Category: Headlines

Just In | The Hill 

Brazilian authorities are reopening a criminal fraud case against Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) from more than a decade ago and seeking his response, adding to the local and federal investigations already ongoing in the United States following the revelations of the false statements he has made about himself.

A spokesperson for Rio de Janeiro’s prosecutor’s office told The New York Times that police had been unable to locate Santos, but with his location known, the office will request the Justice Department formally notify him of the charges. 

Santos reportedly entered a small clothing store in Niterói, a city outside Rio de Janeiro, shortly before his 20th birthday in 2008 and spent almost $700 using a stolen checkbook and a fake name, according to court records. 

Santos admitted to the shop owner that he committed fraud in August 2009 and wrote on a social media website that he knows he “screwed up” but wants to pay. He and his mother told police the next year that he stole the checkbook from a man that the mother formerly worked for, the Times reported. 

A judge approved a charge against Santos in September 2011 and ordered Santos to respond, but he was in the United States by October. 

Santos previously denied that any criminal charge had been filed against him in Brazil in an interview with The New York Post last week. 

“I am not a criminal here — not here or in Brazil or any jurisdiction in the world,” he said. “Absolutely not. That didn’t happen.” 

Santos’ attorney, Joe Murray, told the Times that “it was no surprise” that Santos has enemies at the Times who are trying to “smear” him with these “defamatory allegations.” 

The Hill has reached out to Santos’ campaign for comment. 

The report comes as Santos is already facing two separate investigations stemming from his admitting having made a variety of false claims about his educational, work and personal background while running for Congress to represent New York’s 3rd Congressional District. 

The district attorney for Nassau County and federal authorities announced last week that they would launch investigations into him. 

Santos admitted to “embellishing” his resume during the interview with the Post, acknowledging that he made false statements about having worked for Goldman Sachs and graduating from Baruch College in New York, neither of which he did. He also conceded that he is not Jewish despite having claimed to be a “proud American Jew” in a position paper during the campaign. 

Many Democrats have called for Santos to step aside from his position in light of the revelations, and a few Republicans have said the House and the GOP should look into his future standing in the body.

​House, criminal fraud, George Santos, Rio de Janeiro, stolen checkbook Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) bid for Speaker hangs in the balance, several far-right members of his own party have indicated that they plan to oppose him in Tuesday’s vote. 

The five “Never Kevin” Republicans — Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.) and Bob Good (Va.) — have pledged to vote as a bloc on Tuesday, and they all appear likely to remain firmly anti-McCarthy.

The group has the potential to derail McCarthy’s Speaker vote, as the House minority leader can afford to lose only four GOP votes after Republicans secured a slim 222-213 majority in November’s midterm elections.

If McCarthy fails to secure a majority on Tuesday, the Speaker election will go to a second ballot for the first time in a century.

Andy Biggs

Despite soundly losing the GOP nomination for Speaker in mid-November, Biggs announced earlier this month that he would challenge McCarthy for the position before the full House.

“I’m running for Speaker to break the establishment,” Biggs said in a tweet on Dec. 6. “Kevin McCarthy was created by, elevated by, and maintained by the establishment.”

Biggs has remained steadfast in his opposition to the current House minority leader, saying in an interview with Fox News on Thursday that he does not see any scenario in which he would vote for McCarthy.

While he has put himself forward as an alternative, Biggs does not appear tied to his own Speakership and has suggested that several other Republican members could be “very capable” of being Speaker.

“We feel support. There are those who will not support me, but there are others who are quietly indicating that they’ll either support me or someone else,” Biggs said in a Fox Business interview on Wednesday.

Matt Gaetz

Gaetz has also remained a staunch opponent to a McCarthy Speakership, recently suggesting that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) should take up the mantle instead.

“I’m not voting for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker because he’s just a shill of The Establishment,” Gaetz told the Daily Caller in a recent interview.

“We need someone like Jim Jordan as the speaker of the House, who can cast a vision and who has the trust and confidence of the people across the spectrum in the House,” he added.

The Florida congressman has repeatedly pushed for Jordan to jump in the race as Tuesday’s vote grows closer.

“All I want for Christmas is @Jim_Jordan to realize he should be Speaker of the House!” Gaetz said in a Christmas Eve tweet, adding on Christmas Day, “Merry Christmas to all! Make sure to join me in encouraging @Jim_Jordan to seek the Speakership.”

However, Jordan himself has shown no indication that he plans to run for Speaker, instead choosing to endorse McCarthy and expressing concern that a McCarthy loss could push moderate Republicans to work with Democrats to find an alternative candidate.

“So let’s hope that there’s never any kind of bargain where you bring the Democrats into play because they’ll be … trying to stop investigations that are our constitutional duty to conduct,” Jordan told Breitbart earlier this month.

Ralph Norman

Unlike his fellow members of the “Never Kevin” squad, Norman appears to have left more room to shift his position on McCarthy. However, he has yet to indicate any change of heart on the upcoming vote.

Norman initially told Politico in late November that he was a “hard” no vote on McCarthy’s Speakership over his approach to the national debt.

“Economic security is national security. I was not happy with the answer Kevin gave me about balancing the budget,” he said at the time. “I don’t care who the speaker is. It could be Mickey Mouse, but if we have our way, we’re gonna have some firm economic mandates.”

However, the South Carolina Republican appeared to soften his stance slightly, with Politico reporting that he was a “no right now” in mid-December. 

“We’ll negotiate,” Norman added, when Axios first reported the group of five’s decision to vote as a bloc. “By 11:59 [a.m.] on Jan. 3, we’ll know.”

While Norman said McCarthy could sway his vote by agreeing to a plan to balance the budget within seven years, he added that it might not persuade the others, who he promised would “all operate as five.” 

“We come as five, so we’re going to agree on all [of the concessions we need],” Norman said, according to Axios.

Matt Rosendale

Rosendale has pointed to McCarthy’s pushback on several proposed rules changes for his participation in the “Never Kevin” group. 

“[McCarthy] made it clear that he is unwilling to meaningfully change the rules and challenge the status quo in Washington,” Rosendale said in an op-ed for the Billings Gazette in early December. 

“Current Republican leadership falls in with the majority of politicians who campaign on change but support the current system that provides them with undeserved power and privilege,” he continued.

Rosendale suggested that he was still on board with the group of five and their opposition to McCarthy in a tweet on Friday.

“We must change the rules and leadership if we are going to restore functionality to congress. There are many more than 5 who recognize this,” Rosendale wrote in response to a post from Gaetz about the Speakership election.

However, the Montana Republican previously said he would vote for McCarthy under “extreme circumstances.”

Bob Good

Good, the final member of the five, insisted in an interview with Politico Playbook last week that McCarthy still does not have his vote.

“He doesn’t have anything that I want,” Good told Playbook.

Good also suggested that between 10 and 20 Republicans would vote against McCarthy on Tuesday. While the Virginia congressman said the anti-McCarthy group plans to vote for Biggs in the first vote, it intends to coalesce around another candidate on the second.

“I believe you have enough courageous conservatives who are recognizing based on past history that there’s nothing to indicate that [McCarthy] will bring the fight to the battle,” Good said in an interview with a local Virginia radio station.

​House, News, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, Matt Rosendale, Ralph Norman Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

The phenomenon of George Santos (R-N.Y.) should come as no surprise.

I don’t have to recount the lies he told to get elected to Congress. He admittedly “embellished” his resumé, lying about his educational background and his ethnicity (at various times, he claimed he was “Jew-ish,” the scion of holocaust survivors, and even said he was “Caucasion and black”).

The circumstances of the death of his mother, whose life he said “9/11 claimed,” were a flat-out lie. In fact, she died in December 2016, 15 years later. I put “George Santos lies” into Google and got a startling 51 million hits, surpassing even Donald Trump, who came up with only 34 million.

Santos’s murky finances are also a great big Pinocchio mirage. In 2020, when he first ran, he claimed he had a salary of $55,000 from a small company. By 2022, his net worth mysteriously soared to somewhere between $3.5 and $11.5 million, according to campaign filings, and he wasn’t even in Congress yet. So far, there has been no adequate explanation.

The murky financial picture is among the most serious questions about Santos. Unknown is the exact source of the $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his campaign in 2022, just two years after filing a financial disclosure report that stated he had no major assets or earned income. The New York Times also reported suspicious spending by Santos’s campaign.

The offices of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly (R) and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz (D) each said they are investigating Santos. ABC News reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island, was also looking into his conduct.

Will these irregularities trigger a special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District so that an electorate, informed of the facts about Santos, can make an intelligent decision on his candidacy? Not bloody likely.

The American people have believed lies throughout their history. We believe what we want to believe and reject the truth when it is staring us right in the face.

The 17th century religious charlatan Cotton Mather told his Massachusetts flock that the world was coming to an end in a week. Then he extended the deadline by a week and then a month, and finally shifted his pronouncements to other topics.

Some lies can be generally accepted. A woman lies about her age; a political candidate distorts his opponent’s record. But they can do much harm.

Orson Welles evoked mass hysteria in his 1938 radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” proclaiming that the Martians were coming. He was so convincing that people, terrified of an imminent extra-terrestrial attack, “ran into the streets screaming that the world was ending. Churches were emptied of their congregations, cinemas of their audiences, restaurants of their patrons. Panic-stricken families rushed to their cars and drove like lunatics in a bid to escape Martian annihilation.”

The issue is how to get Santos out of Congress, assuming he chooses not to resign.

The only qualifications for House membership are spelled out in Article I, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution:

“No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”

Of course, it is possible that Santos is not a citizen. He claims to have been born in Queens to immigrant parents. But his history of lies about virtually everything else may cause Congress to question this claim. He has also sometimes referred to himself as an “immigrant,” and former coworkers say he told them he was born in Brazil, not Queens.

So, has he been a citizen for at least seven years? Who knows? The best evidence that Santos is a citizen is that he may have participated in a sham marriage to bring his “wife” over from Brazil. Although Santos is openly gay, documents have surfaced showing that Santos was “married” to a woman, whom he divorced the year before running for Congress. (Not the best way to prove eligibility.)

Given that Santos appears to be a pathological liar, and the constitutional requirement that he be a citizen to serve in the House, perhaps he could produce a birth certificate or his naturalization papers to clarify the situation. So far, Santos has refused to do so.

Evidently, it never occurred to James Madison in 1789 that a House member could be indicted or convicted for a serious crime. Perhaps the assumption was that if such a horrific thing ever happened, the scoundrel would withdraw.

But so far, Santos isn’t budging. He will be sworn in today. The House makes its own rules, and the Republican majority could refuse to seat him. But this has happened rarely in our history, and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), already on shaky ground, desperately needs Santos’s vote to grab his coveted Speakership.

James D. Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

​Campaign, Opinion, George Santos Read More 

Just In | The Hill 

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) on Tuesday will surpass the late Sen. Mike Mansfield, a Democrat from Montana, as the longest-serving Senate leader in history after 16 years leading the Senate Republican conference.  

McConnell plans to mark the historic occasion with a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday afternoon in which he will commemorate the different leadership styles of some of his predecessors, such as Sen. Joseph Taylor Robinson (D), of Arkansas, who pushed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs through the Senate, and Kentucky Sen. Alben Barkley (D), who clashed with the Roosevelt White House over tax policy. 

“The greatest honor of my career is representing the Commonwealth of Kentucky in this chamber and fighting for my fellow Kentuckians. But the second-greatest honor is the trust that my fellow Republican Senators have placed in me to lead our diverse Conference and help them achieve their goals,” McConnell will say in prepared remarks.  

McConnell, who is 80, was elected to the Senate in 1984 and ascended to Senate Republican leader’s position in 2007 after serving a stint as Senate GOP whip from 2003 to 2007 under former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a close ally of former President George W. Bush.  

McConnell served as Senate majority leader from 2015, after Republicans picked up 9 Senate seats in the 2014 midterm election, until January of 2021, after Republicans lost two run-off races in Georgia, which many GOP senators blamed on former President Trump’s decision to contest the 2020 presidential election.  

McConnell’s leadership style has evolved over the past 16 years.  

He made a reputation for himself in the early years of the Obama administration by repeatedly blocking or slowing down the Democratic agenda with filibusters and other delaying tactics and keeping his small Republican minority of 40 members — and then 41 members — tightly unified.

McConnell’s obstruction of Obama’s agenda was summed up by his bold decision after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016 to keep Scalia’s seat vacant until after that year’s presidential election, refusing to give Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, a floor vote.  

But McConnell over the years has also developed a track record of working with Democrats, such as the deal he hammered out with then Vice President Joe Biden in late 2012 to make permanent most of George W. Bush’s tax cuts and avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. 

In 2021, McConnell voted for President Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan, for which he gave a group of moderate Republicans space to negotiate with a group of moderate Democrats.  

Last year, McConnell voted for legislation to address gun violence after a mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and to improve the competitiveness of the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry.  

Throughout his years as the Senate’s top Republican leader, McConnell has prided himself on being prepared, staying disciplined and only saying what he needed to — whether to the media at Tuesday afternoon press conferences or his Republican colleagues at their regular lunch meetings.  

McConnell’s leadership style more resembles Mansfield’s preference for handling conflicts with low-key, behind-the-scenes diplomacy than Robinson’s red-faced rants and desk-pounding exclamations to move obstinate colleagues.  

“Then there’ve been leaders who rose to the job through lower-key, behind-the-scenes styles; who preferred to focus on serving their colleagues rather than dominating them,” McConnell will say in his prepared remarks.  

“And that, Mr. President, is how Sen. Michael Joseph Mansfield of Montana became the longest-serving Senate leader in American history until this morning,” he will say.  

Mansfield, who was elected in 1952, served as Senate majority leader from 1961 to 1977, and played a critical role in shepherding President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society agenda.  

He worked closely with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), to break a filibuster by conservative Senate Democrats against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  

​Senate, News Read More