Fabulist elect ...

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Fabulist-elect George Santos, unqualified to be a congressman, proves, in part, the art of BS, along with a bit of creative story telling, can go a long way in getting elected in the land of the brave and home of the free.

To whit ...

Earlier this week, The New York Times set off a political bomb after it published a story that pointed out the numerous holes in Congressman-elect George Santos’s résumé. The report illuminated several instances in which Santos appears to have committed fabulism. There’s reason to doubt that he graduated from Baruch College. There’s reason to doubt he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. There’s reason to question the tax-exempt status of his organization for rescuing animals. And there was reason to question the source of his wealth.

Days have passed, and Santos has been unable to disprove that he’s a real-life Bob Benson. That he is now under increasing scrutiny for what seems to be a grossly inflated résumé should not be an entire surprise to the Republican congressman or anyone else. Some months prior to the election, a small weekly local newspaper called The North Shore Leader had published an editorial that—while ostensibly endorsing Robert Zimmerman, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 3rd congressional district—broadly questioned the story Santos had sold to the public. Another North Shore Leader article reported glaring inconsistencies in his late campaign finance report: Two years ago Santos had no substantial assets, but by 2022, he was claiming a net worth of millions of dollars.

Inconvenient factoids ...

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Mr. Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

A fabulist indeed.

Addendum ...  It does not matter.

Yet even as Mr. Santos, whose victory helped Republicans secure a narrow majority in the next House of Representatives, admitted to some fabrication, his actions will likely not prevent him from being seated in Congress.

Lastly ...

Intentionally omitting or misrepresenting information on a congressional financial disclosure is considered a federal crime.

In other words ... This sentence is false.