The George Santos report that led half his campaign staff to quit

If you want something done, do it yourself — that includes getting a report on your fake résumé written up before your political adversaries can. It’s advice that the George Santos campaign took to heart when he was running for Congress in 2022.  

Months before the media began to pounce upon Santos’s seemingly endless stream of lies, he already had them well documented. In 2021, his campaign paid $16,600 to Capital Research Group in Washington, DC, to deliver a secret internal report on Santos’s storied past.  

The 100-page report, obtained exclusively by CBS News, documents Santos’s vulnerabilities as a candidate including lies about his college diploma, his marriage to a woman while openly gay and his ties with a company that the Security Exchange Commission labeled a “Ponzi scheme.”  

It’s standard procedure on any campaign to commission a vulnerability report to see what the candidate’s weak points are and what their opponent might hit you with. Why Santos would double down on his fabricated personal history given that his campaign knew it to be discoverable is unclear to Cockburn.

According to CBS, a number of GOP strategists were aware of the report leading up to the elections. In January, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he “always had a few questions about” Santos’s résumé — but that didn’t stop him from supporting Santos during calls for the congressman to resign.  

The report also predicted many of the federal criminal charges that Santos is currently facing for his finances. Santos was indicted by a federal grand jury in May with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives and one count of theft of public funds.  

Just as Santos refused to back down over his claims of “Jew-ishness,” he has refused to plead guilty to the charges. Multiple outlets have reported that Santos and his former campaign aides, Samuel Miele, are preparing to enter a plea deal. Prosecutors in the case asked to delay the court hearing, set for Thursday, because “the parties have continued to discuss possible paths forward in this matter,” according to the New York Post. But Santos denies these accounts.

“I’ll let you write your speculative garbage and misinform the American people,” Santos told the Post. “That’s what the media does best.” But when it comes to misinforming the American people, surely we should all be taking notes from Kitara Ravache herself…