Frauds Expert George Santos Doesn't Like Jail, Would Like a Pardon to Be Free Again

Rep. George Santos | Screenshot

Out gay disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is speaking out after serving his first week-or-so in prison, and his message is that prison sucks.

In a letter published by the South Shore Press, Santos lists many complaints about the prison, including having to wear “state-issued polyester,” having to walk on “linoleum floors,” eating food that’s “joyless and served with indifference,” and using soap that he describes as “government-issued sandpaper.”

 

This is apparently quite the shock for Santos. While Santos lied about his entire life story, according to news articles published shortly after he was elected to Congress in 2022, one thing that the public could confidently know about Santos was that he loves shopping.

Among the many allegations against him were the House Ethics Committee’s findings that he misappropriated campaign funds to, in part, pay for clothes from Hermès and for Botox injections. There was also his former roommate’s accusation that he stole a “very expensive Armani dress shirt” and a $500 Burberry scarf.

Despite the human rights violation inherent in being forced to wear synthetic fibers, Santos said that the real problem with prison is that it’s dehumanizing.

“It’s been just over a week now, but I can tell you this much: when people say, ‘prison sucks,’ they aren’t just talking about the bars and the bunks,” Santos wrote. “It’s not just the loss of freedom—it’s the erosion of your dignity. It’s realizing how many basic human rights we all take for granted on the outside.”

“Here, everything is regulated, stripped down, dehumanized.”

Santos is incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton Satellite Camp (FCI Fairton) in New Jersey. The facility is a minimum security satellite camp attached to a medium-security prison. Santos says that most of the men incarcerated there committed white collar crimes. He repeatedly refers to it as “FCI Flatiron” in his letter.

“No one on the outside ever thinks about what these places look like, let alone who’s inside,” he complained. “After all, we’re the ‘scum,’ right? Society writes us off, labels us, forgets us.”

Perhaps he was referring to himself. He had previously called rights violations by law enforcement a “made-up concept” and supported legislation to prevent people from suing government officials personally for their misconduct.

“America is a nation of law and order,” his old campaign website says. “Our families and communities need to be protected. As woke socialists attempt to defund the police, it is essential that we defend and fund our law enforcement.”

“Criminals must be held accountable for their actions. Democrats in New York and across the country are putting criminals above law-abiding citizens.”

But that was then. Now Santos understands how terrible prison is. Because prison happened to him.

Now he’s saying he won’t be “silent about the way dignity is quietly stripped from the incarcerated.”

“I will not allow my fellow inmates—or myself—to forget that we are still human beings, still Americans, and still protected under that sacred document,” he wrote, discussing why he carries a pocket Constitution with him now.

Shortly after taking office in 2022, Santos was the subject of a damning New York Times report exposing his flagrant and extensive lies about his own biography. Following a House Ethics Committee report that found “substantial evidence” that he used campaign funds for his personal expenses and “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the House voted to expel Santos from Congress in December 2023.

Last August, Santos pleaded guilty to two felony counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The 23 charges he initially faced included wire fraud, identity theft, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to both the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Santos, who won his bid to represent New York’s 3rd congressional district as a Republican in 2022, was accused of stealing campaign donors’ identities and charging tens of thousands of dollars in fraudulent purchases to their credit cards; faking a $500,000 loan to his own campaign; filing false campaign finance reports; and other offenses.

Last week, the president discussed the possibility of giving Santos a pardon, stressing that Santos’ “vote was solid” when he was in Congress. Yesterday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) formally asked for Santos’ sentence to be commuted.