Episode 2: The Congressman

Pushkin.

So, Jake, let me take you back to January twenty twenty three. It's a couple weeks after George Santos has been exposed, and he shows up in Washington, DC.

That was the first day I saw him in person. I remember we were walking through the Cannon House office building and you could hear a pin drop because people were like, that's George Santos. Did you see that was George Santos. This is Masa Wumer. She was George Santos's communications director. You heard from her in our first episode. She was actually hired back in December of twenty twenty two, and her first day and the first day she would

Wow, this was Nace's first day on the job as the communications director whatever, But it was also George Santos's basically first day. I mean, the scandal's happening, but he hasn't even started his tenures of congressman, or he's just starting.

Correct.

Yeah, their first day is the same first day, and the press are also camped outside the office on that first day, and they remain outside the office even as the week's dragon. They're not really losing interest in the George Sandos story.

I've had multiple meetings with individual reporters and they're all saying the same thing. We can't leave until he speaks to the press, until we get a sound bite. We have to stay. And they said, well, we're going to fix this.

So she realizes, Okay, well this is not dying down. We're going to book him on some big name show. He's going to do a long sit down interview with a respected journalist, and we're going to prep him for that, and we're going to spend this time before we have the interview even set up, We're going to spend time prepping.

The hard part was getting him to sit down and prep.

He was very just all over the place, and so I put out like this little list of like the fifteen lies that I've already heard in the news, because, as I said, at this time, it was just you know, obviously his background from you know, work, family, religion, and then the new stuff that was popping up.

What are the burning questions of the burning issues at this particular moment that people want to ask him.

At this point, the press is looking into a bunch of allegations that have come to light, and one of those stories is that Santos had faced multiple evictions in New York while also claiming publicly that he was a landlord.

So there's an inherent contradiction there.

That seems like so telling that he's being evicted and yet he's claiming to be a landlord. This is just stark contrast.

Yeah, there's also new info and new allegations coming out basically on a daily basis.

A New Jersey veteran says that the congressman organized a fundraiser for his dying service dog back in twenty sixteen, only to pocket the money himself.

In Brazil, a local performer claims Santos was Katara Ravash and that he once performed as a drag queen, something the New York congressman strongly denies.

Hash media reports quote.

Two former Santos roommates told Patch several items went missing while they lived with Santos, including phones, expensive dress shirts, and checks from a check book.

So it's just basically, every time Lisa turns around, there's a new story that she has to scramble, figure out what their statement is going to be, and follow up with all the journalists that are asking her questions.

So when Nisa is prepping him for this this interview, what's her take on it. Does she feel that he is being like forthright with her? Does she still have faith in him as someone who is credible or not.

I think Nasa is stepping into this role and saying, I have been hired to do a job, and I'm going to do the best job I can do despite the circumstances. And you know, Nasa told me that Santos was always maintaining to her in their private conversations that he had answers for all of these things. And so when she's in that position where this is her boss, she wants to believe him, and she wants to have his back, and she wants to set him up for success because her boats tied to his.

You know, oh my god, it's just like it.

Even though I was with him for five months, it probably felt like five hundred years at that point. And my joke is always my theme song every day felt like was the led Zeppelin song when the levee breaks.

It's just waiting for that to happen. So oh wait, it did.

Keeps this God.

So in this episode, we're going to get into what Nisa and others would come to learn about George Santos while trying to sort fact from fiction stories that he's told about his family, specifically his mother. And while these stories are not necessarily related to the charges against him, I think they reveal something deeper about his character. And there's one story he told in particular that really struck an earth. This is deep cover George Santos Episode two, The Congressman.

There are a few people in this world you should not lie. Your lawyer, your doctor, and your communications director.

By the way, I would ideally include spouse in there as well.

Just say to say, spoken like a true husband. Yess Okay.

So how does it go when she tries to prep him?

Just getting him to sit down and prep was always it was like it's like getting a child to sit down and do their homework, so very hard.

But she does get the chance to prep him briefly, and at a certain point in these conversations, the tone shifts.

I'd say one of the hardest conversations I had was the death of his mother.

So in twenty twenty one, George Santos tweeted nine to eleven, claimed my mother's life. And in the aftermath of the New York Times reporting, people find that tweet and they start asking more questions about that, and it was actually mentioned on Santos's campaign website. It's actually still on his

And this is.

One of the allegations against him that this is not true. People do not find evidence to substantiate the fact that his mother was there. And NASA knows that this is something he's going to get asked about, so in her attempts to prep him, this is something that they talk about in detail.

Wait, what are the holes that people are poking in this story? At least initially or are there any.

So when Santos's tweet comes to like, there's a lot of questions because when you say nine to eleven claim my mother's life, that seems to imply that your mother died on nine eleven.

Yeah, that's what I thought when you when you read it.

Yeah, And then it quickly becomes clear through reporting and just public records that his mother died in twenty sixteen.

And one of the things we had talked about with him was just did she because I saw the timeline of her death and I had thought, well, I remembered John Stewart was starting to highlight a lot of problems that like first responders were starting to die as a result of nine to eleven from exposure to the ash and dust that came from the World Trade Center.

So Nisa, in that moment understands that maybe it was just an error in how Santos chose to phrase the tweet, but that his mother died in twenty sixteen from cancer which was linked to her time at Ground zero. That was the claim that Santos was making. OKAYNSA is saying, Okay, if you're going to be making this claim in public, then let's break it down. Let's talk through the details of this because you will be asked about it, right.

And it seems like he can kind of make that argument some incredibly because on the website it's saying she passed away a few years later when she lost her battle to cancer. You know, it seems to me like he's actually got some cover here.

Yes, and she's quickly picking up on what he's saying, which is that no, no, no, I'm claiming that she died later as a result of her exposure to ground zero.

Okay, but Nesa wants details.

And I asked him, I said, did she die as a result of nine to eleven? And he said yes. I said, okay, so let's just break it down. Was she in the north of the South Tower? And he said the South Tower? I said, all right, so she was in the South Tower on September eleventh, Okay, like, do you remember what floors she worked on? And he just you know, she worked for a cleaning company. So I did not have the He did not give out

So finally this is starting to make sense for Nissa. She can understand the narrative that Santos has been telling, and even though he doesn't have all of the details, NASA is advising him. You know, this is a powerful story. This is an experience that people can relate to.

You know, people will want to see a human side to you like that. And I said, maybe that's just that's something you should talk about.

Hmm.

It's interesting because I heard that tape and I hear her kind of poking a little bit too.

Well, right, she's doing her job. She's saying, I'm trying to prep you for these interviews. Here's all of the questions that you may be asked about this, So let's try to get some specifics down.

Right, m hm.

And then a few weeks later, I think the New York Times or MSNBC had reached out and said they had found proof that she wasn't in the country, and I thought, oh my god, this is like, why are you doing this? It just I thought why, like why?

I mean, that's the question, right, Does she have any answer to that question?

I would argue NASA is still looking for her why And NISA isn't the only one that's trying to make sense out of all this. The guy that I think has gone the deepest down the rabbit hole is a journalist's named Mark Gisano, and what he's found reshaped the way I think about George Santos. That's coming up next. I had to call the guy who has done, in my opinion, the best reporting on Santos's family and his background. His name is Mark Gisano, and he wrote a book with a very long title.

The book is called The Fabulous, the Lying, Hustling, drifting, stealing, and very American legend of George Santos.

Mark worked for Newsday, basically one of the only major newspapers left on Long Island, and he's covered Santos since his first campaign.

Back then, he sort of had to pick up the phone because no one was really calling him, and so he would he would answer me or he would send a statement or he would have someone call me.

What was Mark's early take on Santos, like in those first interactions.

So Mark told me that Santos seemed somewhat evasive.

He definitely, you know, kind of would allied details and sort of tell you stuff that didn't totally make sense. But it was hard to tell in the beginning. This is what a lot of first time candidates.

Are like, right, And as time went on, of course, it would become clear to Mark and everyone right that Santos was not being transparent about his life on the campaign trail. It strikes me reading through different stories of Santo's stories that he's told about himself that a lot of the stories about him seemed to start with the story of his mom. So what was the story about his mother that he was telling?

Yeah, his mom was pretty central his campaign. You know, she really loomed large. He called her a Wall Street executive, you know, one of the first female executives on Wall Street or something of that effect. He said that she escaped the South Tower during nine to eleven. He said that she was a big political actor. He claims that she had donated over I think he said something like

Well, there's a bunch to unpack there, but one thing that jumps out is that when he was talking to NASA about prepping for that press conference, NASA says that he described his mother as working for a cleaning company in the World Trade Center. So that's at odds with her being a Wall Street executive here.

No, yes, you've hit on one of the first key discrepancies that people pick up on. You know. Santos tells this story about his mother, and because we have the Internet, everyone can kind of compare notes. He tells the story differently, so in certain tellings she's a financial executive, in other tellings, she's working as a cleaner. In the towers, and it's a bit hard to parse out if any of that

Like, so to be careful. I tried to really see what if any of that story about his mother was true. And all I can say is what we've found out is certainly not true. No campaign finance records show any evidence of her donating. She does not appear to have voted in any election in New York or elsewhere. She also does not appear to be a citizen, at least according to her own immigration records. So totally not, you know, not the story that he was telling.

So pretty quickly Mark breaks this down and he's able to say, so much of the story that Santos tells about his mother just doesn't check out.

Yeah, and what seems to be clear to me that there's a pattern here with Santo's which is where there are small lies. If you dig deeper, there are bigger lies.

Yeah, it's just like Mark said, the pebble that becomes the mountain.

Then there's this nine to eleven story, which very central to the story he was telling about her, and I think struck a nerve in New York where people do have nine to eleven stories and everyone kind of says, you know, talks about where you were that day, right, and doubly so on Long Island, where so many that his constituents were cops or firefighters, right, or bankers too, who were you know, in the building, So a big deal to lie about. And again, you know, very hard

So what do we actually know for sure about Santo's his family, their background.

So the real story of George Santos starts in Queens. The family did not have a lot of money, you know, Santos says they he grew up in abject poverty, and that appears to be true. His mother, you know, took care of him and his sister. According to Mark, George Santos and his mother, Fatima had a very close but also complicated relationship.

They seem to have been very close and also in the way that many close relationships work, also kind of butted heads a lot. I spoke to one person who you know, worked on the campaign with Santos. This is kind of later on after she's dead, years after she's dead, by the way, and Santos would still kind of have a kind of shakiness to his voice when he mentioned her, right in a way that didn't seem to be acting.

You know.

There would be moments when he was living, say, you know, in another part of Queen's, and he would come to visit her and see her because he seemed to missed her, one roommate told me. And on the other hand, sometimes they were living together and he would get in these kind of huge fights with her, screaming, screaming, cursing so intense that his mother, Fatima, would go into her own bedroom and close the door and start crying. So this was kind of the back and forth with them.

Okay, so he has this kind of stormy relationship with his mom, really close to living together. How old is he when when his mom gets cancer.

He would have been in his late twenties when his mom died of cancer, And.

How does that play out for Santos.

Fatima gets sick, and Santos seems to have taken that very hard and tried to take care of her, tried to help her.

While this is going on, Santos appears to have struggled to pay rent more than once. So at the time where his mother is sick with cancer, Santos is appearing in court, and Mark told me about one such moment like this back in twenty fifteen.

At one time he shows up in court one of his interactions with housing court in New York, where he's trying to explain why he didn't pay the rent, and one of his excuses is that he's caring for his mother, right, which you know, don't know if that means that he wasn't actually able to pay, but it does sort of show their relationship and kind of their their bombs, their proximity. So she gets sick, she remains sick, and unfortunately she

That's really it's just really poignant, like the idea that he's like his mother's dying and he's basically so poor that he's going before the court and saying I can't pay my rent and I'm caring for my dying mother. It's so interesting he invents these stories to kind of engender our sympathy, but here it almost sounds like the real one is perfectly sympathetic in its truthful form.

Yes, although I will say, because we were talking about George Santos, when you think you have reached the truth, there is usually a catch.

Well, I mean, yeah, maybe I'm a complete sucker to think that he would tell the judge the truth. And I have this feeling that you're about to tell me something about his mother's death that's going to completely undermine the sympathy that I just fell for him.

Unfortunately. Yes, So what Mark has found through his reporting around Fatima's death is just really striking. Specifically, one story around Fatima's.

Funeral, Santa's mother, Fatima passes away, Santos says that he's unable to kind of pay for the funeral costs, right, He and his sister have had a hard time caring for her and they need money basically, And so luckily they're all part of this church community, Saint Rita's and

How much money are we talking about here?

One of Mark's sources estimated it was somewhere around six thousand dollars.

Wow, I mean, okay, this is so crazy. I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Like he collected this money from all these people in this church under the guys that he was going to pay the funeral home for his mother's funeral, and he takes the money and never pays the funeral home.

That appears to be what happened.

I'm really speechless. On some level, we're talking about, like how do you wrap your mind around lies? So there's lies of opportunism that we feel, we understand that politicians will bend the truth embellish the truth, inflate their resumes in ways that make them look greater than they really are. And it's not right, but we get it. That's part of the grammy business of how politics is done. But this is just something altogether different, right, Yeah, what's your take on this?

No, I'm with you.

I was astounded by this and at a loss for words even now.

I mean, it just raised to the question, what, if anything, do we hold sacred. He clearly was close to his mom, that seems undeniable with her. Maybe they fought, but they were also very close. And then he's lying about the manner of her death as a way of self promotion. And then when it comes time to put her to rest, he goes to the community of which she was a part of, asks for their help in her name to

Yeah, you have to wonder what was motivating him at that point, And we don't know what his financial state was in that moment, so it's possible that he was really desperate and needed that money and that's maybe one explanation for why the funeral home never got that money. But we just haven't gotten answers on this, so we won't know more about it. And of course there's lots of things we still haven't gotten answers on.

And you know, when you're dealing with Santos, even the.

People closest to him, including his own staffers, have spent a lot of time just trying to pry the truth out of him. More on that after the break. I want to bring us back to NASA, Santos's communications director, because when we last heard from her, she was prepping for this big TV interview where she had hoped that he would come clean.

Whether you sit down with someone like Chuck Todd or Tucker Carlson, they're all going to be equally tough on you, and I want to find the right one who is going to be tough but like firm but fair.

If you have any guesses on who they go with, I have no idea. They do not get Chuck Todd, they do not get Tucker Carlson, but they do get a journalist from across the pond, Piers Morgan.

When Peers' team reached out, I thought, this is it, this is this is my opportunity. We'll do it with a well known British journalist who has zero skin in the game when it comes to American politics, and he's going to be equally tough on a Republican as he would be with a Democrat. So I thought, he's going to be in the United States this week. Let's set this up and get.

It over with. Rip this band aid off and we'll be done.

The Peers interview prepping for that, what are you hoping or expecting that he'll say the truth? So George sits down for an interview with Piers Morgan on his show called Piers Morgan Uncensored, and Piers goes there. He asks Santos about his mother.

I want to turn to something it's obviously very personal to you, and that's your own mother and this question of whether she was working, as you claimed, in her office in the South Tower of the Twin Towers on September the eleventh, and then passed toways you said a few years later when she lost a battle to cancer. Now there is no record of your mother, Fatima Divolda, ever having worked in the Twin Towers, So what's that true? That's true? Why is there no record of the work?

I don't know where people are looking or what they're looking.

For, but there is obviously no because of what happened afterwards, there's a record of everyone that were there. There's no doubt about who were there. I'm sorry, Well, there's no doubt about who is.

There's no doubt if who worked in the buildings on the.

There was a full record done.

I'm very aware.

So the way that I look at this, and I've rest this case before, and respectfully, please, I won't debate my mother's life as she's passed in sixteen, and I think it's it's quite unsensitive for everybody to want to rehash my mother's legacy.

It's painful to listen to like you can feel his mind kind of churning to come up with something.

Yeah, you know, as the journalist, you never want to be a part of this story. But I found at a certain point I needed to say the thing that I was thinking the whole time, and I started getting into that with Mark.

The reporter who wrote the book on George Santos.

I'll share a little bit here. I grew up in Santos's district. My father was a first responder on nine to eleven. He was a New York City police officer, and he did develop cancer that is believed to be related to his exposure, and he passed away in twenty seventeen.

So sorry to hear that, Thank you.

The story that he's telling has a lot of resemblance to the story that my family shares. There is this community specifically on Long Island that cares a lot about this specific issue of benefits for first responders and has a lot of sympathy and empathy for that situation, And so I think it's just a very specific lie.

It is in the same way that his story about Jewish heritage was very specific. But I think he has a good year for some of these things. And he's not from Long Island, but like most New Yorkers, he kind of knows it very well and kind of understands I think all of its kind of highs and lows, the kind of glittery Hampton's part of of Long Island, but also this this story of first responders and great tragedy, right and the kind of gritty reality of Long Island.

That your dad was a New York City police officer, right, Yes? Was he? Was? He a motorcycle cop? Am I'm memory that correctly?

You are? My dad rode a motorcycle for a highway unit actually based out of Queen's Okay, Well, yeah, I mean, I will be honest and say I did not expect the conversation with NASA or with Mark to go there,

It is just kind of infuriating, like he's appropriating, he's using the legacy of the Holocaust, and then he's in this case, using the legacy of first responders.

These are two tragedies that resonate with his constituents, and he's claiming them both as his own in a way that he has to understand is going to and gender sympathy and bolster his popularity.

Yeah, and I think that this is a moment where that really clarified for me. You know, you could look at the lies that he's told and say, well, to what end is he doing this? And then I think when you focus on a few of these stories, you see the intentionality. You see that there is a reason that it's this specific lie and it's speaking directly to people who would then put him in office. There are still first responders who are receiving treatment related to illnesses

Use against them in a way.

Yeah, it's crazy though, Like, did he not think he was going to be confronted with these facts that there's a record everyone that worked there, because of how much significance that attack had.

I mean, yeah, it's a good question.

You see this time and time again with George Santos, where he's faced with an allegation, he claims to have evidence or proof, but then we never see that evidence, right. But the thing that is striking to me is there are certain lies that he has admitted were.

Lies, Like what was what's an example of that?

Yeah, so he admitted, Okay, I didn't go to Baruch.

Looking back on that lie, that seems like small fry compared to this.

I mean, yeah, and I mean why does he still hold on to this story about his mother even when so many people have challenged him on it. There's one version of the story that Santos tells, which is that his mother passed away in twenty sixteen from cancer, and that appears to be true.

Yeah, that's all he said.

Yes, But then there's another version, or there's an extend version, if you will, that links her illness to her experience at ground zero. And that's the part that most people have come to the conclusion is not true, cannot be substantiated. But it is a part that Santos has doubled down on again with those retractions, like he'll admit, okay, I didn't go to Bruke, but my mother did die as a result of nine to eleven.

Yeah, yeah, what do you make of that?

This was kind of the crazy part about reporting this book is I would go down these rabbit holes and start thinking about, like what is the nature of truth? You know, like, what can I actually like tell the reader is real about this guy's story. You know, typical relationships between human beings, You just we assumes what someone is telling you is true because that's the easiest way

I mean, I think that's the tricky thing about Santos is that he's not making up stories wholesale. He's mixing truth and fiction and weaving in bits of his own story that are really painful and difficult and creating this this thing that is difficult to disentangle and difficult to challenge, and it's just confounding.

I'd agree with you, And I'm left feeling that even though so much of what has been uncovered might feel, you know, morally wrong, there hasn't really been any consequences in this point in time for George Santos. He's telling lies, he's co opting people's stories, he's betraying people close to him, but there's no real accountability for any of this.

It's interesting, like we live. We live in a moment where sometimes when someone accuses you of being a liar, it's actually an asset with your constituents because it's like, oh, it's the New York Times. The Democrats are calling me a liar, and in fact, you just double down on your position, and then you know it's like, look, my

Absolutely, I mean, George Santos flies under the radar for a really long time, but as he is in office that first year, something is starting to shift. There are investigations going on both with the Justice Department and in the House, and you get the sense that Santos and others are starting to feel like the walls are closing in. Maybe these investigations are going to start to catch up with him coming up next time on Deep Cover George Santos.

For me, I'm furious because I spent some of my friends that I asked to support George.

I mean all of them.

They know me, so they're you know, and they were hoodwinked and know that I was hoodwinked, but they were upset that they were dragged into this and it was my responsibility, you know. I am mad at myself for not doing my own due diligence.

For more on Mark Gisano's reporting on George Santos, check out his book The Fabulous, The Lying, hustling, grifting, stealing and very American Legend of George Santos. This series is produced by Amy Gaines McQuaid and Joey fish Ground. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Mastering by Jake Gorski. Fact checking by Aica Robbins. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Music in this episode is from Luis Garra An Epidemic Sound special thanks