One Of The All Time Worst Political Liars

December 31, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

 The big news in political lies at the moment comes from a guy named George Santos. Santos has been newly-elected to Congress from New York’s 3rd District, a competitive seat covering parts of Queens and Nassau Counties. Although the districts got re-drawn for this election, most of Santos’s district was previously held by Democrats, Tom Suozzi and Steve Israel, for the last decade. So Santos became part of the mini-wave of Republican pickups that will lead to the takeover of Congress by a thin margin come January 3.

On December 19, several weeks after the election, the New York Times published a story exposing Santos as having lied extensively about his background during the campaign. The headline was “Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.” Among the main issues identified by the Times were that Santos had never worked, as he claimed, at Citibank and Goldman Sachs, and had not graduated, as he claimed, from Baruch College. Also, a pet-welfare charity that he claimed to run, Friends of Pets United, could not be found in IRS records. Also, he is not Jewish as he had claimed. The Times did not challenge Santos’s claim that he is the first openly-gay Republican elected to Congress as a non-incumbent.

Over the past few days, Santos submitted to extensive interviews by, among others, the New York Post and Tulsi Gabbard (guest-hosting the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News), where he was forced to concede his fabrications. He referred to them as “résumé enhancement.”

Plenty of Democrats immediately came forward to demand that Santos resign, or that the Congress decline to seat him. In an article on December 26, the Hill quoted, for example, Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas as saying that allowing Santos to take office “would set a dangerous precedent”; and quoted Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell (!) of California as saying that Santos had “confessed to defrauding the voters of Long Island.” Slate on December 27 described Santos as “disgraced” and called the situation “truly unprecedented.” Peggy Noonan devotes her entire lead op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal to the Santos matter, calling him “a stone cold liar who effectively committed election fraud.”

Let’s face it — Santos’s fabrications are pretty bad. But are they really “unprecedented,” or even unusual, among the lies told by politicians to advance their careers and gain office, including among current office-holders?

I’ve got a bunch I think are worse. The funny thing about these, though, is that not a single Democrat seems to care about them. All involve current officeholders, who are not subject to any widespread demands that they resign. Let’s consider.

Ilhan Omar. Ms. Omar is the current Congressperson representing Minnesota’s 5th District (Minneapolis). Rumors that Omar had married her biological brother as part of an immigration fraud scheme had surfaced even before she was initially elected to Congress in 2016; but during her first re-election campaign in 2018 the rumors were replaced with detailed and damning research. A guy named David Steinberg did a meticulously-researched series of articles from August 13 to November 5, 2018, that as far as I can see definitively prove the allegations. Scott Johnson of PowerLine has followed the story extensively, and in this summary post from July 18, 2019 not only summarizes the facts, but also provides links to all of Steinberg’s articles.

Incredibly, Omar is almost never asked about this situation by the press, and has almost entirely avoided even addressing it. No “mainstream” news source has subjected Omar to anything like the examination that Santos got from the Post or Gabbard. Omar has never even had to answer a direct question as to whether her ex-husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is related to her. However, in this October 17, 2018 article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Omar is quoted as saying that the allegations that she had married her brother are “disgusting lies.” So, if the allegations are true, that one is an affirmative misrepresentation.

Richard Blumenthal. Blumenthal is a sitting Senator from Connecticut, just re-elected in the November 2022 election. He was first elected to the Senate in 2010. In the run-up to that campaign, Blumenthal made numerous statements that he had served “in Vietnam” during the Vietnam War. On May 17, 2010, the New York Times (to its credit) ran a big article on Blumenthal’s false statements about his Vietnam service. For example, the Times quotes Blumenthal from a 2008 appearance before a veterans’ group in Norwalk:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008.

There are several other such direct quotes. But, according to the Times, Blumenthal’s history of military service is somewhat different:

Mr. Blumenthal . . . never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records. The deferments allowed Mr. Blumenthal to complete his studies at Harvard; pursue a graduate fellowship in England; serve as a special assistant to The Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House. In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam.

Elizabeth Warren. Ms. Warren claimed “Native American” ancestry going all the way back before her first getting hired to teach at Harvard Law School in 1992. Warren first ran for the Senate from Massachusetts in 2012. According to an article at Boston.com from May 31, 2012, Warren admitted at that point in her campaign that she had told Harvard (and before that her prior employer the University of Pennsylvania) about her claimed ethnic status. But she maintained that the claim had nothing to do with her getting hired:

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren acknowledged for the first time late Wednesday night that she told Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania that she was Native American, but she continued to insist that race played no role in her recruitment.

In September 2018 the Boston Globe did a big investigation, and determined that even though Warren claimed Native American ethnic status on each occasion, that claim had nothing to do with Warren getting hired either at Harvard or any of four prior academic employers. The Boston Globe article is behind paywall, but here is a summary from CBS News, September 2, 2018:

The newspaper [Boston Globe] reports that interviews and documents show the issue [of Warren’s Native American ancestry] was not considered by Harvard Law faculty or those who admitted the now U.S. senator from Massachusetts to law school at Rutgers or to jobs at The University of Houston, The University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania.

All five of those academic institutions are completely obsessessed with race and ethnicity, and were equally so obsessessed in the 80s and 90s when Warren was hired. The quoted statement is one of the most preposterous lies I have ever seen from the American mainstream press, and that’s really saying something.

President Joe Biden. And finally, how about our current President? Santos is not remotely at Biden’s level as a political liar. As Douglas Murray recounts in the New York Post from December 29, Biden has variously claimed that he got three undergraduate degrees from the University of Delaware, had a full academic scholarship, and finished at the top of his class. But the truth:

Turned out he’d been at the bottom of the class and scraped a single degree.

But, out of a universe of dozens of candidates for Biden’s most egregious lie, I pick the claim that he never spoke to his son Hunter about his business dealings. From USA Today, September 21, 2019:

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said. “Here’s what I know. Trump should be investigated.”

That’s an attempt to avoid responsibility for what would be criminal activity. The statement has been definitively disproven by eyewitness accounts of Biden business-associate Tony Bobulinski, and by emails that Bobulinski has produced. No lie of Santos comes close to that level of significance.

I’m certainly not trying to stand up here for Republicans as being pure on this issue. If you’d like to read about some notable political lies by Republicans, check out this article from The New York Times from December 28 (a broad survey of political liars covering both Republicans and Democrats). But the remarkable thing is the extent to which the media protect and cover for conduct of Democrats that is far more egregious than what Santos has done, including criminal conduct in the case of our current President. In case you were wondering, the title of this post refers to Biden, not Santos.