Republican congressman-elect George Santos didn’t do himself any favors on Tuesday when he appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as part of his efforts to salvage his reputation after being exposed as a serial liar. Santos clearly expected a softball interview from a friendly media outlet; instead, he was grilled like rainbow trout by guest host Tulsi Gabbard.
Pressed by Gabbard about the many lies he’s told about his background and personal life, he was left almost sputtering by the time she ended the excruciating 6 minutes-long interview. But not before he compounded his rapidly decaying situation with more lies, much dissembling, and even an attempt to deflect criticism by insulting voters. No, really.
You can watch the whole thing above now, courtesy of Aaron Rupar.
Of course, the reason you even know Santos’ name is because it was only after he was elected in November to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York’s 3rd district that his many, many lies were revealed.
He lied about his work history, claiming falsely that he worked for Citibank and Goldman Sachs as an investor and financier (both companies have no record of him). He lied about his education (he didn’t attend New York University or Baruch College).
Astonishingly, he claimed that his maternal grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who not only ‘fled’ the Soviet Union but also survived the holocaust before moving to Brazil, and repeatedly described himself as “an American Jew” and Jewish, all claims that have been proven false.
In fact Santos, who says he is gay, has no record of being married to the man he calls his husband and public records revealed he was married to a woman until 2019, a fact that directly contradicts several claims he’s made about his personal history. And he’s also now being scrutinized for how he recently became very rich despite all of that.
Santos already tried and failed to make this all go away with an embarrassing series of interviews on Monday where, among other things, he told the brazen lie that he never said he was Jewish, he merely said he was “jew-ish.”
So on Tuesday, as you can see in the video above, Santos didn’t fix things. It was a whole lot of huge embarrassments crammed into 6 minutes.
For example, at one point, clearly exasperated by Santos’ obvious dishonesty, Gabbard asked him “Do you have no shame?” Santos responded with whataboutist attacks on Democrats, something Gabbard immediately shut down.
Santos, also repeated the now proven-to-be false claims of Jewish ancestry.
But things got really weird during the final minutes of the interview when, while clearly attempting to B.S. his way through a defense of his false claims about his financial background, he not only lied even more, but effectively called his own voters stupid.
“These are blatant lies,” Gabbard said about Santos’ claims about working in the financial industry, “and it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you are standing on the floor of the House of Representatives, supposedly fighting for them. That’s the real issues here.”
“Well, look, and I, I agree with what you’re saying and, as I stated and I continue, we can debate my resume and how I worked with firms such as Goldman and Citigroup,” Santos said.
“Is it debatable or is it just fraud,” Gabbard asked.
“No, it’s very debat-it’s very debatable. No, it’s not false at all. It’s debatable, and I can sit down and explain to you,” Santos replied before launching into a string of finance industry buzzwords, “what you can do in private equity, in capital, via servicing limited partners and general partners, and we can have this discussion that’s gonna go way above the American people’s heads, but that’s not what I campaigned on. I campaigned on delivering results for the American people-“
“Wow,” Gabbard interjected.
“By, by lowering inflation. I can sit down if you want to have that discussion I’d be glad to, Tulsi, to explain that to you,” Santos rambled.
“Congressman,” Gabbard said.
“We, we settled the score,” Santos added.
“This is now about settling scores, and I think you just kind of highlighted, I think, my concern and the concern that people at home have, you’re saying that this discussion will go ‘way above the heads of the American people, basically insulting their intelligence, and not only are you now backtracking the lies that you told, you’re saying that you can’t explain it in a way that your constituents would actually be able to understand, and that these lies are debatable” Gabbard replied while Santos repeatedly tried to interrupt.
Santos then launched into what can only be described as gibberish: “I could explain it in a way if you’d give me the time, I could easily give the, if you give me the time I can easily explain it for you, uh, as in, when investors are looking for capital, and I’m sitting there, doing due diligence on the de- on the appetite and what they’re looking for, right? And we work alongside GPs and LPs to help them launch this capital. This is what I was doing and that’s what I worked extensively with these firms and many other firms at my time as I was vice president of linkbridge investors.”
“So this isn’t, uh, this isn’t a made-up narrative, but I feel like nobody really wants to sit down and talk about it, everybody just wants to push me and call me a liar,” Santos added.
Gabbard ended the interview with a brutal summation, referring to the people who voted for Santos. “It’s hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations when you’re not really even willing to admit the depth of your deceptions to them.”
Ouch.