After Incoming Lawmaker Accused of Faking Resume, a Fake Quote

UPDATE Dec 20, 2022 12:40 AM CST

Included in the statement from a congressman-elect who was accused of faking his resume was ... a fake Winston Churchill quote. Attorney Joseph Murray's statement concludes with the line, "As Winston Churchill famously stated, ‘You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.'" But, as PolitiFact reported in 2019, there's no evidence Churchill ever said that; rather, it appears to be a modernized version of a line from a Victor Hugo essay written three decades before Churchill's birth. The defiant statement does not actually refute any of the allegations of falsehoods in Santos' resume, Politico reports. Democrats are calling for a House ethics investigation into the matter, the Washington Post reports.

Dec 19, 2022 10:25 AM CST

The New York Times has dug deep into the stated background of congressman-elect George Santos and found a slew of problems with the 34-year-old Republican's resume. Santos, a staunch supporter of former President Trump, is headed to Congress next month after winning in a Long Island district where Democrats were favored. Some of the investigation's key points:

• The newspaper found no evidence that he worked for Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, as he claimed.
• Baruch College has no evidence of him graduating from there, and New York University has no evidence he attended class there, either.

• Santos claimed that he lost four employees in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting of 2016, but the Times went through the backgrounds of all 49 victims and found no connection to any company affiliated with Santos. The congressman-elect is gay, and Pulse was a gay nightclub.
• The IRS has no record of a tax-exempt organization registered as Friends of Pets United, a charity Santos claimed to have founded in 2013.
• Santos says his parents came to this country from Brazil, and the Times reports that a check-fraud case against him from when he was 19 remains outstanding there. He allegedly stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, then used the checks to buy things.
• Santos didn't respond to the Times, but lawyer Joe Murray said in a statement that it was "no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations."

(More congressman stories.)