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George Santos is eating up a lot of media attention right now. I don’t think there’s a single politician who has so effectively lied his way into power as Santos, and honestly, it’s a bit impressive.

I mentioned a little over a week ago that the most significant part of the Santos story no one will talk about is just how bad the Democratic Party’s oppo research in New York appears to have been. There were apparently signs and claims that his opponent’s campaign knew some of the lies, but they never hit on them. They either thought a D+3 district Biden had won by 10 points in 2020 was safe or they struggled to maintain any offensive against GOP talking points, so they never really got that particular message out there.

Or, they just flat out didn’t do their job on the opposition research front and all this talk about not getting the message out there is cover for that.

On Tucker Carlson’s show last night, guest host and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard tore into Santos over the lies.

As my colleague Mike Miller has pointed out (along with others), there are plenty of reasons to mock the Democrats’ hypocrisy. Their party leader, President Joe Biden, has told some pretty massive lies over the years, and he’s never been called on to address or apologize for them.

Let’s do a quick refresh, shall we? Here’s a summary of Joe’s lies, as provided by NewsBusters:

  • Made multiple lies about his academic background. Among them was his claim to have graduated in the top half of his law school class. He graduated 76th out of 85.
  • Fabricated his family background, plagiarizing a story from Brit Neil Kinnock’s speech about his family bio.
  • Lied about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver.
  • Lied about quitting the Delaware football team in order to visit his girlfriend. In fact, he quit because of poor grades.
  • Lied in saying, “I got started out of an HBCU, Delaware State.” He never attended Delaware State or any historically black college or university.
  • Lied about his involvement in the civil rights movement.
  • Lied about being arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.

And of course, “The Big Guy” ridiculously continues to lie about his involvement with — or even knowledge of — his crackhead son Hunter’s shady business dealings. Moreover, multiple reports allege that the Biden Family Business, headed by Joe, makes Godfather Don Corleone look like a piker. So again, why hasn’t the door hit this guy in the behind on the way out? Yep, Democrat hypocrisy.

I want to get back to that last bit – the bit about Hunter – shortly.

Resume embellishment, even to the extremes Santos took, doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it bothers the Democrats. I’m sure a few of them will call me a partisan hack over it (someone has already accused me of being “just another Trumper excusing more Republican lies,” which may come as a shock to some of you), but if we took every politician who lied about themselves to task for deceiving the voters, we may not have a political class.

As an aside, that wouldn’t offend me much at all.

Anyway, it’s not the lies that are bothering me at this point. It’s the reports of his sudden, unexplained financial prosperity that give me pause.

When Santos in June 2021 announced his bid for New York’s 3rd District, which largely represents an affluent section of the North Shore of Long Island, he made a promise that few other candidates could match. If elected, he said in a campaign video, “I pledge to never take a salary.”

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He furthered the impression that he was independently wealthy by lending his campaign at least $580,000, and his political action committee at least $27,000, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The loans played a key role in his surprising victory and helped give Republicans a narrow majority in the House.

In his first bid for the House, Santos said in a 2020 financial disclosure that he had no assets or earned income, and he only cited a commission worth more than $5,000.

But by the time Santos filed his 2022 financial disclosure, he declared he was worth millions of dollars, with most of the wealth coming from a Florida company in which he was the sole owner: the Devolder Organization.

The problem is that, somewhere along the way, he came into a lot more money.

In any case, on Sept. 6, when Santos filed his financial disclosure report with the clerk of the U.S. House, he said the Devolder Organization had provided him with millions of dollars. Santos reported that the Devolder Organization had paid him an annual salary of $750,000 in 2021 and 2022, and that the company was worth between $1 million and $5 million.

Asked in the radio interview about a report that he had put $700,000 into his campaign, he responded: “That is the money of — that I’ve paid myself through my company, Devolder Organization.”

Candidates are required to file accurate reports of their finances with the clerk of the House. If a candidate knowingly files a form that is false, it could violate a number of laws, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

The question of where that money came from should be of the utmost importance here, which brings me back to the Hunter Biden issue.

Republicans in Congress are preparing to investigate further the Biden laptop story, and Hunter and Joe Biden in general, because they see a pay-for-play game where foreign bodies paid massive amounts of money for access to Joe Biden. There are still questions about the Hunter Biden art deals and whether or not they are a front for something along the same vein.

That’s what is raising flags for me about Santos. We likewise don’t know where his money is coming from, and if $700,000 got injected into his campaign from a foreign body, that is a big, big issue. Jim Geraghty at National Review had similar questions.

For all we know, some foreign power may have bought itself a congressman. This isn’t outlandish speculation, as one of his largest donors has ties to the Russian government. The Daily Beast pointed to a February 12 tweet from Santos that reads, “We are going to enter a war in the middle of the Eastern Europe winter against Russia, to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine. Meanwhile this is the sight at the US southern border, where our sovereignty is no longer a priority.”

Shockingly, pathological liars aren’t all that consistent in their foreign-policy beliefs, because ten days later Santos was telling Fox News that President Biden was too weak in standing up to Russia.

That’s not to say that I think Santos was bought and paid for by the Russians, but I do think that Santos needs to give us a pretty detailed accounting of where his money came from and how we can be sure it wasn’t from non-American entities looking for access to Congressional power (honestly, the fact that Democrats aren’t hitting this a bit harder is surprising to me, but they have not been very clever where Santos is concerned, it seems).

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