#georgesantos

Santos also has an outstanding criminal charge in Brazil, where there is evidence he stole an elderly man’s checks—he denies this, although has produced no evidence—and questions about where the $700,000 he apparently lent to his 2022 campaign came from, since he was in trouble over relatively small outstanding debts as recently as 2020. Finally, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out, although Santos claims to have been born in Queens to immigrants from Brazil, it is not entirely clear that he is a U.S. citizen. Former co-workers say he told them he was born in Brazil.

My bet is we haven’t seen the last of the indictments around this scheme or these individuals. For the moment, the superseding indictment now charges Santos with the credit card fraud scheme directly. In its follow up report on Tuesday, TPM notes that the indictment alleges Santos charged the credit cards of his contributors “repeatedly, without their authorization” before paying the money to himself, his campaign and other election operations. The brazenness of the scheme was laid bare in the charging document, with one donor’s card racking up over $44,800 in several months, of which at least $11,000 went to Santos’s personal bank account.