President Trump demurred on whether he’ll pardon disgraced former Long Island Rep. George Santos, who kicked off a seven-year prison sentence for fraud last week.
Despite Santos’ claims he had been privately lobbying for a pardon, Trump indicated the push to give the fabulist some sort of clemency was news to him.
“He lied like hell, I have to tell you. And I didn’t know him, but he was 100% for Trump. I might have met him, maybe, maybe not, I don’t know,” Trump told Newsmax host Rob Finnerty on Friday.
“Nobody has talked to me about it,” Trump said of a Santos pardon, before taking note of the former Congressman’s prison sentence. “It’s a long time.”
Santos, 37, pleaded guilty in August 2024 to aggravated identity theft charges and wire fraud for swindling donors to bankroll his campaign for Congress.
Prosecutors accused Santos of falsely claiming he had $250,000 in donations to qualify for the National Republican Congressional Committee’s “Young Guns” program.
Santos also preyed upon elderly donors and charged credit cards without authorization for frivolous expenses, authorities said. Some of the charges billed to donors include Botox treatments, OnlyFans purchases, jaunts to Atlantic City casinos, French fashion attire, and more, prosecutors said.
Santos denied some of the accusations made by prosecutors and blamed others on his former treasurer Nancy Marks, who cooperated with authorities.
“But he was a congressman and his vote was solid; it sounds like a lot. You know, you could blame the other side for not checking him out,” Trump added.
“You could say the media misses. Everybody missed it. They found out about it after the election was won.”
Trump was referencing the series of scandals against Santos after he was caught lying about vast swaths of his personal backstory, including falsely claiming he was a star volleyball player at New York University even though he never attended the school; that he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and that his Jewish grandparents fled prosecution in Europe.
In reality, his grandparents were born in Brazil, and he has since described himself as “Jew-ish.”
Santos, who was ousted in a late 2023 bipartisan vote, was the sixth House lawmaker to be expelled from the lower chamber.
Since then, he’s launched a podcast, titled “Pants on Fire,” and revealed he had been pressing behind the scenes for some form of clemency from Trump, though in May, Santos said he dropped that pursuit.
“Even though I initially considered the prospect of petitioning the president with a pardon application I have seized that approach as I will not spend the last 61 days I have of life scrambling on how to get past a bunch of guard dogs,” he said.
In his remaining weeks before reporting to prison, Santos made several media appearances including on the “Tucker Carlson Show,” in which he admitted to being terrified of winding up behind bars.
“I’m not suicidal. I’m not depressed. I have no intentions of harming myself, and I will not willingly engage in any sexual activity while I’m in there,” Santos wrote on X earlier this month.
Trump also acknowledged that Sean “Diddy” Combs’ allies have pushed for a pardon, but was noncommittal about pardoning him or Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
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