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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Have you heard yet about this New York Times story reporting a shocking amount of reportedly made-up stuff on the resume of a newly elected congressman from New York? Last month, residents of Northeast Queens and parts of Nassau County, you may not know this name if you don't live in the district, this is mostly the North Shore of Nassau County and Northeast Queens neighborhoods like Bayside and Little Neck and around there, elected Republican George Santos to represent them in the House.

A son of Brazilian immigrants, a CUNY graduate, we were told, turned financier, we were told. His American dream story seemed inspiring and presumably was a factor that led him to success at the ballot box. His victory, of course, was crucial in bringing a Republican majority to the House of Representatives this coming January and making him the first openly gay Republican House member ever elected. This New York Times investigation and to Santos's resume raises doubts about so much of his story.

From his educational background to his work experience, much of what Santos claimed about himself reportedly, at least, was fabricated including something Santos said on this show after he was elected. We will play that clip soon so stick around and with us now to go into it and discuss the depths of it all is Grace Ashford, one of the New York Times reporters who unearthed the story along with her co-author Michael Gold. She covers New York State politics and government from Albany usually. Grace, welcome to WNYC.

Grace Ashford: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll go down some bullet points of the many many things that you apparently uncovered were wrong on Santos's bio. What prompted this investigation in the first place? You could look into any elected member of Congress and look for stuff. What put you on to George Santos's resume?

Grace Ashford: It's a really good question. I'll say it did not start as an investigation, it just started as you outlined. Mr. Santos has a really fascinating backstory and he's young and he's gay and he's Latino and he just flipped this important district on Long Island that helped the Republicans earn their narrow majority and so we got assigned to write a story about him, who he was. As we started looking into some pretty basic stuff, things just weren't really checking out. Then we started asking some questions and those led to more questions, but yes, the hub. We were pretty floored.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go through some of these. Did he graduate from Baruch College as he says?

Grace Ashford: Baruch was not able to find any records of him graduating in 2010 with degrees in business and finance, he was very specific. No, he may have taken classes there, but there's no record of his graduation.

Brian Lehrer: Was there a record of him being a student there?

Grace Ashford: Not that they were able to share with us.

Brian Lehrer: What about NYU? Where does that come in?

Grace Ashford: This claim was repeated on a couple of different places in a few interviews and also on the NRCC website. He said that he had perhaps achieved a graduation, some sort of a business degree there. When we asked him about it, he didn't reply with any sort of specifics about his education and NYU had no record of his attendance.

Brian Lehrer: How about his work in the finance sector for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs?

Grace Ashford: This is really part of the core of his pitch to voters is that he has this success and all of this knowledge on Wall Street. He understands how markets work in the economy and as on his show on your show he said he wanted to work on the Financial Services Committee, but when we reached out to Citigroup and Goldman, neither of them had any records of his employment there.

Brian Lehrer: Does he live at the address where he's registered to vote?

Grace Ashford: We're still trying to figure that out, but he certainly was not there when we went to Door knock him over the weekend. We spent a lot of time trying to engage with Mr. Santos and try to get him to sit down for an interview. We would love to speak with him and ask him for some documents that would help clear up some of these things, pay stubs from these places, colleagues that he worked for, even dates that he was at these places so that we could run some of these things down.

Transcripts from education, but he wasn't able to furnish that and so yes, as one of our final attempts to reach him, we-- My colleague, actually, Michael, went to ring his doorbell, but the person who answered said that they didn't know him.

Brian Lehrer: I should say he did come on this show twice, once as a candidate and once after the election to talk about what he wanted to do in Congress now that he had been elected. We have a talking relationship and we reached out to him yesterday and invited him to come on again and refute some of the things that you put in this New York Times article and we did not hear back, but we did extend that invitation.

Let's keep going because there's more. We'll play the clip of something that you cited from this show as another thing that he may have made up. We'll get to that. More importantly, you said the IRS did not have records of his animal rescue charity called Friends of Pets United. What is that charity apparently or according to him and does it even exist?

Grace Ashford: Yes. Actually, this was one of the earlier things that got me curious about this. In one of his earlier campaign Bios, since been scrubbed, but you can find it on the Wayback Machine. He says that he ran this animal rescue charity that helped save thousands of dogs and cats and that he ran it for five years and very specifically, that it was a 501C3, which is a designation that is granted by the IRS and it allows an organization to be tax-exempt and to receive tax-exempt donations

The thing about 501C3s is that the IRS maintains a record of every single organization that has that status and you can look it up online and so that was one of the earlier things that I did because I wanted to learn more about the good works of this charity but was not able to find any record of it and the IRS confirmed they weren't able to find any record of it receiving that status, which set off some alarms for us.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I see people are starting to call in already. Most of our lines are filled up already with people either wanting to say something about or ask something about this George Santos story. 212-433-WNYC for the rest of you is the number. Anybody from his district. This Northeast Queens and parts of Nassau County District going to get first priority.

Do you want him to not take his seat? We heard from Senator Gillibrand in the last hour that, unless he broke a federal law, there's nothing that would require him to not take his seat and it may just be up to the voters to assess this two years from now, but 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's take a phone call right now. This is not from the district, but it's the question I wanted you to get to next anyway, so it's Eric in Red Bank, you're on WNYC, who read the article. Hi, Eric.

Eric: Hi, good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, I read the article. It was fascinating and I was just wondering, in the article, it mentioned that Mr. Santos had very little income to show, in fact, that he, I think, lost money for a number of years and then, all of a sudden, he reported an income in the millions of dollars and I was just wondering where that money came from? If there's any additional reporting or maybe some thoughts on where it came from and I'll take my answer off the air. Thanks so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Eric. Grace?

Grace Ashford: Hi. This is a great question and one that we have as well. What the caller, I think, points to is the fact that we have congressional disclosures for Mr. Santos from 2020 that show that he was only making about $55,000, and then two years later, when he filed his disclosure, he reports an income of $750,000, dividends in the millions, hundreds of thousands dollars in bank accounts. I think the natural question is what was the source of his change in fortune? Unfortunately, Mr. Santos did not disclose anything about the clients of his organization, the Devolder Organization. That's where he's earning that money, that $750,000. We were not able to find almost any trace of this business.

It has a registration in Florida that was dissolved for failing to file a financial report and doesn't have a website that we were able to find. This was, obviously, one of the key questions that we asked Mr. Santos, what does this business do? Can you help us understand it a little bit better? He did not share any information with us, but because he didn't really file any information about who his clients are and the requirement is that any source who pays a candidate more than $5000 is required to be disclosed in these forms because he didn't do that. We don't really know. In fact, if he had clients like that but he didn't disclose intentionally, that could be a serious legal matter.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of callers want to know, I'm not going to take the same call over and over again, but callers and people on Twitter, a lot of them have the same question. Didn't the Democrats, this was a hard-fought race against Robert Zimmerman in that district that Tom Suozzi used to represent and Suozzi was leaving Congress. This was a Democratic district Republican George Santos competed and won here. Many people are asking some version of why didn't the Democrats do enough opposition research to turn up some of these things if there is so much there?

Grace Ashford: I think it's easy after the fact today. Well, why didn't everyone see this? Anyway, there's a lot of people that could have been looking at this earlier, and some of the things that we use the jumping-off points and we included in the story, were included in some of the things that Democrats were able to dig up. I can't really speculate as to what was going on inside the Democratic Party. I do know that we were able to spend about a month or so on this and we were able to use a Brazilian reporter to help us find Brazilian court records. We were lucky in the amount of time we were able to devote to this. It certainly didn't come quickly or cleanly.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Kelly in Hastings on Hudson, who knows somebody who's connected to the Losing Zimmerman campaign against Santos. Kelly on WNYC. Hello?

Kelly: Hi. Yes. I have a good friend who was the Westchester County organizer, field organizer for Robert Zimmerman and they took the story to the New York Times and the Times told them that they were only reporting on New York City races, although about a third of the district was in Queens. The New York Times, I'm glad they did the story now, but they heard some responsibility about not listening and digging into the story a bit during the election.

Brian Lehrer: Kelly, thank you. That's an allegation. Do you know anything about this?

Grace Ashford: Well, I can say they didn't come to me, but I'm not sure, I don't know what conversation who had with what, but I can say that we were covering all of the races, but there are a lot of them. I know, for example, I was very engaged and there were a lot of really competitive races this year in the Hudson Valley up in Syracuse. I think though there's a lot of people in media who are frustrated that this wasn't given a little bit more time earlier on. I think that's just the reality.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the part that refers to this show. One of the things that he said here that made it into your article that that didn't check out. Just last month, Santos was on the show to discuss his victory after the election and we invited him to come on and reintroduce himself to the listeners as the new congressman-elect.

We'd had him and Zimmerman on back to back doing candidate interviews and we've invited all the newly elected representatives from our area, the new ones to come on and do out of the heat of a campaign interview. Now that you're going into office, let's just talk about you a little more. When I asked him about his reflections on anti-LGBTQA in light of the shooting at a Colorado Springs gay bar, here's what he had to say.

Speaker: I condemn what happened in Colorado, just much like Pulse at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, which I happened to at the time, have people that worked for me in the club. My company at the time, we lost four employees that worked that were at Pulse nightclub. This is a Deja Vu moment for me, not something that is really good even going over because it just brings back such tragic memories. Like I said, I just want to weed out the hate out of our country and our society. There is no place for hate in the United States of America,

Brian Lehrer: The sentiment is good. He said we lost four employees that were at the Pulse nightclub and you checked that out. Tell us what you did with that.

Grace Ashford: We were listening to this interview, my colleague Michael Gold and I and obviously this was a really tragic event. My colleague went through and he read through all of the obituaries and news coverage that he could find for each of the 49 people that perished in this event. We weren't able to find four people that worked at the same company or for anyone who worked at any of the companies that Mr. Santos has said that he worked at during that time period. We, of course, also asked Mr. Santos about this, maybe he a different company. He hadn't disclosed, he didn't share anything with us.

Brian Lehrer: If there were four employees of his company who were killed in the post-nightclub massacre, you couldn't find any of those names who seemed to have a connection to a company of his.

Grace Ashford: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Would that information have been available? I don't know what records are made public about victims after a mass shooting like that. Would their employment records have been available to you?

Grace Ashford: No, not, certainly not. We were not able to look at the employment records for every single person that that died. We relied upon obituaries and news coverage of which there was a good deal. Of course, as I said, we reached out to Mr. Santos to try to figure out if there was something that we were missing. We weren't able to find any four employees that worked at the same place either.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks, relevant to this story, is George even gay? Were you able to confirm that or that he's married to a man? That would be a matter of public record.

Grace Ashford: Yes, I'm not going to speculate on a person's private life, but there is a man that he has, introduces his husband that he's photographed with and seems to be married to. That's our understanding.

Brian Lehrer: What are the Republicans saying? Did you get a comment yet? I know there was no initial comment in your article. Is Kevin McCarthy saying anything Republican leadership in the house, will they seat him? Will they ask him not to take his seat? What are the Republicans saying?

Grace Ashford: This is a big question. We have heard some calls from Democrats obviously Senator Gillibrand earlier this morning. We haven't really heard anything from Republicans in Congress or specifically Mr. McCarthy. Obviously, it's a very, very tight situation that Mr. McCarthy's in. He's really struggling to maintain control and hold onto the speakership.

Certainly, he's under a lot of pressure but we haven't heard anything from him on this. There was however a statement that was released by the chairman of the Nassau GOP requesting that Mr. Santos be given a fair full ability to clear his name and clear these up, cleared any confusion up by answering the questions that we had shared with him and to my knowledge, Mr. Santos has not responded to that publicly either.

Brian Lehrer: Howard in the District, in Great Neck, you're on WNYC. Hi, Howard.

Howard: Good morning, Brian. Thank you Ms. Ashford for your reporting and Mr. Golds. Yes, I will be a constituent of Mr. Santos, assuming he is seated in January and I am outraged that I will now be represented by a congressman who is going to be without much power. I wonder if he'll ever hold a town hall in two years if he'll ever meet with the press for fear of being asked questions that he can't answer.

I'm upset with the wide variety of folks who got us here. Mr. Santos himself, the Republicans for nominating him, the Democrats for not unearthing this sooner, the media the, Times Newsday other papers for not coming up with this sooner. I know there were little hints of things here and there, but what your article discloses is that his whole resume practically is a lie.

Brian Lehrer: Howard, thank you. You're really asking how does he go forward. How does he ever talk to a reporter again? How does he hold a town hall in his district where he could be fact checked by constituents? I'm sure some people who voted for him or very upset by this, not just Democrats. How does he, if you can envision what the future now holds for him, assuming he is allowed to take his seat?

Grace Ashford: Yes, I think all of those things are going to be really tricky for him. I think that that will certainly complicate his efforts to represent his constituents. I think that's fair to say.

Brian Lehrer: There's more that we haven't even touched on yet, let's go through some additional points. In your investigation, you found various civil suits that Santos was involved in due to failures to pay rent, and yet, Santos claims his family made a fortune in real estate. He had an eviction in 2015. He was fined $12,000 in civil court over unpaid rent in 2017. Were those two different residences?

Grace Ashford: Yes, they were. This was confusing for us as well. We spent some time, obviously, just once it became clear that we weren't really sure where Mr. Santos had been during the time that he said that he was working at Goldman and City. We were just trying to figure out anything about his life during that time period. Yes, these evictions turned out so it's clear that he had some money troubles.

What is striking is that very soon afterwards, while he's running for Congress, he takes to Twitter to cry frustration with his own tenants who are not paying him rent during the eviction moratoria the New York had on 13 properties, he says, "We looked for 13 properties. We looked for any properties, we were not able to locate them." There's a lot of ways in which properties could be held, so, that's not necessarily dispositive, but he did not disclose any ownership of any properties on his financial disclosure either.

Brian: Another of the shocking revelations in this story is that Santos has an unresolved criminal case in Brazil. What's that about?

Grace Ashford: Yes. This one really surprised us. We started looking at Brazil because, in his most recent disclosure, Mr. Santos says that he owns an apartment down there. We were curious how much time he was spending down there. One of our colleagues, a really excellent Brazilian reporter, Manuela Andreoni, helped us run down a former criminal case that occurred when he was 19.

He apparently stole the checkbook of a man who his mother had been working for as a nurse and used it to write some checks that bounced, I guess, for a number of things including a pair of shoes. A couple of years later, I guess, the police caught up with him. He came in and he confessed, as did his mother to this minor thing with checks. When the time came for him to appear in court to have the matter be disposed, he could not be found. The Brazilian authorities sent someone to his address and they were not able to find him. The case actually does remain unresolved because he never showed up for court.

Brian Lehrer: Bella in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bella.

Bella: Hi, Brian. I wonder this guy lies so much. This liar. Maybe he's the agent from somebody of Russia or even Brazil, can somebody verify for sure he is not?

Brian Lehrer: Any hints of that? I did see that a Russian oligarch reportedly donated five figures to his campaign, that's according to The Daily Beast. That doesn't make him a Russian spy but the caller is asking the question.

Grace Ashford: Right. Yes. He did receive some campaign donations from, I believe, the cousin of a Russian oligarch. We don't know that. We don't have any information to believe that that's true. We're certainly looking into everything and speaking with everyone, and possibly can, who's known him and interacted with him and welcome any tips from anyone who's dealt with him or his businesses, so we can learn more.

Brian Lehrer: Did he support Russia in the war, somebody's telling me that he called Ukraine totalitarian.

Grace Ashford: I'm not 100% sure. I think his statements have changed a little bit on that. I can't really speak to that.

Brian Lehrer: Are any of these things crimes, because Senator Gillibrand was on the show last hour, and a caller asked her about the George Santos case, and whether she or anybody else could prevent him from taking office if all these lies are being reported accurately by you in the New York Times. She said, probably not, because the only thing that could stop somebody from taking a seat they've been elected to is a federal crime. Are any of these things crimes?

Grace Ashford: Well, it's a really good question. Giving false information to the FEC or filing a false statement, those are crimes. However, it's not totally clear just based on the information we have on the disclosures themselves that anything false has been done or said, what's difficult is you don't know what you don't know. Certainly, I think there's a lot of questions about the source of Mr. Santos as well that prosecutors could certainly look into. At the current, what we have now, I don't think there's anything that is imminently actionable with just the information that's public.

Brian Lehrer: About his alleged wealth, he lent his campaign, was it $750,000? There was some of your reporting about that with a question.

Grace Ashford: Yes, I think just a little over $700,000 which is-- Yes, over a couple of different loans, he loaned that money to his campaign. To my knowledge, none of those have been repaid yet but they certainly imply that he has some wealth. Some of the rules around campaign, finance have changed recently. As opposed to in the past, you would have to repay yourself pretty quickly out of campaign funds. Now, I believe you have a bit more time to continue fundraising to repay yourself. We could see that [unintelligible 00:26:16] paying himself down the line if he's able to raise the funds to do so.

Brian Lehrer: On the claim that he made on this show, the four of his employees were killed in the post-nightclub massacre, and you couldn't find any records of any of those victims working for a company that he owned. A listener writes on Twitter, why not simply ask Santos for the names of the four killed at Pulse? I guess he didn't do an interview with you for this story. He would not be questioned by you for this story, so you couldn't ask that or many other questions that you would've had.

Grace Ashford: Yes, we did ask that question repeatedly via email, but we didn't get a response.

Brian Lehrer: Where does this go from here? Now that this is all out here, he hasn't issued a denial. The Republican leadership isn't saying anything. Santo's office apparently just says, yes, no surprise, we have enemies at The New York Times, we're Republicans, what do you do next?

Grace Ashford: Well, we're continuing to report both on developments. As I said, whether criminal authorities take a look into this, whether political, pressure is exerted on Mr. Santos to step aside and we're continuing to report to try to answer some of the questions that our original story raised. As I said, anyone who has any information that can help us to answer those questions, please send it our way.

Brian Lehrer: Grace Ashford, New York Times reporter, who, along with her colleague, Michael Gold, wrote this eye-popping story that was published in The Times on Monday, who is Representative-elect George Santos. His resume may be largely fiction. Thank you for sharing this with us.

Grace Ashford: Thank you so much, Brian.

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