George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in 2023, was sentenced on Friday to more than seven years in prison for identity theft and wire-fraud charges stemming from his 2022 midterm campaign.
“I cannot rewrite the past, but I can control the road ahead. I have tried my best,” Santos said at his sentencing, according to CNN, adding that he told the judge that he “betrayed the confidence entrusted to me” by the American people.
The former Republican representative from New York pleaded guilty last August to aggravated identity theft and wire fraud. He also admitted to lying to Congress, fraudulently collecting unemployment during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and cheating his campaign donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
After he was thrown out of Congress—the sixth member in history—he also faced a 23-count federal indictment that included conspiracy, identity theft and credit-card fraud.
Santos claimed, among other things, that he was of Jewish ancestry, that his mother was Jewish and that his maternal grandparents had survived the Holocaust. When proven false, he denied he ever said it.
Oddly enough, he was sentenced one day after Yom Hashoah.
“I never claimed to be Jewish,” he told the New York Post in 2022. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish.’”
Genealogical records in Brazil, where both of Santos’s parents were born, suggest that his maternal grandparents were Catholics with no connection to the Holocaust.