George Santos raised $265,000 for his own 'stop the steal' campaign

WASHINGTON — At a pro-Donald Trump rally in Freedom Plaza near the White House on Jan. 5, 2021 — the day before the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol building — George Santos stood before a crowd and declared himself a victim of the “Big Steal.”

“If you’re from New York, you know what they did to me,” said Santos, referring to his unsuccessful 2020 congressional campaign as a Republican. “They did to me what they did to Donald J. Trump. They stole my election.”

What Santos did not tell the rally was that he had conceded his race six weeks earlier, just six days after election officials began counting absentee ballots that ultimately gave then-Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) a victory margin of 46,600 votes.

Nor did Santos reveal he had set up a special “recount committee” that raised $265,662 from people across the country for a recount of votes or a court case to contest the election, neither of which ever happened.

Instead, the Santos recount committee spent about a third of its expenditures to pay consultants, election observers, lawyers and staff to monitor the counting of tens of thousands of absentee ballots cast in the election, according to campaign finance filings reviewed by Newsday.

The committee's biggest expense — nearly two thirds of the total — went to fundraising that brought in small contributions from 7,140 people from across the country, most of it over a three-day period before the Nassau and Suffolk county election boards began counting.

The Devolder-Santos for Congress Recount committee has drawn scrutiny from the Campaign Legal Center and other Washington-based ethics and fair-election groups, and prompted the liberal End Citizens United organization to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

The groups have raised questions about how Santos’ recount committee raised and spent its recount funds, and about the credibility of its FEC filings.

Santos, who now represents New York’s 3rd Congressional District, did not respond to an interview request or to a list of questions.

Santos' attorney, Joe Murray, said, “It would be inappropriate to comment on any open investigation.”

But on that day in Washington, Santos spoke as a victim of voter fraud and as a Trump supporter as he prepared to run again in 2022 in a race he would win before the revelation of his fabrications about his personal life, education and employment.

Count or recount?

After polling places closed on Nov. 3, 2020, Santos led Suozzi by 4,171 votes out of some 275,000 cast in person in the district, which at the time spanned parts of Suffolk, Nassau and Queens counties.

The lead buoyed Santos.

But the Democratic and Republican chairmen in Nassau and Suffolk said they thought Santos had little chance of winning because tens of thousands of absentee ballots, most of them submitted by Democrats, had not yet been counted.

“We knew based on the numbers that his chances of winning were very slim,” Nassau County Republican chairman Joseph Cairo told Newsday.

Undeterred, Santos set up a special type of federal campaign committee for recounts or contested elections to raise money to cover the costs of monitoring the count and challenging it, if necessary. 

Recount funds are not mentioned in federal election law or regulations, although they’ve been around since the 1970s. The FEC gives guidance on those funds only with advisory opinions to address specific questions.

In a 2004 advisory opinion, the FEC said recount funds could pay for absentee ballot counting. But it also stressed that a candidate cannot use that money for campaigns for office. 

The use of recount committees, or separate bank accounts in a campaign committee, to pay for absentee ballot counts appears to be a new development, veteran campaign finance attorney Brett Kappel told Newsday.

Both Santos and then-Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley) took advantage of that FEC ruling to create recount committees. 

“While the FEC [advisory opinion] does allow the creation of recount funds for the purpose of counting absentee ballots, I’m not aware of that being done until recently,” Kappel said.

“Until Trump, they weren’t typically created unless there was a genuine recount or litigation over a disputed outcome,” he said.

Such a dispute occurred in New York’s 22nd Congressional District in 2020, where then-Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-Utica) faced off with former Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-New Hartford) after the vote had ended in a near tie.

Both set up recount funds to pay for nearly four months of vote recounts, ballot disputes and judicial reviews. Finally, on Feb. 12, 2021, a judge ruled that Tenney won by 109 votes out of 326,568 cast.

Santos conceded his 2020 race after just six days of absentee ballot counting.

Counting costs

Santos’ recount committee reported to the FEC that it spent $94,716 to make sure the counting of ballots was fair, and to cover overhead.

Its filings show the committee hired 22 observers and paid them $300 a day each to monitor the absentee vote counting, although half worked just one day.

The committee also paid for research, legal advice, consultants and some overhead, federal campaign finance records show.

Nassau County's party leaders and Board of Elections officials told Newsday they saw Santos observers during the absentee counting.

Suffolk County GOP chairman Jesse Garcia said Santos observers did not have much of a presence at the Suffolk BOE's absentee ballot count.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center in Washington, which filed a complaint with the FEC about Santos’ 2022 campaign finances, told Newsday he questioned about $7,500 for food, beverages, hotels and lodging.

Included in that category was $492 paid on Jan. 12, 2021, to the Il Bacco Ristorante in Little Neck, Queens.

The day before, Santos had held a business meeting at the restaurant as regional director of the investment firm Harbor City Capital, which the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission would shut down as a Ponzi scheme, according to The Washington Post. 

Election law does not permit candidates to charge business expenses to their federal election committees.

End Citizen United’s complaint to the FEC said filings show Santos' recount committee and campaign committee reported overlapping expenditures. 

The recount committee and campaign committee each listed a $300 payment to an election observer. That election observer told Newsday he made $300, not $600.

Similarly, both committees just days apart listed the purchase of a laptop computer from Best Buy for $2,026.25.

A costly haul

Santos created the recount committee the day after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, and money soon began trickling in — $1,000 on Nov. 4, $15,400 on Nov. 5 and $15,450 on Nov. 6.

Not long afterward, J&W Strategies, a political fundraising firm led by Ore Jacinto and Jason Weingartner, executive director of the New York State Republican Committee, organized a fundraiser in Manhattan's East Village that raised $10,000. J&W Strategies took 10% as a commission, FEC filings show.

Members of conservative gay networks also chipped in.

Charles T. Moran, president of the Log Cabin Republicans, a national political group for LGBT conservatives, told Newsday in an email he gave $1,000 to support Santos as “one of our only gay Republican candidates.”

But the recount committee's biggest haul came primarily in the three days before the Nassau count began Nov. 12.

DonorBureau, a Virginia fundraising firm that says it uses advanced data analytics to identify donors, solicited contributions through texts and emails and reaped an average of $31 from about 7,140 people across the nation for a total of about $219,500.

“This is Trump's base,” Kappel said, “and there are people out there who give $5 or $10 to anybody they think is MAGA.”

In all, Santos raised $265,662 for his recount committee, $203,278 of it in small un-itemized contributions, 95% of them for $50 or less, a Newsday review of his FEC filings found. He had $5,148 left over that remains in the recount committee account.

The recount committee paid DonorBureau a fundraising commission of $138,598 — the largest amount the company reported receiving from a campaign committee in 2020, its FEC filings show.

DonorBureau executives did not respond to Newsday queries.

The committee also paid $22,538 in fees for the credit cards used by donors for the more than 7,500 contributions made through WinRed.

Overall, Santos reported to the FEC the committee spent $164,584 on solicitation and fundraising.

Raising so much money so quickly and at such a great cost raises questions, Ghosh said.

“Given the overall lack of clear and accurate reporting from Santos’ committees, I think it just compounds the problem when you see a sudden influx of money,” Ghosh said. “And it does raise the question about was that money legitimately given.”

DonorBureau appears to have set up a revenue-sharing arrangement with Santos, fundraising experts said, soliciting and collecting large sums and taking as much as a 60% or 70% share of the money raised.

Under such an arrangement, the Santos recount committee would get a smaller share of the contributions.

But it would benefit by not having to pay money upfront for the donor list and then get to use the names and contact information for a proved donor list in the future.

That list gave at least a small boost to Santos’ campaign in 2022, a Newsday analysis found. It could be more since campaign committees don't have to identify donors of less than $200. 

End Citizens United, a nonprofit focused on "getting big money out of politics," argued in its FEC complaint that the recount committee illegally offset Santos' 2022 campaign costs.

But Kappel said the FEC allows a candidate’s affiliated committees to give donor files to each other.

Not long after Election Day 2020, Santos began suggesting in tweets he would run again in 2022. On Nov. 5, 2020, Santos began accepting contributions for a 2022 campaign, FEC filings show. By the end of March 2021, he had raised $153,143 for the 2022 race. On April 21, he filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC.

Messaging for money

In the first days after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Santos’ tweets sounded upbeat. One read: “#TeamSantos is confident that we will maintain our margin” of victory during the absentee vote counting.

By Nov. 7, however, Santos’ tone had changed. “Democracy is dead. #Elections2020,” he tweeted, citing “reports” that 4,000 ballots in his district’s Republican strongholds omitted his name, and that dead people were voting.

Those tweets echoed Trump’s complaints about stolen elections and voter fraud.

On Nov. 14, while he was participating in the new member orientation in Washington, Santos raised alarms about the Nassau County Board of Elections’ counting process, tweeting “#StopTheSteal.”

Then he appeared live on a News 12 Long Island show about the absentee vote count and accused the Nassau BOE of “voter suppression.”

Asked for proof, Santos replied: “When you're not able to oversee the counting of absentee ballots and watch them being fed into the machine, that's voter suppression. When you're not able to challenge signatures on these ballots, that's voter suppression.”

Santos accused Democrats of trying to block him because he’s gay, and took a shot at Republicans, too.

He said he had asked for more access to the ballots for his observers, but complained both of Nassau’s Republican and Democratic election commissioners “struck it down.”

Santos said he planned to sue the Nassau Board of Elections.

“I have the one ballot and it’s already been annexed to a court filing and we're going to fight that and we're going to ask for a complete audit of the entire district roll. We want to see every single ballot,” he said on News 12.

Newsday's search of court filings turned up no lawsuit.

Cairo, Jay Jacobs, who serves as Nassau and state Democratic chairman, and Suffolk GOP chairman Garcia defended the vote counting, calling it fair and accurate.

They said the fact that in New York every county has both a Democratic and a Republican election commissioner, and that the party split extends to election board employees who count the ballots, ensures the process is fair.

On Nov. 17, after six days of counting, Suozzi announced that Santos had conceded his loss in a phone call.

The next day, Santos tweeted: “To all my supporters, Thank you! We ran an amazing campaign and we could have not gotten this far without your support! Now let’s enjoy our loved ones during the holiday season. It’s good bye for now, 2022 is amongst us! 

“#Thankful #Election2020 #LongLiveDemocracy #USA”

In late December or early January, Cairo said Santos asked for a meeting.

“He started by saying he apologized, he made mistakes. He shouldn't have done what he did. He shouldn't have said what he did,” Cairo recalled. “I stood up. I said his apology was accepted. He asked about a second chance. I said he would have to earn it.”