Former Rep. George Santos arrives at federal court for sentencing in April in New York.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Perhaps the most notable thing about President Donald Trump’s Friday decision to commute the prison sentence of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) is how unsurprising it is. In the end, one felon from Queens has come to the aid of another felon from Queens.
The president hasn’t done so because he believes Santos was falsely accused—not even Trump could convince himself of that—but because Santos stayed loyal. As Trump put it in his post announcing the commutation, Santos was “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” but he “had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
Joseph Murray, Santos’ lawyer, told me he learned that Trump was commuting his client’s sentence when the president posted about it on Truth Social Friday evening. Hours later, Santos was released from a prison in South Jersey after serving less than three months of a more than seven-year sentence.
The commutation did not come totally out of the blue for Murray, who said he had been in “constant communication” with lawyers at the Justice Department’s pardon office. That office is now led by Ed Martin, a former Stop the Steal organizer, who posed for photographs in a trench coat outside the home of New York Attorney General Letitia James this August.
Two months later, James was indicted on flimsy charges filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is overseen by Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and personal attorney for Trump, who the president installed after his previous pick for the job declined to bring charges against James and James Comey. Martin was seen as playing a significant role in both indictments—just as he appears to have worked to free Santos and participants in the January 6 insurrection.
The lesson is clear: There is one set of laws for the president’s supporters, and another one for those who have run afoul of him.
In August 2024, Santos pled guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. As part of the plea, he admitted to participating in a credit card fraud scheme in which his campaign stole “the personal identity and financial information of contributors” then “charged [those] contributors’ credit cards repeatedly.” As part of the scheme, the Justice Department said “Santos sought out victims he knew were elderly persons suffering from cognitive impairment or decline.”
Santos was ordered to pay more than $373,000 of restitution to his victims when he was sentenced in April. Trump’s commutation wipes out those restitution payments.
Santos also admitted to a fake donor scheme first exposed by me and my colleague David Corn. That scheme involved listing more than $45,000 of donations from relatives of his in Queens who had never actually donated. The motive was to make his campaign seem like it was in a better financial position than it actually was.
In January 2023, I visited the Queens home of one of those relatives, whom Santos’ campaign claimed had donated $2,900 on two occasions. “I’m dumbfounded,” the relative said about the fake donations. They added, “I don’t have that money to throw around!”
We also exposed what appeared to be an even more brazen fake donation scheme conducted during Santos’ first run for Congress in 2020. In those cases, Santos’ campaign listed donations from people who did not exist and people who reportedly lived at nonexistent addresses.
Many of Santos’ other lies were not criminal in nature. Some of them were comical; others were abhorrent. As we wrote in 2023:
Santos falsely claimed that he wrecked his knees playing on a college volleyball team that “slayed” Harvard and Yale; that he had helped produce Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a musical that lost tens of millions of dollars; that he was Jewish and that his ancestors had fled the Holocaust; that four of his employees died in the Pulse nightclub shooting; and that the attacks on 9/11 had taken his mother’s life.
There was also the misappropriation of campaign funds exposed by a congressional investigation before Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives in December 2023. That included spending campaign funds on OnlyFans, Botox, and a skincare spa.
Santos had published a personal plea to Trump in the South Shore Press, a Long Island publication, on Monday. The former Congressman wrote that he was in solitary confinement, while the FBI investigated what he claimed was an alleged death threat made against him. He made a point of stressing his loyalty to Trump as he asked for the president’s aid.
When Murray and I spoke on Saturday morning he was on his way to meet Santos. He reported having received tremendous support for his client from both strangers and former colleagues of Santos’ like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whom he aid had been “leading the charge” in Congress to get Santos out of prison. “The American people are the most generous, forgiving, compassionate people in the world,” Murray reflected. “And this is just more proof of it.”
I asked Murray whether Santos was sorry for the crimes he committed and is now seeking a second chance, or if he would be contesting the things to which he pled guilty. “That’s something that he should respond to because you’re trying to get inside his head,” Murray responded. “So, I’m going to leave that for him.”
