Republican Representative-elect George Santos admitted on Monday to lying about his work experience and education while campaigning for a position in the House of Representatives. The Representative-Elect said it would not stop him from serving his full two-year term as a congressman.
Following a report which revealed Santos’ embellishments about his work history. Santos, who helped Republicans seize a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, touted an image of being the “full embodiment of the American dream” as an openly gay man who is the son of Brazilian immigrants, who became a “seasoned Wall street financier and investor”.
Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the newspaper reported, had no record of Santos having worked there. The administration at Baruch College, which Santos said he had graduated from in 2010, also said no one with his name or date of birth was in that year’s graduating class.
“I am not a criminal,” Santos said in an interview on Monday. “This [controversy] will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”
“To get down to the nit and gritty, I’m not a fraud. I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I’ve been around a long time. I mean, a lot of people know me. They know who I am. They’ve done business dealings with me,” he added.
“I’m not going to make excuses for this, but a lot of people overstate in their resumes, or twist a little bit… I’m not saying I’m not guilty of that,” he said.
“I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume,” he said.
Santos explained that he had worked at a company called Link Bridge and helped make “capital introductions” between clients and investors including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
Last week, US media also reported Santos’ claims of being a descendant of Jews who were victims of the Holocaust may have also been fabricated based on contradicting sources as well as Santos’ family tree. Santos had made the claim that his grandparents fled the Holocaust as Ukrainian refugees in Belgium.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos explained. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
In an appearance last month at the Jewish News Syndicate, Santos said he was “very proud” of his Jewish heritage. And in May of this year he said that his “grandparents survived the Holocaust, so these regimes of socialism, Marxism, they don’t work, and they’re followed up by a lot of hurt, and we’re seeing that currently and what’s happening in Ukraine with the Russians.”
“There’s no sign of Jewish and/or Ukrainian heritage and no indication of name changes along the way,” said Megan Smolenyak, an author and professional genealogist.
According to a US media outlet, who spoke to “multiple genealogists,” there were no records of Santo’s grandparents at the Holocaust Museum or the International Center for Nazi Persecution, which keeps records of Jewish refugees.