It might be hard to find someone to have your back in politics if you get caught lying about your life story, become one of a handful of people ever expelled from Congress and then are thrown into federal prison.
But George Santos is no ordinary former politician.
In a letter Monday, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene formally came to the aid of the disgraced ex-congressman with a request that his seven-year prison sentence be commuted, arguing that the length of the term represented “a grave injustice.”
The plea, which was sent to a Justice Department pardon attorney, came less than two weeks after Santos began his sentence.
“While his crimes warrant punishment, many of my colleagues who I serve with have committed far worse offenses than Mr. Santos yet have faced zero criminal charges,” Greene, a Georgia Republican, wrote without elaborating. “I strongly believe in accountability for one’s actions, but I believe the sentencing of Mr. Santos is an abusive overreach by the judicial system.”
Republican President Donald Trump, in an interview with the conservative news outlet Newsmax last week, said no one has talked to him about taking action in Santos’ case, but added “that’s a long time” when told of the ex-congressman’s seven-year sentence.
“He lied like hell,” Trump said. “And I didn’t know him but he was 100% for Trump.”
Santos pleaded guilty last year to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft following a damaging indictment that alleged he stole from political donors, paid for personal expenses with campaign contributions, lied to Congress and collected unemployment benefits while working.
Santos was once heralded in the Republican Party for winning a perennially contested New York congressional seat covering parts of Queens and Long Island. However, it all began to unravel when it became clear that he fabricated much of his life story.
At one point, he falsely claimed that his mother died in the 9/11 attacks. At another, he had to clarify that he was “Jew-ish,” not Jewish, when pressed about a claim that his grandparents had fled the Holocaust.
The lies made him a political pariah before he even got to Washington. Once there, he survived two expulsion attempts before a scathing House ethics committee report in late 2023 sealed his fate. He was expelled from Congress after a vote later that same year, becoming the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be removed by colleagues.
Santos, long a Trump loyalist, has been holding out hope that his support of the Republican president could result in a reprieve from his criminal sentence.
In a dispatch from prison published Monday in the The South Shore Press, a newspaper on Long Island, Santos wrote, “It’s been just over a week now, but I can tell you this much: when people say ‘prison sucks,’ they aren’t just talking about the bars and the bunks.”
“It’s not just the loss of freedom — it’s the erosion of your dignity. It’s realizing how many basic human rights we all take for granted on the outside.”
