Breaking barriers/marital bonds
But this morning I reported that court records in Queens County, New York, show that Santos appears to be the subject of a previously unacknowledged Sept. 2019 divorce with a woman. A search of the New York City Marriage Index—a database culled from public records—shows that the couple was married for nearly seven years, getting their license on Dec. 12, 2012.
While his 2022 campaign bio mentions his husband, who according to Santos lives with him and their four dogs on Long Island, he’s kept the marriage out of the public eye entirely. But just 12 days after his divorce was finalized, Santos filed the official paperwork to launch his 2020 campaign.
The Daily Beast has now found remarkable inconsistencies in those campaign finance statements.
Paperwork pushover
That dissonance echoes across multiple committees tied to Santos, and while a fair share of the maneuvering lurks behind fairly complex transfers—some involving GOP allies—most of the problems have, like the other cracks in Santos’ life, been hiding in plain sight for years. This time, it’s in the form of a litany of publicly disclosed federal notices for shoddy bookkeeping and a slew of possible violations.
Those records also point to sketchy behavior beyond Santos, most specifically regarding his GOP ally and fellow Long Islander Rep. Lee Zeldin.
Perhaps most famously, Santos stuffed his 2022 campaign account with $705,000 in personal loans, though questions abound about how the young conservative—whom the Times reported was evicted twice for failure to pay his rent, as recently as 2017, and only drew $55,000 in his most recent previous job—was able to come up with that kind of money.
This year, however, Santos reported pulling a $750,000 salary on top of the more than $1 million in dividends he received from his financial consulting company, the Devolder Organization.
Pay raise
He gave much of that salary to his 2022 campaign—a total of $705,000, including a $500,000 lump sum at the end of March and another fresh $125,000 injection two weeks ahead of the election, all from his personal funds, according to federal filings. In 2020, Santos gave his campaign about $80,000—much more than his LinkBridge salary, but a fraction of what he ponied up in 2022.
According to Federal Election Commission data, Santos—whose committees reflect both of his surnames, Devolder-Santos—pulled in $2.93 million to his 2022 campaign, and another $233,000 to his leadership PAC. That’s a sizable haul, even without the loans.
But the reports accounting for that fundraising are, in a word, a mess. So much so, that, as with the holes in his resume, it’s a wonder they didn’t draw more political heat before the election.
The Corrections
FEC analysts have sent the Santos campaign a notice, often multiple, for literally every report his campaign filed this election cycle—the July 2021 quarterly drawing five.
Additionally, all of Santos’ 2020 filings got dinged, with the sole exception of his year-end report, which the campaign pre-emptively corrected. He even got a notice for failing to register his campaign properly.
Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Daily Beast that the sheer volume of errors was eye-popping, even for someone with Santos’ apparently loose relationship with reality.
“Santos clearly has a problem with telling the truth, so it’s not a surprise to see him struggle with his FEC reports. That being said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone running for the House have to routinely amend their reports five or six times whenever they file,” Libowitz said.
Money problems
The notices flag a wide range of apparent violations, from excessive individual contributions to impermissible committee transfers to unexplained increases and decreases in cash to failure to file required reports.
One letter revealed a convergence of two major scandals. That notice, from October, alleged that Santos appeared to have taken thousands in excessive contributions from former FTX crypto boss and Sam Bankman-Fried partner Ryan Salame, along with donations in the names of two people that public records tie to Salame’s parents. (The Bankman-Friend indictment alleged a straw donor scheme that wrapped up a number of as-yet unnamed people.)
Combined, the notices for the 2022 cycle called attention to $310,000 worth of allegedly impermissible contributions that the campaign needed to explain or otherwise resolve. The July letters alone involved about $36,000, from different sources, and showed the campaign struggled for months to properly report an $80,000 loan from Santos.
Amending the amendment
The campaign amended reports as it went along, resulting in alerts for unexplained spending increases, such boosts of more than $40,000 on an amended Oct. 2021 quarterly and more than $45,000 on another amended quarterly from last April.
In this year’s April quarterly, the agency flagged seven categories of possible violations, including apparent flaws in loan disclosures.
But that’s just one of five committees bearing Santos’ name.
Santos also launched a leadership PAC after he lost the 2020 election, called “GADS PAC,” bearing the initials of his four names. That committee—a special type of PAC for officeholders and candidates, widely regarded as a personal slush fund—also received FEC questions after every report for the 2022 election, except for the pre-general report, which the committee pre-emptively corrected earlier this month.
On top of that, Santos also had two joint fundraising committees—“Devolder Santos Nassau Committee” and “Devolder Santos Nassau Victory Committee”—which pulled in about $200,000 and $470,000, respectively. And in the wake of his 2020 loss, he opened a “Devolder Santos for Congress Recount PAC,” raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as he fought a doomed election challenge alongside MAGA totem President Donald Trump.
But those Santos committees have also displayed some curious interactions with other Republicans, particularly in his home state of New York.
EGADS!
For instance, GADS PAC, Santos’ leadership PAC, made some interesting moves in proximity to tens of thousands of dollars in unaccounted payments that an influential, well-funded ally made
On July 10, 2021, Santos loaned GADS PAC $25,000, presumably from personal funds. The next day, GADS PAC transferred exactly $25,000 to the new New York gubernatorial campaign for retiring Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), a fellow Long Islander. Santos transferred another $2,000 four days later.
The same day as that first $25,000 transfer, according to New York state campaign finance records, Zeldin made a series of major transfers from his gubernatorial campaign (Zeldin for New York) to his federal congressional campaign (Zeldin for Congress).
Those payments include installments of $36,045 and $26,762 for “Car Rental, Payment, Etc.” (Just a few days prior, Zeldin for New York had already spent $35,000 for that same itemized purpose in $5,000 payments to seven auto dealers, including three separate Nissan outposts.) Zeldin for New York also laid out another $17,500 to Zeldin for Congress that same day—for “office”—and another $1,350 for professional services.
Missed connections
Although all of those payments could be legitimate, none of them—totaling $81,657—appear as receipts in Zeldin for Congress’ federal filings. And that missing money, according to Documented deputy executive director Brendan Fischer, is a “red flag.”
“Transactions between committees should be reflected on both reports—we should be able to see the money going out from one committee, and coming in to the other committee in the same amount,” Fischer said.
While Zeldin didn’t give Santos money directly, a group tied to him called “Conquering Cancer PAC” gave $10,000 to a Santos joint fundraising committee on Aug. 10 this year. The cancer PAC transferred another $10,000 to the Santos campaign that same day.
Nancy Marks the spot
It turns out, Conquering Cancer PAC, Zeldin, and Santos’ committees all share the same treasurer—a Long Island woman named Nancy Marks. And Marks is the person ultimately responsible for squaring away these reports. FEC records show that over the last three years, she has been paid a total $160,000 by all five Santos committees for an array of services, including compliance fees, fundraising costs, accounting, printing, even gas cards.
The Daily Beast left a comment request with a Marks associate, but Marks did not reply.
While Marks serves as treasurer to a number of committees, her ties to Santos run deeper, into the private sector.
Marks is connected to another company with ties to Santos. That company, R.I.A. Concepts Holding LTD, is registered at her address and appears on the incorporation documents for a now dissolved consulting business Santos launched in Florida, called Red Strategies.
In one of the only reports on Santos’ business record ahead of the midterms, The Daily Beast noted in April that the other members of Red Strategies were also part of another troubled former Santos firm, Harbor City Capital.
In April 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Harbor City—without naming Santos—of bilking clients out of $6 million, The Daily Beast reported. Santos and his colleagues (who also weren’t named in the SEC complaint) started Red Strategies the next month.
