• The “George Santos” story gets stranger every day. MoJo summarized the initial story, then moved it forward:
On Monday, The New York Times published an explosive story revealing that George Santos, a New York Republican elected last month to the House of Representatives, had made what appeared to be brazenly false statements about his background, including assorted claims about his business career. He had boasted of being an accomplished investor and financier who had worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Yet each firm noted it had no record of his employment there. He had said he graduated from Baruch College. The school said he had not. His personal finances seemed odd as well, and he had worked at a Florida company called Harbor City Capital that was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021 of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Subsequently, he supposedly made at least $3.5 million from a mysterious company, called Devolder Organization LLC, that he started, that had no public profile, and that was dissolved soon after it was created. This marked a dramatic shift from his first run for Congress in 2020, when he reported earning $55,000 per year.
The day after the Times story appeared, Santos took a curious step: He revived that mystery firm that he had claimed as the source of millions of dollars of income, and he listed as its address a Florida property associated with a former top official of the company that allegedly mounted that Ponzi scheme. Devolder’s resurrection was first reported by Talking Points Memo. The story of this firm is a key component of the Santos scandal.
Santos — or whatever his real name is — is attempting damage control this week by sitting down for an interview with the New York Post. Their headline shows about how well that went: “Liar Rep.-elect George Santos admits fabricating key details of his bio.”
After admitting to “embellishing” his background with made-up educational and employment histories, Santos struggled to address some of his other bogus claims:
Santos, elected to Congress on Nov. 8 to represent the Long Island- and Queens-based 3rd District, was also accused of lying about his family history, saying on his campaign website that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Nazis during World War II.
Santos now says that he’s “clearly Catholic,” but claimed his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos said. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
There’s more — so much more. And there’s bound to be more tomorrow.
• Speaking of people who aren’t who they claim to be … the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette follows up on the wild, strange story it first reported on in the summer.
Back in August, a team of PG reporters gave us “Inventing Anna: The Tale of a Fake Heiress, Mar-a-Lago and an FBI Investigation.” The woman in the photo above visited TFG’s golf club and home four times, passing herself off as “Anna de Rothschild,” heir of the banking family beloved by conspiracy theorists. She turned out to be, instead, “Inna Yashchyshyn, a Russian-speaking immigrant from Ukraine,” proprietor of several dubious charities.
The new report from the paper, assisted by reporters from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project — “Chasing Anna: Russian Mob Pursued Fake Heiress Who Spent Days at Mar-a-Lago” — tells us more about those purported charities. It reads like a sequel to Ozark, Jason Bateman’s Netflix series about a money launderer desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the Very Bad People he’s both serving and stealing from.
Just months before she posed as a powerful banking heiress and swept through the gates of Mar-a-Lago in a black Mercedes Benz SUV, Inna Yashchyshyn was bombarded by threats from a Russian crime group with a history of money laundering and murder.
The 34-year-old Ukrainian immigrant — once known as Anna de Rothschild — had founded a Miami charity and launched a campaign that was supposed to raise money for impoverished families.
But this wasn’t just any charity drive.
Thousands of dollars were funneled into her organization under an arrangement that the group said it had reached with her in 2020, according to one of the network’s senior members.
And now the member of the criminal group known as the Thieves in Law demanded that she give back the money.
The Russians’ money apparently comes from stolen credit cards, illicit income that “Anna” had agreed to legitimize for them by laundering it through her charity, in exchange for a 40% cut of the take. Instead, the mobsters say, she kept all of it, which they find upsetting. (How the reporting team managed to arrange and conduct its interviews with these guys seems like another story as strange and fascinating as the one they’re reporting.) This seems to be a tale of dishonor among thieves, with double- and triple-crossing leading to paranoia, distrust, and at least one attempted murder in Quebec involving other versions of the fake-charity franchise and a Canadian branch of the Hell’s Angels.
What does any of that have to do with Mar-a-Lago and with “Anna’s” attempts to infiltrate the Former Guy’s inner circle there? I still don’t know. But it sure seems bad.
Strange, too, that all of this drama, crime, and skullduggery is swirling around a place that is otherwise, apparently, mainly characterized by boredom, delusion, and depression.
• Here’s another local-paper story from the Indianapolis Star. “A chance encounter and mother’s intuition: How 2 Indy women helped find missing Ohio twin.”
Cousins Shyann Delmar and Mecka Curry first helped police find the apparently troubled woman who had kidnapped the toddler from Ohio. Then, with a lot of pluck and a little luck, they did some crackerjack detective work on their own to locate the missing child, safely retrieving him from a snow-covered car just before temperatures plunged this weekend. Heroes.
• That story has a happier ending than this other story involving local police refusing to listen to Black residents: “As Black women go missing in Kansas City, Black community looks to itself for solutions.”
Kansas City community leaders were so concerned about the number of missing Black women that they raised the possibility of a serial killer preying on women around Prospect Avenue. Police emphatically denied any such thing. Then, in October:
A young Black woman escaped from a home in Excelsior Springs after allegedly being kidnapped by Timothy Haslett Jr., who is accused of sexually assaulting and beating her over several weeks. The woman said Haslett also killed two women who were in captivity with her before she escaped.
Haslett is facing charges of first-degree rape, first-degree kidnapping and second-degree assault.
The woman was taken from Prospect Avenue in Kansas City.
A reminder: If Haslett is guilty of all that he’s accused of, then he’s a monster. But everything he did was perfectly legal and his constitutionally protected right for the first fourscore and nine years of this country. This, again, is what “originalism” means and what it is for.
• Tim Dickinson gives us a long profile of extremist hatemonger Jackson Lahmeyer, “Meet the Christian Nationalist Behind ‘Pastors For Trump.’”
Lahmeyer is the pastor of a church in Tulsa who ran a splashy right-wing primary challenge against Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford. Lankford is also a pastor-turned-politician. The senator is Southern Baptist and a graduate of its fundamentalist Southwestern seminary. Lahmeyer is an Oral Roberts University graduate and exemplifies the MAGA-Pentecostalism of Charisma magazine. Lankford’s overwhelming victory in the primary was probably due more to the advantages of incumbency than to the relative popularity of his brand of white Christianity, but the race was still an interesting contrast between those two competing strains of white-/Christian-nationalism.
Lahmeyer was often described as running an “unconventional” campaign, relying more on outrageous statements and trolling on social media than on more traditional electioneering. But his strategy actually seemed completely conventional in a different sense. He ran a fairly typical running-to-fundraise campaign — the kind intended not to win an election, but to collect names and addresses as sources of future revenue (see: Robertson, Pat).
Dickinson’s profile treats Lahmeyer as a true believer, highlighting the very real danger of such an extremist being normalized within the Republican Party. It’s possible Dickinson is right about that. It’s also entirely possible that Lahmeyer is nothing more than a cynical grifter who has created this persona because he sees the MAGA circuit as a lucrative source of personal financial enrichment. One could argue that everything Jackson Lahmeyer has done in recent years is completely congruent with the latter possibility, but I don’t think it all neatly aligns with the former.
Yes, Jackson Lahmeyer says he’s a true believer. But that, too, seems like evidence that he’s not.
Again, though — as we’ve discussed here over many years involving dozens of similar cases — it doesn’t really matter whether or not someone is a sincere fascist or a sincere bigot. The effect and the actual, tangible harm to others is the same.
• The title for this post comes from Chagall Guevara’s non-hit song “Escher’s World.” Seemed appropriate.
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