Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m Preet Bharara. George Santos’ time in Congress came to an end on December 1st after he was expelled over ethics violations. Santos still faces 23 charges in federal court, including for wire fraud, identity theft, and money laundering. As we all now know, he’s lied over and over and over again about, well, everything. In a new book called The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, author Mark Chiusano does a deep dive on Santos and the life he built on lies.

This didn’t just start when he eyed to bid for the US Congress. It’s been a lifelong habit. So why does he lie and what does Santos’ election to such a powerful position say about our political system? Mark joins me to talk about his reporting and the stories about George Santos he uncovered along the way. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Chiusano:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So I guess my first question is, and maybe it’s an obvious answer, what drew you to this story such that you decide to spend all the time and energy it takes to write a book?

Mark Chiusano:

Santos was always kind of a strange figure, and I encountered him in 2019 when I was writing for Newsday and I was just doing a very short little intro on him for our newsletter. And even in that first conversation, things were weird. He said that he was launching his campaign that very day, but he was actually in Florida at the time on business, which is a very strange thing to be doing if you’re running for a New York seat, right? And he said his filings were about to come on online, but they weren’t there yet.

We had all these questions. And I wrote about him here and there over the next few years, and he kept doing weird things. So always interested in him as a figure. But even after everything about him came out and he was fully exposed as a liar, I wasn’t sure that this was a story with staying power until he gets actually put in his seat in Congress and isn’t pushed out. And then I thought, oh, something different is going on here.

That this guy who’s been lying and scheming to this level is staying in Congress and isn’t able to be pushed out. That’s saying something different about American politics.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting you say it’s saying something different about American politics when the subtitle of your book is “The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.” So is he different or is he very American in a certain tradition of lying?

Mark Chiusano:

I think he’s a very American figure. I think he is bringing a very old strain, a very old American tradition into the social media era of American politics. He’s different from other politicians who’ve gotten into trouble for one reason or another I think because he does everything at an 11. It’s not just that he makes up every single thing himself.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not a white lie.

Mark Chiusano:

Yeah, it’s not a white lie. It’s also not a single lie. I write in the book about Douglas Stringfellow, who is a post-war member of Congress, lied about his World War II record. Pretty quickly that gets found out while he’s running for a reelection, and then he bows out and he’s never heard from again. This is the opposite of the George Santos story. First of all, that he brazens through and also that it’s not one thing. It’s not just volleyball.

Preet Bharara:

Did you use brazen as a verb? I love that.

Mark Chiusano:

Yeah. I don’t know. Am I allowed? Is that all right?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know. I’m going to have to look at he brazens through. I think it’s pretty direct.

Mark Chiusano:

The other way I’ve been thinking about it is that he keeps posting through too, to use the social media term.

Preet Bharara:

Just to remind folks, we’ve been taking it as a given that people are aware of the demonstratively proven lies that George Santos has told. Could you give us just a rundown of the things we’ve heard in the press even before the vote in Congress that he’s known for lying about?

Mark Chiusano:

Totally. One of the big ones is college degrees. He has admitted himself that he didn’t go to college, didn’t complete college. He’s also lied about having grandparents that fled the Holocaust. He has this zany story about playing volleyball in college and being a championship volleyball player. He wasn’t. He also has talked about being a media person, that he worked at Globo, which was a big media outfit in Brazil. That wasn’t true either. It’s just one thing after another with him. It’s very hard to find the truth.

Preet Bharara:

I’m so confused about how he got elected and what failings there have been in our system, as I said in the intro. Was there no vetting? I mean, if this person had been selected to be a cabinet official or even a US attorney or a district court judge, the vetting process would’ve found out about many, many of these lies in the ordinary course, I guess, and there’s no formal vetting agency for political candidates, nor should there be, but usually it’s the press.

So let me put to you the question I asked in the intro, what does it say about our system that he was able to get elected, notwithstanding his body of mendacity?

Mark Chiusano:

I think though what’s interesting about Santos is that he has so many things wrong with him, he’s told so many lies, that there actually were a lot of questions raised about him before the campaign, during his two campaigns. I was writing about some of these sketchy things that he had going on in his story. The Daily Beast did some really good stuff about his employment history, North Shore Leader. There were things out there, and even the DCCC, the campaign arm of the Democrats that is supposed to look into these things for their candidates.

Preet Bharara:

Whoever was responsible for APO Research on George Santos, and maybe it’s someone I know, so I don’t mean to cast aspersions, but boy, shouldn’t they be taking a second look at their protocols?

Mark Chiusano:

So it’s an interesting thing because I agree with you, they missed a lot. And I write in the book about how, for example, one very easy one was the colleges, and that is something that you can call and colleges will typically tell you. That was a big miss, but they caught a ton of things. They found a lot of weird things about him. For example, his sketchy pet nonprofit, which it turned out wasn’t registered.

That was the beginning of the great finds that The New York Times had that showed how sketchy his background was. They found a lot of things. The problem was that all these people that were poking into Santos before he was elected didn’t connect the dots, didn’t say, “Oh, everything about this guy is wrong.” It’s not just that five or six things are wrong, and that is why we have George Santos.

Preet Bharara:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but do you have a psychology degree?

Mark Chiusano:

I do not, no.

Preet Bharara:

Did you feel like… Well, the reason I’m asking, because it seems like this is not so much a political story or a pop culture story, it’s kind of a psychology story. Have you learned anything in the writing of the book about George Santos’ mental state and whether he can be classified as having some kind of disorder? Or is he just a dude who lies?

Mark Chiusano:

I did, and we’re careful about armchair diagnosis these days, which I think is right. So I’m going to offer an armchair diagnosis with the caveat that obviously I’ve not diagnosed him. But one thing that people have pointed me to in the mental health world is something called pseudologia fantastica, which is basically the idea that someone might actually believe their own very lurid lies.

Something that goes beyond something that you tell a lie, you tell for personal gain, mere personal gain. It’s bigger than that. It’s about heroism, something huge. It’s often people make up stories about their war records, for example. And I do think there’s something like that sometimes going on with Santos. It’s funny, there are so many lies, and I hear a new one every day. Literally this morning I got a phone call.

Preet Bharara:

Since writing the book?

Mark Chiusano:

That’s true. Yeah, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Oh my goodness.

Mark Chiusano:

Someone called me today, person I’d been trying to reach and hadn’t been able to, knew Santos on the campaign trail and he told me this great story about how he was friendly with Santos. Santos was very nice to his kids, and then comes over for dinner one night and is just claiming that he knows a person that this individual was mentioning, like an acquaintance of this individual.

And Santos is saying, “Yeah, no, totally. I know them. I’m connected to them. I’m fully aware,” and he absolutely wasn’t. There was just no way he knew this random guy, and the person who’s calling me is saying, “I pressed Santos. I sort of said, ‘I know you’re lying. Why can’t you just admit it?'” And he just refused.

Preet Bharara:

So you and your book go back in time to George Santos’ childhood, and you even make mention of his own mother’s observation. Can you talk about what the long arc in history of his lying has been?

Mark Chiusano:

This has been a pattern with him. I think he’s a man who’s full of patterns. He’s been grifting for a long time. This was not something he started doing when he ran for Congress. And the lies were there early on as well. I was told this wonderful line that his mother said, the way his mother described his lying I think says a lot about what he was doing.

She said when confronted with the lies, she said something like, “Oh, Anthony and his stories.” His stories. And I do think that’s kind of what they are. They’re not just mini little quick lies that you misspeak and then you keep going with it because you’re embarrassed. They’re very elaborate lurid stories.

Preet Bharara:

So there’s another guy on the political scene who lies a lot, not quite in the same vein, but his name is Donald Trump and he’s been proven to have lied again and again and again. Is there any relatedness between George Santos’ aversion to the truth and the way Donald Trump misstates the truth? Or are they different?

Mark Chiusano:

I think there is. There’s one obvious similarity, which is that Santos himself models himself after Trump. You probably recognize it, listeners will recognize his speech patterns are kind of similar.

Donald Trump:

Somebody started throwing around 5 million, I didn’t say 5 million, somebody said 5 million. I think it might’ve been the Harvard report. There was a report from Harvard.

George Santos:

Actually studies point that most people lie on their resumes. Unfortunately, it’s the reality.

Interviewer:

Yeah, but you lied about everything.

George Santos:

Well, not true, right?

Interviewer:

You lied about your mom.

George Santos:

Not true either, but again, I never said my mother died on 9/11. I never said that. That was never said.

Mark Chiusano:

He types the same way. He even steals the memes that Trump uses sometimes for social media. He was following Trump around during his early campaigns. He would try to see him, see the extended members of the Trump universe when they cycle through Queens. He would film them and learn from them, I think.

So he is looking directly at Trump and seeing how he can pattern himself after Trump. I also think that Trump left some space for Santos, right? That these lies existed, that someone who was demonstrably lying and didn’t face much accountability for it, I think that that showed Santos, oh, I might be able to get away with this.

Preet Bharara:

But what’s funny is Santos didn’t model himself after Trump as an initial matter, because as you said, he has been lying and telling these Anthony stories from childhood. So did he remake himself in some way when he decided to become a political figure after Trump came on the scene? Did he use Trump as a convenient parallel for himself because his lying precedes the rise of Trump lying?

Mark Chiusano:

I think that he has used the Trump bombast in a way. That was a slightly different tone of lying maybe than what he was doing earlier. But I also think that he was always pretty conservative, I would say, family members indicated as much to me, friends who knew him early on. But he really embraced some of the MAGA positions, I guess, once Trump came on the scene and once politics became the place to be in American culture.

Preet Bharara:

You said something interesting recently, bearing on this theme, “What’s interesting to me is the Santos story shows that even a regular person can be lying and shameless and get to office, and that is, in some senses, almost scarier than someone like Trump being able to do it.” What did you mean by that?

Mark Chiusano:

Well, I think it’s not that surprising if we step back a little and say, “How did Trump get to office,” right? Sure, he was not qualified in the way that previous presidents have been, but he was well-known around the country. He is a household name. He has this TV show. He doesn’t have as much money as he says he had, but he has a decent amount of money. He knows people who he can call to get more money as well. George Santos had none of these things.

He had very, very little going for him, and yet he was able to warm his way into the political system, by the way, also often by saying that he had money and by making connections in the financial world. And I think that is a little bit different than the Trump case because Trump is not really replicable. It’s a little hard to run the Trump playbook without being Trump. But if George Santos can do it, that means others can as well.

Preet Bharara:

Is George Santos replicable?

Mark Chiusano:

George Santos is truly, truly one of a kind in terms of like a character, I think. I just think that people would get tired doing all the lies that he does. I don’t think you could say, “I’m going to be George Santos today.”

Preet Bharara:

Does he have any legacy? What’s the legacy of George Santos or his ordeal and his expulsion?

Mark Chiusano:

I wonder if people look at him and say, “Wow, I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did.” I feel like right now we’re saying, “Well, at least he got pushed out of Congress. That sends a message,” but it was a long time.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s a great question. I’m glad you raised it. I mean, was it possible that he could have survived this vote, or was it inevitable once the Ethics Committee came up with its conclusions, even in the face of this indictment?

Mark Chiusano:

I think it was possible. I was reporting on a little bit of the vote count that morning, and it was not very clear that there were going to be enough votes to expel him. Republican leadership totally went the other direction to protect him, and that was after this pretty, pretty wild House Ethics Committee report, which had a lot more information.

Preet Bharara:

To be charitable to the Republicans on this, was that almost exclusively because of the narrow margin that they have in the House that they can’t afford to lose even a crazy sociopathic liar?

Mark Chiusano:

Right. So I guess there what they would say is that it was a question of precedent, and you don’t want to push someone out before convicting them. However, I think that the committee report really makes that argument problematic.

Preet Bharara:

Because those were conclusions, not allegations at that point.

Mark Chiusano:

They were conclusions and they were conclusions based on bank records. This is not just interviews that someone did.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t think it’s crazy to have voted against the expulsion of George Santos after the indictment, because we have the presumption and there’s a sitting United States Senator of the other party who has been indicted on federal charges and he has not been expelled. So I get that. And obviously many members must have felt the same because there were two votes. Were there not?

Mark Chiusano:

Yeah, both sides of the aisle too. [Crosstalk 00:16:23]

Preet Bharara:

There were a couple of votes that failed. This one succeeded. What do you make of the discussion, because I have a hard time with this, already speculation about what George Santos’ second act might be, and why should he have a second act, or should everyone have a second act?

Mark Chiusano:

Well, it’s a free country, and he’s already… Incredibly, he’s doing his second act already with Cameo, apparently making a lot of money off it. I feel a little nervous that I may have incepted a second act into his head. Someone asked me this question and I said, “Dancing with the Stars.” And then another reporter told him that I said that, and he at first said, “No, no, no. Certainly not.”

But then he thinks about it and says, “Well, if I need the money.” So now I think that’s in his head and he’s looking at that as well. I feel like we have to remember how serious his legal challenges are. This is not a period that’s going to last forever. So I think his second act will have to wait until after his court date, his trial, if he gets that far.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think people maybe didn’t take this as seriously as they might have, this is just a theory on my part, and I don’t know what you’ll think of this, because the guy kind of presents so comically?

Mark Chiusano:

In the first place, you mean, like when he was running, or after?

Preet Bharara:

Well, even after. I don’t know quite how to characterize it. He doesn’t cut a scary figure, right? There’s something kind of silly about… He comes across like a silly man. Does that mitigate the level of feeling and anger about someone elected to Congress who lied so much?

Mark Chiusano:

I think that’s definitely right. There was this perception that somewhat victimless crimes. I would push against that, because I write in the book about some victims.

Preet Bharara:

Right, because the lies were so outlandish and it does reach the point of farce sometimes, right?

Mark Chiusano:

It was farcical. He’s a very charismatic man, and it’s a fun story. I mean, I wrote in the book about how he’s in Brazil participating in a beauty pageant. This is the style of stuff that he’s interested in, so that’s a lot of fun. And I wrote a piece about this a few weeks ago. While he was in Congress, he was continuing to do some sort of zany things that are different when you’re in Congress versus when you’re just a member of the public.

He would go on X Spaces, which is this audio platform, and say some of the wildest things, like saying that we should move into a police state in the US after the Hamas invasion of Israel, go door to door in this very vague way. These are things that are, I think, a piece of his… They’re kind of part and parcel with his lying, and those things are not so fun. It’s not such a joke.

Preet Bharara:

Did you learn something about human nature in the course of writing this book?

Mark Chiusano:

I think that it is harder to find out that someone’s lying than I thought it was in the first place. We all think we’re really good judges of liars, and I think that we’re not. Santos is a bit of an edge case, obviously, because he was lying about everything. But I spoke to so many people who said that they wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt even after they found out he was lying. It’s just we can’t believe that someone is going to keep lying to us over and over and over again.

Preet Bharara:

Mark Chiusano, the book is The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos. Thanks for spending some time with us today.

Mark Chiusano:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former US Attorney Joyce Vance. Head to CAFE.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s CAFE.com/insider. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice.

Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@CAFE.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Nat Weiner, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.