Weepy George Santos Promises to Change After Guilty Plea

George Santos, the serial grifter who ascended to a congressional seat only for his lies, crimes, and various shenanigans to drag him down, pleaded guilty on Monday to federal charges of aggravated identity theft and wire fraud.

The 36-year-old’s plea marks an end to a two-year legal saga and will see him avoid a criminal trial that had been set to kick off next month. He faces years behind bars when his sentence is handed down on Feb. 7. His charges carry a minimum of two years in prison and a maximum of 22 years.

As part of the deal with prosecutors, Santos must also pay more than $373,000 in restitution and $205,000 in forfeiture.

After Monday’s hearing, according to The Hill, Santos told reporters on the courthouse steps that he had “allowed ambition to cloud my judgment, leading me to make decisions that were unethical and guilty.”

Choking up, he added, “Pleading guilty is a step I never imagined I’d take, but it is a necessary one because it is the right thing to do.

“I hope that by facing these consequences head on, I can begin to demonstrate my commitment to change and to earning your forgiveness,” Santos said.

“I want to be a part of restoring the integrity that I helped diminish. And I will work tirelessly to regain the trust of those I have let down.”

Last May, just months into his freshman term, Santos was indicted on 13 counts of defrauding donors to his 2022 House campaign and falsely claiming unemployment benefits. Five months later, prosecutors tacked on 10 more charges of aggravated identity theft and making materially false statements to the Federal Election Commission.

Santos initially denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the 23 charges against him. “I will fight the witch-hunt,” he assured reporters.

That the disgraced former lawmaker had changed his mind and started circling a plea deal was reported late last week.

Santos was kicked out of Congress last December by a vote of 311-114 after a House ethics committee found “substantial evidence” that he had misused campaign funds for personal use. He was accused of dropping donors’ cash on, among other things, Hermès items, luxury getaways, and Botox.

It wasn’t long after his stormy departure from Capitol Hill that Santos was attempting to mount a public comeback, however. He launched a Cameo account, claiming at one point that he was raking in up to six figures on the personalized-video service. (Earlier on Monday, a judge threw out a lawsuit Santos had filed in February against Jimmy Kimmel over the comedian’s Cameo requests.)

He also established a presence on OnlyFans, where he currently charges subscribers around $30 a month for “full behind the scenes access.” It was not immediately clear if he would shutter either account if sent to prison.

After an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2020—a loss that he, in the vein of former President Donald Trump, baldly refused to accept—Santos was swept into office in Nov. 2022, flipping his district and becoming the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican elected to federal office.

Just weeks after joining Congress, however, outlets like The New York Times began reporting that key parts of his resume and biography had been wholly fabricated.

Among his bogus claims: that he had ancestors who fled the Holocaust, a mother who was at the World Trade Center on 9/11, a niece who’d been kidnapped by Chinese spies, and four employees who died in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

No evidence was found to substantiate any of those claims.

“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos infamously told the New York Post in an interview copping to some, but not all, of his lies. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”

He soon walked back other claims, including one that he’d never been a Brazilian drag queen. “I was young, and I had fun at a festival,” he said after photos surfaced of his alter ego, Kitara. “Sue me for having a life.”

He also lied about where he went to both high school and college, his time on Wall Street (he had logged none, as bemused representatives of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, the firms where he’d claimed to have worked, confirmed), and helped produce the notorious Broadway flop Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

Even as his term began showing the first signs of total meltdown, the scams and scandals kept accumulating. Early last year, he was accused by a disabled Navy veteran of stealing from his service dog’s surgery fund in 2016.

Santos has repeatedly denied that he swindled the vet, whose dog died less than a year after the alleged con. The FBI is reportedly investigating.