The president of the United States, Donald Trump, this Friday commuted the prison sentence imposed on , who invented his resume and was , and ordered his immediate release from prison, where he was serving a seven-year sentence for a federal case of electronic fraud and aggravated identity theft. He had entered prison in July.
The president has resorted, as usual, to a publication on his Truth Social platform to announce the measure of grace. “George Santos may be a rogue, but there are many rogues in our country who are not forced to serve seven years in prison,” Trump wrote, saying after comparing his case with that of Democratic Senator Richard Da Nang Dick Blumenthal. “As everyone remembers, Da Nang He claimed for almost twenty years that he was a proud Vietnam veteran, who had endured the worst of the war, seeing the wounded and the dead as he ran through the hills and valleys, blood pouring from his face. He was ‘a great hero’, he told everyone who would listen… And then it happened! “It was a TOTAL AND ABSOLUTE FRAUD,” he states, in his usual emphatic capital letters.
Because of this precedent now rescued from oblivion, Trump says he made the decision to release the former Republican representative, but also, fundamentally, because he is one of his own. “[Da Nang] He never went to Vietnam (…) His status as a war hero was totally and completely INVENTED. This is much worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the courage, conviction and intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICANS. George has been in solitary confinement for long periods of time and, from all indications, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I have just signed a commutation of sentence, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck, George, have a great life!” concludes the president.
Congressman Santos, who won his New York seat in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, saw the fiction he passed for life crumble when a journalist investigating Holocaust survivors in a New York county discovered that he was not the grandson of Ukrainian Jews persecuted by Hitler and refugees in Brazil, as he claimed. Barely a month had passed since he was elected.
Santos admitted the fabrications in an interview with the sensationalist New York Postafter the diary The New York Times revealed, based on initial information, that the congressman had lied about his resume and that he did not have the university degree he claimed to have. The neophyte congressman—he had not yet even collected the minutes—said during his campaign that he was a graduate of New York University and that he had worked at Wall Street financial giants such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He also said he had a family real estate portfolio of 13 properties; but it turned out not to be the owner of any, and to live in a modest shared home.
Santos, who admitted to lying during his campaign and stealing from his donors, was booked into the FCI Fairton federal prison in southern New Jersey in July. A judge sentenced the former New York lawmaker to more than seven years in prison after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. The judge also ordered him to pay more than $370,000 in restitution.
held in New York that December 2022, when his lies began to surface. Those figures marginal Two years later they became the hardcore of the MAGA movement that brought Trump to the White House for the second time. The now pardoned congressman also spoke at the Republican national convention held in July 2024 in Milwaukee and, during the presidential campaign, at several Trump campaign rallies in New York.
A display of loyalty like that of Santos is usually rewarded with generosity by the Republican president. As soon as he took office for his second term, in January, which he himself, a bad loser of the 2020 elections, encouraged and encouraged on January 6, 2021. At the end of May, among them those of a sheriff, a gang member and a former congressman.
