Marjorie Taylor Greene Asks for George Santos's Sentence to Be Commuted
On Monday, one of his former colleagues began a formal effort to get him out.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the brash Georgia Republican and MAGA adherent, sent a letter to the Justice Department's pardon attorney asking that Mr. Santos's 87-month prison term be commuted, calling it 'excessive' and a 'grave injustice.'
Ms. Greene's letter came just days after President Trump, who has doled out pardons or clemency to staunch supporters and others favored by his right-wing base, did not rule out offering a pardon to Mr. Santos, saying only that he had not been asked.
'Nobody's talked to me about it,' Mr. Trump said on Friday in an interview on the right-wing channel Newsmax. Still, the president, who is known for his own exaggerations and outright falsehoods, acknowledged Mr. Santos's reputation.
'He lied like hell,' Mr. Trump said. 'And I didn't know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.'
It was an accurate assessment. Mr. Santos, 37, rode into Congress in January 2023 as the object of national scorn after The New York Times and other outlets uncovered that he had fabricated much of his résumé, including a booming Wall Street career and ties to Sept. 11 and the Holocaust. He was ejected that December, after three-quarters of the House voted to expel him.
But during his 11-month stint in Congress, Mr. Santos, a Republican from New York, frequently aligned with hard-right lawmakers like Ms. Greene. And even before he took office, Mr. Santos was a reliable Trump loyalist. After both men lost their elections in 2020, Mr. Santos repeated the president's debunked claims of election fraud and falsely insisted that he, too, had an election stolen from him.
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