lynn Kelly’s incompetence, from $7K office TVs to listeria outbreaks. His sudden release after Trump’s commutation left him stunned, but he credits divine intervention for escaping a system where mental health care is nonexistent and inmates face dehumanization. Now free, Santos warns of NYC’s decline under Adams and criticizes Netanyahu’s alleged betrayal of U.S. interests, framing his ordeal as a wake-up call to prioritize faith over power—before Carlson pivots to 9/11 conspiracy theories. [Automatically generated summary]
And it starts with a, this is a medium facility with a satellite camp.
Now, the medium facility is a very violent prison.
I mean, very violent prison.
Ex-gang members, gangbangers, child molesters, rapists, you name it, murderers who've worked themselves down from a penitentiary with good behavior throughout the years.
And now they have this cozy little spa and this array of like the worst human beings on earth all sitting in this medium facility.
So it was, that was kind of the environment, right?
And then I start understanding that, I mean, the first day I walk in there, I understand that this isn't a place where people go to be abandoned and rot and forgotten about to rot.
The ceiling is all made out of like this, how can I call it this canvas?
And it's all ripped up, patched up, and there's a flap hanging open and black mold, like bubbles of black mold, almost like cotton are just like dangling off the ceiling.
And you can see that the whole thing is compromised with black mold.
We're breathing this in in this non-ventilated space.
This is the kind of environment that the warden maintains down in FCI Farriton.
This is not an indictment, by the way, on the BOP.
This is an indictment on a derelict in duty administrator who has no business doing her job.
Female warden, Lynn Kelly, who runs the prison, absolutely unqualified for the job.
I mean, and I say that with confidence.
She can sue me.
I'd love to go to a deposition for calling her unqualified.
When you run a facility where the bathroom has outbreaks of ringworms and listeria, when you run a facility that you're serving inmates expired food as far back as a year, chicken patties that had been frozen but expired in 2024 were still being served to inmates in 2025.
This is the United States, but I felt like I was in a Mexican prison because everything, by the way, fun, fun story.
Beef taco, beef taco salad, chicken taco, chicken taco salad, beef fajita, chicken fajita are all on the menu on a constant rotation to the point you're just like, I don't want to see another tortilla or tortilla jump in my face.
So this is, this is a facility I was in.
You know, canned goods that were expired.
I would go to the officer in charge of the kitchen because I obviously got involved in the kitchen right away.
The kitchen is officially closed after I wrote several observations of its risks on my column for the South Shore Press because I was still writing from in there.
I mean, broken equipment, absolute filth, nothing functioning, drains that backed up and bought back the most guck you can think of.
Machinery that you were literally, you know, I always thought that eating the food at FCI Ferriton was either I get some really, really bad food poisoning and I'm going to lose a lot of weight, or I might just not die.
You should see the loveliness of how, I mean, I got in trouble because I put a pair of gloves on, right?
And if I'm stirring a spoon and I'm doing my things and then I proceed to go open a box to get something, once I'm done with that box, I would switch out gloves and toss them.
But I guess I was going through gloves so fast and I got yelled at.
Say like, you change gloves too many times.
Like, no, you take it easy.
Once you're gloved up, you're gloved up for the day.
I'm like, what?
Like, what is going on here?
You would see these guys, like some of the inmates follow that regiment.
I don't care.
I'm like, I'm not doing that.
I eat this food.
They would put on gloves.
And the loveliest thing was they get a piece of paper, blow their nose, wearing the gloves.
They'd open a box.
They touch dirty, dusty cans.
And then the next thing you'd see, they're in there mushing up spices into the ground beef.
And I'm like, it's like, I'm telling you, it's your own personal hell for a germaphobe.
It's like, that's prison.
The conditions of the kitchen were just atrocious.
It's just, it's hard to explain when you have a walk-in freezer that's constantly over freezing and breaking and you have to thaw it and then everything in it thaws and then they refreeze it.
And then it's like, but the chicken has expired a year, but it keeps well.
Like, you got to pretend this is all normal, you know?
It's, it's, it's just remarkable.
Like, Guantanamo has better treatment for their prisoners, I assume.
Um, it definitely wouldn't, you know, I don't think we can go to dinner with, I'd say, 80% of them to, I know, the French laundry.
Gavin Newsom would never.
So, um, but some people very remember, I was in a white collar camp.
The problem is, is President Obama changed the rules of camps, and now you get other people that are not white-collar.
So, you get some drug dealers, you get some, you know, violent former gang members that have worked theirselves down throughout the years in the system, and their custody points have lowered.
They're on their way home, so they get put in a camp now.
So, I joked and I said, it's a really dark shade of white for white collar in this camp.
Not not on a racial thing.
No, I was like, Yeah, it's definitely not white-collar.
It's off-white, it's off-white for sure.
Cause it's not all white-collar like they like to say, bankers and executive.
The only real white-collar guys I saw there were actually gold collars because they were Bob Mendendez's co-defendants.
No, yes, what were they like?
Interesting, very interesting people.
I mean, business guys, very intelligent guys, but very interesting to interact with.
I mean, we're talking about multi, multi-millionaires.
I reconnected with a former campaign staffer of mine who ended up going to prison for something completely unrelated to me.
But in the nature of what I believe the Merrick Garland DOJ did, he refused to play the narrative of bashing me and cooperating against me because he had really nothing to say.
So in lieu of that, they got him on a technicality on some paperwork and they threw him in prison for a year and a day.
And that's Sam Mealy, who is a really remarkably intelligent young man who I would say made some poor choices, but at the same time, doesn't deserve to be in prison just because he didn't narc on me.
But that's what the Merrick Garland DOJ was operating like.
I met this very competent man who I still struggle.
I looked at after I left prison.
I wanted to make sure this is a guy who I think would will be a friend in my life because he was a very even-keeled, well-spoken, respectable executive.
He was a very renowned architect worldwide.
His name's a Lok, Indian gentleman, former executive for United Airlines.
He got caught in a pay-to-play kickbacks scheme in the private sector, though.
I've never thought that that was illegal.
And when I look at his saying, I'm saying, look, don't do it if there's a gray area, right?
So I'm not defending the activity, but I'm also looking at saying like, this is protocol in the private sector.
I worked in the private sector for 10 years in private equity.
I mean, if you go to my house, I'll be glad to tour the wine cellar I've built out of gift baskets.
You know, like four, five, $600 bottles of wine, two, $3,000 bottles of champagne, Peppy Van Winkle scotch.
I mean, all of this sits in my house.
I never bought that stuff, but they were gifts during my private equity days.
And they would be like, thank you.
It was a pleasure doing business.
It's not a crime, but they put this man in prison.
That's right.
So I struggle with the criminal justice system these days because I look at it and I feel like it's an overall zealous system just meant to put people in prison.
There has to be some monetary benefit benefiting suppliers when you look at it.
Well, Bob Barker's family or him, I don't know who started a freaking line of supplies from curtains to towels to linens to t-shirts to the jumpsuits we wear in prison, all the way to the bare basic toiletries.
And it's all the Bob Barker line.
That is a multi-billion dollar federal government contract.
Retail monopoly in contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
So when you look at this, we currently have a system that houses approximately 250,000 Americans in federal custody.
I don't even have an idea of what state custody is, but a quarter of a million Americans sit in federal custody today.
That is a business, not for the federal government, though.
Federal government loses.
It's a business for all of those with the contracts to those prisons.
So there is an incentive to putting people in prison somewhere along some line.
Judges might be compromised.
And I'm assuming prosecutors might be compromised.
I can't prove that, but that's the only thing that makes sense when you're seeing people go to prison for arbitrary reasons or for purposes and timeframes that wouldn't suit the crime or are, you know, overtly unusual and cruel, which is a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
So you have to really walk this tightrope to understand.
And I don't think that a BOP director will be able to grasp that because A, they work in four term, four-year terms or eight, if they get re-elected, their principal gets re-elected or president.
And in eight or four years, there's so much you have to do that I don't think you can get to the nitty-gritty.
That's why I'm like so focused, Tucker, to get into this in prison reform because it's desperately needed.
We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia.
Yeah, good luck.
So most people, when they think about this, want to carry a firearm, and a lot of us do.
The problem is there can be massive consequences for that.
Ask Kyle Rittenhouse.
Kyle Rittenhouse got off in the end, but he was innocent from the first moment.
It was obvious on video, and he was facing life in prison anyway.
That's what the anti-gun movement will do.
They'll throw you in prison for defending yourself with a firearm.
And that's why a lot of Americans are turning to Burna.
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Is the problem with it that it's dirty, disorganized, violent, corrupt, all the above?
Like if you were to isolate one problem with the federal prison system as you experienced it, what would it be?
I mean, if you're in New Jersey, here this is, I think it's hilarious, this story.
An inmate was being transferred to New Jersey from Pennsylvania, but first they drove him to Kentucky off to Wisconsin and then he bought us back to New Jersey.
Why?
I don't know why.
I don't understand it.
And that's why the BOP has a nickname for its acronym, which is backwards on purpose.
I had no quarrels with them or qualms or anything.
I mean, great people.
Matter of fact, I am only here today talking to you because of two very specific people that didn't let me walk off that ledge when I was in isolation for 41 days.
I don't obviously want to say their names because I don't want to compromise them.
They were very compassionate men who were themselves distraught and completely flabbergasted at why I was being treated the way I was being treated while I was in solitary confinement.
It didn't compute to them.
It didn't make sense.
So I'd say 80% of them are some of the best people you'll ever meet.
They're fun.
They can dish it out with the best of them.
Like, you know, on a good day, I'd, you know, I'd pop some jokes.
They'd pop right back.
They clap.
And you have this very good environment because it's supposed to be rehibilatory.
It's not supposed to be punitive.
So some CEOs want to make your life miserable just because it makes them happy.
And they live and relish off of your misery, but that's not the majority.
Those are very few and select.
And I'm so glad that that's the case.
So I look at it as I had a positive experience with the CEOs.
I had a terrible experience with the administration from the assistant warden Noble to the warden Lynn Kelly to the camp administrator who then turns out to be the most competent man there and funny enough his name is Mr. Santos cousins and no no um it turns out he was the most competent and most honest of the three on the power structure and
it's infuriating that he's the one with the less power and then you have the two with the most power and they're absolutely tucker here's here's do you know where my head exploded CEOs are working With the bare minimum because there's no budget.
We don't have that in the budget.
The building's falling apart.
We don't have it in the budget.
That's her answer to everything.
The warden.
The AC broke and it was broke all summer long.
And then I had to fight tooth and nail, literally writing about it before they put on an actual temporary AC because I wasn't about to sleep in 90-degree weather.
Because look, it's I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I couldn't find a lot of similarities with a lot of them.
I think there was like a group of like five or six that I could talk to, but these are well-educated individuals, very savvy, but at the same time, very liberal.
While I was in the camp for the 43 days that I was in the camp, the first 30 and then a break and then 13 days because I had that big 41 block of isolation.
You know, I was in the kitchen from 7:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon.
And it was a great refuge for me psychologically.
Yes.
Because I didn't have to deal with whatever was outside of the kitchen.
I mean, which is, you know, whatever they call maintenance there is not maintenance in the real world.
And then you have the warehouse guys who are in charge of like picking up the heavy boxes of, you know, the goods that come in to operate the prison.
And then you have, oh, you have the cleaning crew.
So they're the ones in charge of cleaning the entire compound from, you know, the buildings, the bathrooms, and all the other facilities for the staff.
And lastly, you have the landscapers because this is on a big old bird reserve that was converted into a prison in 1990.
So it's massive amounts of acreage and lots of green and lots of grass.
And so you have a landscaping crew.
So I don't know what these people do.
All I know is that I was in the kitchen from 7:30 to 40.
Imagine a run-down gym with no maintenance, same structure, shower, two, two, two sides of showers and an aisle in the middle, like a locker with showers on both sides with curtains that are just falling apart, lime and every bacterial growth you can imagine growing on the walls and in the corners, peeling paint inside of each stall.
Same thing goes for the toilets.
And then there was something lovely that I discovered.
There's this, this is what made the bathroom really unbearable for me to a point that I started having to brush my teeth with bottled water.
You're not going to believe this.
But in prison, there's this Muslim culture that has become very prolific in a sense.
That is the question I would always pose when there was some court sort of issue where the COs couldn't walk the range of the shoe because the smoke of Suboxone and K2 were so thick.
And then you ask, why are they being provided lighters?
They're not.
But some inmates have medical prescriptions that are pumps and require a battery.
They take a little piece of whatever foil they can find and they put it on each end of negative and the positive and create a little brazier and they smoke from that.
Which is insane because these are, I mean, they strip, they strip us naked, make us spread our cheeks and cough to go into solitary to make sure we're bringing nothing we're not allowed to into solitary.
So I went through that humiliating display.
You're always handcuffed to your back.
You have no access to outside.
So when all that is happening, unfortunately, there's only one way that drugs make it in there.
Now they're working without compensation for God knows how long because Democrats can't even get that together and Republicans can't seem to work with them to do something.
Although I agree with the principle of standing up to Chuck Schumer, but the problem is you're just going to create a far worse.
This is a pressure cooker situation, but ferritin is littered in drugs in the medium.
Um, I stuck to like they have these really they have some healthy alternatives, healthy-ish, right?
So, lots of tuna, uh, ate lots of I felt like a cat.
Like, I could do, I think I could do a full-blown Friskies commercial right now.
Like, I know how to, I have my meowing down to the T.
So much tuna, but um, lots of like cashews and almonds and trail mix.
Like, I lived off of that stuff, like, and you have to ration because the premium stuff like that, they give you a limit of how much you can buy of it.
Oh, you can't go out and buy a case, no, like two bags a week of each.
So, I'd get two of each: almonds, cashews, trail mix, and um, the peanuts.
So, I just, you know, ration it through the week.
Sometimes dinner for me was like half a bag of trail mix, and I'd go to sleep because the food was inedible from the kitchen.
Um, so much so that the prison there, even though other prisons do allow people to stay on their actual medications that they've been treated on for years, I was on Vyvanz for I have been on Vivans, which is an add-eral because I'm ADD for 22 years since I'm 15, 37.
These guys took me off Vivans, cold turkey, and literally stuffed me up with antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications.
Well, of course, but I mean, they will give you, oh, yeah, but those pills, they won't give you what you won't treat you with what you need at that prison for some reason.
Although, if you look historically, even Sam Bankman Freed, when he's in prison, he's receiving his add-erole because he's ADHD, right?
Well, I mean, obviously, because you take a diagnosis like that, and it just exacerbates every confinement, the solitary confinement, what it did to me.
So, Joe Murray, my attorney, who I adore, good man, great champion for me.
I mean, shout out to Joe because what him, Matt, my partner, and my sister, Tiffany, went to hell and back for me.
But Joe really was a driving force.
I mean, this man texted me.
I mean, he didn't, he did not rest a single day.
It was remarkable.
And I have two other attorneys, Andrew and Bobby, who did fantastic work.
But really, I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight Joe's efforts.
Receives this text message from a journalist, an investigative journalist from Project Veritas, which is an organization I have, I've given, I've donated to their former outfit.
I was very close to Keith and all of those guys.
I don't know.
I didn't even know Project Veritas was still around.
To me, eventually after Matt Tiermond left, I think after the whole breakup with O'Keefe, it was gone, but apparently it's still active.
So, they get this person, this woman named Patricia.
She's Brazilian.
She's had an obsession with me to a degree that I can't explain.
It's inexplicable almost to a degree.
She has in the past made threats that were deemed uncredible.
So she was a non-credible source with these elaborate threats of high power players in DC want to kill you because you're outing about orgies and talking about the DC swamp orgies with the SEC and Congress.
And I said, okay, whatever.
Capitol Police looked into it in 2023 when I was a sitting member of Congress.
Not credible.
She comes back out of the woodworks and I guess convinces Project Veritas on those old texts to be real and adds a new one dated August 18th, saying that we need to take care of Santos in prison.
And I'm paraphrasing, you know, essentially somebody needs to break into prison to kill George Santos, which is on its face value ridiculous.
I've heard of jail breaks.
I have not heard of inbreaks.
So I'm sitting there like, wait, what?
So Joe sees this.
I've been the subject of threats, credible threats to the point we do have people in prison for trying to kill me today.
Reaches out to facility things, you know, hey, I need you to protect George.
I just received this threat.
It seems concerning.
The warden's definition of protected custody, because she's lazy and she's completely irresponsible with her budget and doesn't have adequate protective custody, you know, protocols, does what's easy and the shortcut, which is toss George Santos in the shoe.
Now, I am not there for disciplinary action, but I am subject to only three showers a week.
I'm subject to using recycled clothes, meaning I'm using whatever underwear Joe Schmo was using yesterday got into the washing machine and was propped up and given to me.
Comes with their, it even comes with complimentary skid marks on them.
That is protection under Kelly Warden Lynn Kelly at FCI Fairton.
How dare you say that's cruel and unusual?
I am a crybaby.
Or as the deputy warden said, I was a princess.
Stop being a princess, he said to me, right?
So this is, this is, this is real.
This is actually real behavior.
And they put you there, give you no information.
They peep you.
So they put you in a cell that's six by nine.
I couldn't do this without touching the walls.
You know, the six, six, six feet apart.
If I was really measuring my, my, you know, spread arms distance, I was definitely further than six feet apart from you because I couldn't do that to the wall.
So Again, you drink water out of a toilet, the top of a toilet, which has a metallic taste.
And when you put water in it and you let the cup sit, sediments fall, like these black sediments fall to the bottom of the cup.
Now, my neighbor in the cell next to me, a murderer who had just killed another inmate months earlier with a pencil.
Granted, disciplinary custody, waiting with a pencil?
With a pencil, stabbing another inmate through the eye with a pencil.
This is on the news, by the way.
Now, the lovely part about it is this inmate is a trans inmate who killed another trans inmate who the news reported on as a leader, activist, native trans leader in their community, God knows where, but failed to disclose that he was a vicious child molester.
They give you three books a week, an arbitrary number for, I mean, I understand that the reading level of most prisoners aren't going to be quite high and they'll probably take a while to read a 300, 400-page book.
I was crushing books, you know, 400-page books a day sometimes, you know.
It's like the Uzbekistanis are kind of like right there.
That's the halfway point where they all are, right?
But it's crazy because I even got into War of the Roses, but from the pretext of Margaret Jianju, the French queen, who was married to King Henry, which was depicted in history as a great manipulator.
So my very first book on Genghis Khan, Lords of the Bow, The first chapter was cut out of the book and somebody wrote in the beginning of the second chapter, fuck you, figure out what happened in the beginning.
So you're just like, these people really need help.
And then on the very last book of the series, which is Kingdom of Silver, they ripped out the last chapter.
I did do a lot of reading, but it was eccentric reading at best.
But that's what I did with my days.
And, you know, when I wasn't doing that, I was trying to pray because I had a really big awakening, a religious awakening.
I've strayed so, so far from the principles and the teachings of my family and literally Jesus Christ and growing up and in the Catholic Church and, you know, baptism, communion, confirmation.
I mean, all of those things.
I've strayed so far away from it.
And I saw where it landed me because now I can easily tell you this.
It is so much easier to walk in your life with a God in it than to ignore it.
I mean, it is phenomenal.
I have my peace with God.
I, I, it was, and I'll tell you the remarkable.
I think it was like day 10, and I had already written my first suicide note.
I told her I had an outburst by about day, I'm going to say 35 or 30, somewhere along that range where, you know, after all the meandering bullshit of, you know, it's still under the investigative authorities, blah, blah, blah.
And it was like, I go into the shoe August 28th, September 23rd, just five days shorts of a month in, I meet with the FBI.
They come to tell me this is not credible.
I think it takes five days later, around the 28th, that email is sent to the facility.
Look, we're referring this to the AUSA.
We don't find us to be credible, but the AUSA has to decline to prosecute, right?
At that point, the warden had the discretion, total discretion to say, okay, I'm sending you back to the camp.
But she chose to let the AUSA do their process, which is fine.
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here.
But she chose, knowing there was no threat, she chose to wait for the official process, even though I had screamed till I was blue in my face that it was not credible.
There was a former investigation to the same person with similar allegations.
And these were just new trumped up ones.
That took a process.
And I, so I want to say, oh, well, that was, let's say the 28th, I believe, is the day that that email went in.
And then by the 17th of, I'm sorry, by the 7th of October, I was released a couple, a week later or so, I was released back to the camp.
And then 10 days later, I was sent home.
But she chose to keep me there, in my opinion.
Now, one can argue she was following protocol.
I think if two federal officers are telling you that it's not credible and they've done all the due diligence on this, I think it's pretty remarkable that you're going to wait and extend suffering for somebody for another nine days just because, you know.
From day one, my very first article, I mean, by the second or third article, I literally, after being there and experiencing the decay in the kitchen, the food issues, the issues with hygiene, the issues with mental health, the issues with medical, the issues with the dorm and sleeping and health and in the environment.
Well, I guess, or I was going to say something a lot.
You're nice.
Let's just say that.
I was going to be as nice as you are, but she was mad.
And she made these choices and she mocked me in the process to a point where I was losing my mind.
So they do executive rounds once a week.
I won't say the days.
So I don't compromise the facility again in lieu of not compromising officers and the facility routine.
They do rounds once a week in every segment of the facility.
So there was the day of the week that they did rounds in the shoe.
Now, in the shoe, we're sitting in our cells and there's this metal door, which is blast proof, heavy as hell, with a little drawer so you can get your trays.
And when you got to get out, put your hands backwards through that and get cuffed.
And a skinny window about, I want to say four inches wide, about 20, 20, 25 inches tall, give or take, that they come in and they peep their eye to see if you're alive, right?
And they're doing their rounds.
And I would always ask, it was around day 30 to 35 or somewhere in between there.
I lost my shit.
I said, why am I still here?
Because now I had already spoken to the FBI.
I knew what they were doing.
They said that following Monday, they would send a letter, which in fact they did.
So I was furious.
And I said, and I quote, bitch, you are going to regret fucking with me.
And I meant that.
And I don't mean it as threatening her, but I'm going to take her to task.
Kelly, Warden Kelly, Lynn Kelly, will be the face of evil, of grot and corrupt of the BOP if I have it my way.
We need to make an example of somebody because if we're going to rehabilitate people in this country, it cannot be at the hands of that woman or people like her.
So let that serve as a warning.
If you operate like Warden Kelly does at FCI Farriton, I strongly suggest you fuck off because I'm going to come for you.
I'm going to find you.
You're prison.
I'm going to investigate it and I'm going to work tooth and nail to make these changes because we're creating more criminals and recidivism is at an all-time high because of how we treat people.
We're not giving people a second chance at life.
We're making them better criminals at that or angrier criminals.
On September 10th, I was sitting in my cell, minding my business, thinking, wow, tomorrow's 9-11.
What a rough day.
And I'm sitting here like, you know, it's, I'm from New York.
It's still very much a somber day for New Yorkers.
And a CO knocks on my door, says, hey, do you know, did you know Charlie Kirk?
I'm like, yeah, I know Charlie.
Charlie's a fun guy.
I've met Charlie throughout the years.
He's, you know, I like him.
I call him a friend.
No, no, no.
You knew him.
He was just murdered and just walked away.
Now you're talking to somebody who's all fucked up 50 shades from Tuesday mentally in a shoe by myself, no one to talk, can't pick up the phone and make a call to understand what's going on.
And they took glee in my, I was wailing like, what do you mean?
Come back here.
How do you tell me this and walk away?
I was like losing it, like losing it.
This is a guy that I've always found so inspirational.
And I think I said this to you in private once when I was last year.
I think he's going to be a president of the United States.
So the nice CO I'm telling you, the two of them, I asked them to look into it.
They're not really tuned into politics, but they did some research and they would ever on a day-to-day, they'd give me like play by play of what they had read.
When I say these guys were top-notch phenomenal human beings, I mean top-notch phenomenal human beings.
They gave me play by play.
They told me about the memorial.
They told me about the attendance that President Trump spoke, that he was getting awarded the Medal of Free.
I knew all of that through the accounts of these two COs that I really hope that in my life, I cross paths with them one day because I'd love to thank them appropriately, like a proper thank you for not treating me like a subhuman piece of trash because they were the only two.
Everyone else, I was nothing but another number and being treated in certain instances quite, you know, bad.
Bad.
I struggle to find the words because, you know, this facility declined a visit from my family.
My partner and my aunt drove three and a half hours each way to go see me, got there and said, no, no, you can't see him today, even though it was visitation day.
There was a vibe shift, which you weren't here to see, but you went from being, you know, widely reviled, all these members of Congress denouncing you, everyone making fun of you, to once you went to prison, there was this sense that, like, wait, what's George Santos doing in prison?
And it was, it was wild to see it.
Tim Burchett, your friend, Congressman, good man from Tennessee, kind of led the charge on your behalf, but there were a lot of sympathetic ears.
Oh, look, it was wild.
You became more popular like Alexander Solsenitz and you became more popular in prison.
unidentified
Oh, look, hey, never let a good crisis go to waste.
But I'll say this: from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's a dear friend, to Tim Burchett, who's another dear friend, Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina, Matt Gates.
I don't know till this day what was the determination.
I do know this.
I know that that same day, I had a legal call with the Joe, my attorney, after I got the three different like nonsensical BS.
And Joe literally said, I'm working.
I'm fixing this.
I don't know what Joe did, but I will say this.
He called everyone and their mother, and he made sure that they knew that the letter is out and the warden is still not being straightforward and forthcoming.
And all I know is that within a matter of hours, it went from 1 p.m. saying I'd get out at some point at the end of the week or next week at best, at worst case, to an hour later saying, goodbye, go back to the camp.
You know, there's this, it's, it's perverse is a lack of mental health care they give you.
They have three psychologists in which they should have six.
They have no psychiatrists.
So they have no prescribing mental health provider.
So psychologists give referrals to a physician, which is wild in the standards of mental health, especially when you're dealing with people who are incarcerated, which guess what?
A lot of them are there because of mental health issues.
I go through this process that I had not done in at least two years, or if not more.
It felt great.
I go to Mass.
I take communion.
And then we do a rosary at the end.
And it was just so nice.
I left that feeling like I had squared away a large part of my life.
And it just felt good.
So good.
I woke up the next day.
I had this immense resolve on October 17th that everything would be okay.
That even if I had to sit there for seven years, I would be okay.
I would not be in pain.
I would not be in anguish.
I was ready for whatever the road ahead was.
So much so that we had something called Coffee Club that Sam Mealy started, my former employee.
And we would just wake up at seven o'clock.
A lot of us woke up early, but at seven o'clock, we would all meet in the library with coffee or tea.
I'm a tea guy and, you know, coffee cake or whatever it is, the cakes that, you know, Sam was hoarding for coffee club from everybody's breakfast bags that didn't want them.
And we sat, we'd sit there every morning, a group of like five of us.
Everybody was welcome to come, but only five people or so would show up.
You can't even get prisoners to coalesce.
Trust me.
They have no options to do anything else, but they still don't show up to stuff when it's available.
So we sat there and I said to him, like, dude, I feel so good.
He's like, what do you mean?
I'm like, I don't know.
I woke up feeling this resolve, like, it's all going to be okay.
And he's like, well, that's good, but you know, it's strange at the same time, which it is.
And then everybody like kind of stiffens, like, oh my God.
I'm like, oh, please don't let it mean me going back to the shoe because that's how initially it was.
I was called in the PA and they're like, oh, you got to be seen at the J building, which is a facility building.
And I never came back, right?
41 days later.
So I stiffened and I said, well, God's on my side.
I don't care.
I confidently like marched to go see what it was.
Turns out it was a subpoena from Congress that Tim Burchett and Lauren Bobert had sent to the facility for me and the warden to go testify to the oversight committee under the conditions of my imprisonment.
Rarely did it go anywhere else other than those two channels.
So I'm sitting there looking at this Chiron for a split second.
I'm like, apoplectic.
Like, what?
But nobody told me anything.
Somebody should have called me.
And then I think, I'm like, wait, nobody can make an inbound call.
So I run to the emails.
There's nothing there because emails take about an hour and a half to get to you of a delay because it needs to be vetted through security.
So if you sent me something an hour and a half before I get it, and then if I send your response another hour and a half before you get it, because everything is monitored.
And I can understand that because of criminal conduct and activity.
I was ugly, snotty crying in that phone stall, head down, like my head and all this, all these thoughts inundated my body, my soul.
I'm going home.
And it was just, I didn't know this was going to happen.
I had really made peace with the fact that this was my predicament just that morning.
And to tell me that there's no divine intervention in this, I will never accept that because there was no palpable appetite to give me clemency, according to every single person I had spoken to.
I was walking out and my phone came in the car and I was already dialing.
Like the first call I made was Marjorie Taylor Green at the assistance of Matt, who was prolific on Call Marjorie.
I want people to know this because it's important to me.
I used to say that if you want a friend in DC, get a dog, not realizing I actually had real friends because it's, you measure a friendship, not on how much you see one another, because we all have busy lives.
It's been 11 days and I still haven't wrapped my head around it, but I'll say this.
There's no bigger supporter of President Trump that I served with.
And I'm saying this to the detriment of getting other colleagues and friends of mine mad at me, but there was no bigger loyalist to President Trump than Marjorie Taylor Greene in my time in Congress.
I've known her since 2020.
And I can tell you with good faith, she is a loyal soldier.
She means well and she wants the best for our country no matter what.
And I think that to conflate that with any other issues that you might want to find a singularity with her, it is your problem, not her problem.
She, she played therapist, best friend, mother, all of those roles to my family.
And for that, I'm, I'm forever indebted because you can only dream of having that level of friendship with someone in your darkest moments when you're absent from your family and someone steps in and takes a position of counseling and consoling your family.
I feel for the first time in my life free, free of, I have no reservations to what I'll say.
I have no reservations of what I care of what society thinks of me.
And I don't want to fit your social normative whatever bullshit.
I want to embrace the better parts of life.
And those to me are my family, my friends, my health, my pets.
That's what I don't care.
I don't need to live in the most beautiful house with the most beautiful curb appeal.
I don't have to drive the nicest cars.
I don't have to have the fanciest shoes.
None of that matters.
I lost complete and total interest after being encapsulated and captured by the consumer mind virus of I must buy the whatever couture and I have to have the two $3,000 suits and the $800.
And I thank God and I thank God profoundly for letting me hit rock bottom because if not, I would still be spiraling out of absolute control in a ball of chaos like I was prior to going to prison.
I took a shower, an hour-long shower with no flip-flops, no concerns of the soap falling on the dirty floor, actual shampoo and all like, like I put on every cosmetic product I had in the bathroom.
I need guarantees that I'm eating something that was barely dead before I consumed it because I was so tired of it.
Not expired, frozen, expired.
I couldn't do it anymore.
So I said, I need sushi.
So we got really good sushi, had a great time.
And I've been non-stop, believe it or not.
It's, it's been as if I've never left almost because I've, you go right into the media cycle and you're traveling and you're talking and you're doing these interviews.
But this is the first long format interview I do.
And I reserved it for you because I thought it was appropriate.
When I spoke to your booker and your staff, I said yes right away because I said, I finished all of it at Tucker.
I gave you the last word and I only thought it'd be great to give you the first word long format because you can do five, six, seven minute hits.
There's this weird segment of social media who are all these conservative influencers taking dunks on the president, which I'm like super like lost at.
But I've also learned throughout the last few months that I don't want my president to be at the mercy of a prime minister who is toxic and causing great pain to our country now because President Trump goes out there, puts his neck on the line, does an amazing, formidable peace deal.
Amazing.
Like something extraordinary.
I mean, the man deserves a Nobel Prize.
I don't care what anybody says.
I don't care what the liberal bench of the Nobel Prize Association or whatever you call them think.
The reality is Donald Trump is a peace president.
He wants to broker deals of peace and end war.
He does this extraordinary measure, is now working towards putting the conflict of Ukraine-Russia to an end.
Hopefully we can achieve that.
Only to see that people like Bibi Netanyahu are sabotaging that.
So I have to come to realization, despite being a staunch defender of Israel and the Jewish people and their right to exist and their right to be in Israel.
I at the same time now live in a place where I think it's time BB move on.
He has become toxic.
He has become pretty much the merchant of death almost, the face of it.
Yes.
On both sides, every Israeli soldier and family and every Palestinian soldier and Hamas terrorists and family, although I'm not too sympathetic for the terrorists.
Quite frankly, the only good terrorists alive, the only good terrorists in my world are the ones that are not alive, even though I have this profound opinion of death and life and that we should not kill.
But there's a special place in hell for terrorists.
Let's just put it that way, especially after what I saw when I was in Congress after the initial October 7th attack.
The video, I'm sure you saw the video, the baby, and that stayed in my nightmares for quite some time.
So every single death at this point, I think is easily being attributed to BB because he is overstepped.
And in two months and a half that I've been gone, it gave me so much clarity because I was out of the rhetoric machine.
I was out of the spin room.
And I'm just like, my president is going to bat for a man that is not being forthcoming with him at all.
No, but watching someone you love and admire to whom you're grateful, Trump, mistreated by an ungrateful foreigner whose salary we pay is like, is beyond.
It's just, it's gotten to a point where I, and then there's also this other aspect of this, which is anybody who says what I'm saying now gets accused of being on the Qatari payroll.
I never second thing to really bring it to perspective is what are we doing in this country to really fix anything?
The government shut down.
Schumer won't.
Schumer wants to make this the Republican shutdown so bad.
It's almost like Gretchen Weiner and Mean Girls trying to make Fetch happen.
It ain't going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
So I don't know how so much has changed in two and a half months, but I'm here.
I mean, I'm literally living an existential crisis in my life right now in New York City.
I'm at the precipice of having an actual dangerous man become the mayor of the largest city in the country that is responsible for 10% of the American GDP become mayor of a $118 billion annual budget.
We're leaving by all barometers.
I mean, do you know how I check out my barometers now are not polls anymore?
I just go to Polymarket.
When you look at Polymarket and it's a 93% chance that this Mondami guy is going to win, let me tell you something.
Mondami is the next mayor of New York City.
There's no wishful thinking.
There's no sensational ads or sensational headlines on the New York Post that are going to say, Cuomo eats 10% of Mondami's lead, narrowing the gap.
Hello, wake up.
It's over.
I've learned this throughout the last year.
I have yet to see Polymarket get something wrong.
And when I see something like that, it's over.
So I'm, and I don't get paid by them to say that, by the way.
I had 37 years New York City resident, born and raised in Queens, New York City.
I have lived in various parts of Queens throughout my life, but I'm originally from Jackson Heights, Queens, proud of it.
My aunt still lives there.
She's lived there for 40 years.
My dad still lives there.
He's lived there for 40 years.
I have no desire whatsoever to stay in New York City or New York State at that because it doesn't matter if you're fleeing the insanity of a madman in the city when you have, I lose the words to describe our governor.
So I'll just leave it at, you have literally two Looney Tunes running the state and the city.
I'm like, I still am offended that he sent me to Jersey.
I should have gone to Otisville.
My point is, this is how serious it is to me.
So this is another big change.
It's an existential one for me.
I'm uprooting my life.
I'm moving far away from my family because there's, I mean, my poor aunt, she just retired.
She she's set up.
She's well retired.
So there's no point in her moving.
My dad's about to retire in two years.
There's no point in him getting up to move.
You know, like they're rooted there.
I'm not.
I'm 37.
I'll put my roots elsewhere.
I'll uproot it.
I don't care.
And it's not a place to raise a family.
We're looking to adopt kids next year because we think it's time to like help kids who are abandoned in foster care.
Let's adopt two kids, give them a life, put them through school, give them whatever they want, education, give them a fair shake instead of letting them become a statistic.
But I don't want them to grow up in a place like New York City.
At first, there's going to be the sticker shock of taxes being raised on the wealthy, but he's categorizing the wealthy people who make over 400,000 a year, which in New York, net, you're making about 270.
And then about 40% of that goes to, you know, housing, you know, lodging costs, whether rent or mortgage, whatever that makeup is.
You're not really wealthy.
Now you're going to pay an additional 1% so that we can have inefficient free buses because they're not going to get better because they're free.
They're just going to get worse, in my opinion.
And that's going to be the start.
Then you have John Katz Matides, who's a prolific businessman in New York City, who's made it abundantly clear.
He's going to take his red apple group and dip New York.
And along with it, he's going to close his historic grocery chain because he can't compete.
Graceides can't compete with a city-owned supermarket.
There's just no way.
So, what's the point?
So, there goes countless jobs.
You're going to see every single major corporation start uprooting out of New York.
Pretty soon, you're going to leave the stock exchange to the dust mites and whoever dares venture into the city.
Just remember, Ken Griffin picked up and left Chicago and took Citadel with him to Florida.
J.B. Prickser can be fat and loud and a billionaire, but he doesn't tell what other people do with their businesses.
So, when you see an example of that happening in Chicago with Ken Griffin, it should raise flags.
Goldman Sachs moved GSAM, their asset management division, all but their retail-facing people out of New York to Brickle, Florida.
Like that division, the only people who stayed in New York of their main heart of Goldman Sachs, which is GSAM, their asset management division, it's mainly the frontline people who stay.
Like the people who have the day-to-day because the wealth is still in New York today, it's still there, but the operations end of it is in Brickle, largely.
Like when you see these moves being made and you still want to talk about raising the corporate tax by 2%, you're either dumb, deaf, blind, or all of the above.
Because there's just no way you think people are going to stay in corporations are going to be beholden to staying in the state of New York if you make it even less business friendly.
We have had a net loss of over 600,000 people in the course of the last five years in New York State.
We're a large exporter of out-migration from the state.
Lee's Eldon could have been governor if it wasn't for the 400,000 people who at that point in 2022 had fled to Florida due to the pandemic.
We have Elise Stefanik who's a phenomenal congresswoman who has a shot.
But I fear that with this out-migration that's going to occur after Mondami, it might hurt our electability unless Democrats finally see they messed up and they actually give it to them.
A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.
How did he know there would be an event to document in the first place?
Because he had foreknowledge.
And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.
They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.