George Santos said during his sentencing that he had “betrayed the confidence entrusted to me” by the American people. He was given until July 25 to surrender.Credit...Adam Gray for The New York TimesBy Michael Gold and Grace Ashford
The reporters have been covering Mr. Santos since 2022, when they broke the news that he had lied extensively about his résumé.
Published April 25, 2025Updated April 26, 2025, 1:26 p.m. ET
George Santos, the former Republican congressman from New York whose outlandish fabrications and criminal schemes fueled an unforeseen rise and spectacular fall, was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison on Friday.
His 87-month sentence was a severe corrective to a turbulent period in which Mr. Santos was catapulted from anonymity to political and pop cultural infamy, a national spotlight that, even when negative, he often relished more than rejected.
Mr. Santos pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other deceptions, including lying to Congress, fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits and bilking campaign donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sitting before Judge Joanna Seybert in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., a teary Mr. Santos, 36, seemed far removed from the swaggering politician whose lies — that he was a college volleyball star and a Wall Street financier with ties to the Holocaust and Sept. 11, to name a few — turned him into a national punchline and led to mocking impersonations on “Saturday Night Live.”
His voice trembling, Mr. Santos told the judge that he had “betrayed the confidence entrusted to me” by the American people. “I cannot rewrite the past,” he said, but “I can control the road ahead.”
He asked for a lenient sentence to have time to “let me prove that I can still contribute positively to the community I wronged.”
But citing Mr. Santos’s history of lies and noting that he has not yet paid any court-ordered restitution to his victims, Judge Seybert cast doubt on Mr. Santos’s contrition.
“Where is the remorse?” she asked incredulously at one point. “Where do I see it?”
She expressed some sympathy for Mr. Santos and hope for his future, even if it was now derailed by a prison sentence. But she ultimately sided with federal prosecutors’ recommendation that he receive an 87-month sentence.
“Mr. Santos, words have consequences,” the judge told him. “You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.”
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Mr. Santos, who cried into his hands as the sentence was being read, was given until July 25 to surrender and begin serving his term. He was ordered to pay more than $370,000 in restitution to his victims and will have to give up 10 percent of his income toward payments once he is released.
After his sentencing, Mr. Santos straightened and pulled a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses out of his suit jacket. He strode from the courthouse to an awaiting car without speaking to the press, and he did not respond to a subsequent request for comment.
Hours later, he called the judge’s decision “an over the top politically influenced sentence” in a social media post and appealed to President Trump to offer him “a chance to prove I’m more than the mistakes I’ve made.”
One of Mr. Santos’s lawyers, Joseph W. Murray, said the legal team would seek a presidential pardon — something that Mr. Santos had ruled out just two days before his sentencing.
A spokesman for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If Mr. Santos’s lies accounted for his ignominious rise, his financial misdeeds are what triggered his downfall. Well before any resolution in his criminal case, his colleagues in the House made the unprecedented decision in December 2023 to expel him from Congress without a conviction.
After an ethics investigation found Mr. Santos had spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to push him out.
It was a bipartisan break from party orthodoxy that seems unthinkable less than two years later, as Mr. Trump uses the bully pulpit to unite Republicans in Congress behind him and hold their slim majority.