The Local Paper That First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how the story began. “We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things,” Lally told her. “He was so well known, at least in the more active political circles, to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamtos.” Lally explains how redistricting drama in New York State turned Santos from a “sacrificial” candidate—to whom no one was paying attention—to a front-runner. At the same time, Malone thinks, “the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues” enabled his penchant for fabrication. “[There’s] lots of crazy stuff that’s popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, Eh, who’s gonna check?”

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0:42.5	Yeah, eBay. Things people love.
0:49.2	This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.
1:07.0	The Trump years were a frenzy of daily, deliberate fabrication.
1:15.2	So perhaps the revelations about Congressman George Santos' self-fashionedings aren't as shocking to us as they should be.
1:19.2	But you've got to give him credit. His laws are extra.
1:23.4	They've ranged from the injuries he got on the college volleyball team.
1:29.4	By the way, a sport he never played at a college he never attended, to alleged criminal misrepresentation on campaign finance.
1:33.3	He's gone from punchline to pariah, even in his own party.
1:37.3	He's a national joke, he's an international joke, but this joke's got to go.
1:42.3	He is a stain on the House of Representatives. He's a stain
1:45.9	on the third congressional district. Mr. Santos, haven't you done enough harm? Most of us first
1:52.9	learned about Santos from reporting in the pages of the New York Times. But the story really
1:57.8	emerged months earlier in a newspaper called The North Shore Leader.
2:02.5	They were sounding the alarm, except nobody really heard it.
	...

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