Setback for Santos Ahead of Long Island Fraud Trial
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. — A federal judge on Tuesday denied disgraced former Republican New York Rep. George Santos’ request that potential jurors in his upcoming fraud trial fill out a questionnaire describing how they feel about him.
U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert handed down her decision during a pretrial hearing on the case held at the federal court in Central Islip, a hamlet in Suffolk County, Long Island.
Santos, who was tossed from Congress by a 311-114 vote on Dec. 1, 2023, is set to go on trial on 23 fraud-related counts on Sept. 9.
He stands accused by prosecutors of a number of financial misdeeds, including reimbursing himself for loans to his congressional campaign that prosecutors claim he may never actually have made. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
Last week, Santos’ defense attorneys argued in court filings that due to the amount of publicity Santos has received since winning election to Congress in 2022, he has “already been found guilty in the court of public opinion.”
Pointing to hundreds of articles and even comedian Bowen Yang’s impression of him on “Saturday Night Live,” the attorneys said their client has been branded as deceitful, fraudulent, “a ‘liar,’ ‘fraud’ and ‘con artist.’”
They said at least one news outlet referred to Santos as lying “like other people breathe.”
They also noted that other federal courts have required jury questionnaires in the criminal trials of former President Donald Trump and Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota cop convicted of killing George Floyd.
Prosecutors pushed back, arguing that 850 prospective jurors have already been told to report to the federal courthouse on Sept. 9, and that there is “no mechanism to require those jurors to appear at an earlier time for the purpose of completing a questionnaire.”
They went on to say that whatever publicity Santos has received, it’s been “largely a product of his own making” and that he should have made his request for the questionnaire months ago.
In rejecting Santos’ request, Seybert said she doesn’t like such questionnaires as a rule because, among other things, they limit the kinds of questions that can be asked to jurors to help put together the fairest jury possible.
However she did grant one of the Santos team’s requests: The identity of the jurors will not be made public during the trial, in the interest, she said, of preserving their impartiality.
Seybert also revealed that of the pool of 850 potential jurors, 98 have already been ruled out, while more than 300 have been confirmed to be available.
One of the wildcards ahead of the upcoming trial is whether and in what capacity Santos’ former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, will participate in the proceedings.
In October 2023, Marks pleaded guilty to charges that she falsified campaign finance filings in an attempt to “defraud the United States.” She was scheduled to be sentenced on April 12, but asked that her sentencing be delayed until mid-November.
The request, which was granted, means she won’t be jailed until after Santos’ trial, setting up the possibility that she could emerge as a star witness for the prosecution.
For those who may not remember, Santos was elected to Congress in November 2022 as part of a red wave on Long Island that saw Republicans claim all four of the island’s congressional seats.
In doing so, he defeated longtime Democratic operative Robert Zimmerman, who was running to succeed Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., who was then running for governor.
Santos’ victory quickly came into question after a December 2023 New York Times expose revealed much of what Santos had claimed about his life and career on the campaign trail was false.
Among other things, he claimed to have worked for CitiGroup and Goldman Sachs, and to have attended Baruch College and New York University, though no records were ever found to substantiate those assertions.
A number of other claims, including that he is of Jewish heritage and that his mother was a survivor of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, also proved unverifiable.
After Santos was expelled, Suozzi won his seat back in a special election in which he defeated Nassau County Legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Republican from Great Neck, Long Island.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue
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