Defiant Santos brushes off new charges

A defiant Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) is brushing off the latest set of criminal charges filed against him, claiming his innocence in the wake of Tuesday’s superseding indictment and emphasizing that he has no plans of resigning despite heightened pressure to step down.

“I will fight this to prove my innocence,” Santos told reporters in a 25-minute interview in his Capitol office. “So yeah, I’m pretty much denying every last bit of charges.”

Santos’s denial — and defense — came one day after prosecutors in New York charged Santos with 10 new criminal counts, bringing the total number of charges against him to 23. He is due to appear in court Oct. 27.

The congressman said Wednesday that he will not take a plea deal and has not engaged in discussions about that prospect.

“The No. 1 question you all ask me is, are you going to take a plea deal? No, the answer is I will not take a plea deal. I have not been in discussion for a plea deal at this time,” Santos told reporters. “And the reason so is I’m strong in my convictions that I can prove my innocence.”

He also affirmed that he is “still running for reelection” despite the new slew of charges.

The superseding indictment filed Tuesday against Santos accuses the New York Republican of stealing the identities and financial information of contributors to his campaign and charging their credit cards a number of times without authorization.

It also alleges that Santos engaged in a scheme that involved falsely reporting to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) that at least 10 family members made significant contributions to his campaign, despite knowing that they did not. The scheme, according to prosecutors, was carried out in an effort to have Santos qualify for a “national party committee” program that would provide financial and logistical support to his congressional bid.

Santos said Wednesday that he plans to “fight until the bitter end” against the charges, claiming that he had no control over his campaign’s finances — an argument he has levied in the past.

“There was a superseding indictment from the [Department of Justice] yesterday with an additional 10 counts on this ongoing investigation that I have made very abundantly clear in the past that I am going to fight until the bitter end,” Santos told reporters. “I’m going to continue to fight this as much as I have said in the past. Nothing changes.”

Prosecutors unveiled the new charges against Santos five days after his former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, struck a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to conspiring with the then-candidate as part of the scheme involving the “national party committee” program. The pair is accused of committing fraud on Santos’s campaign finance reports.

Santos said Wednesday that he was “not entirely surprised” to see the additional charges filed against him “following Nancy Marks’s turning in.”

“It was expected in a case like this, with high-profile case like this,” he later added. “And it’s politically convenient, quite frankly. I’m not trying to say it is a political persecution, but I’m gonna say there is political benefits to it. So I look at it that way.”

Santos appeared to try to pin the blame on Marks.

“I had no control over specifically campaign finances. I’ve made this abundantly clear. I paid somebody, and by the way, according to the news — you guys, some of you people in the news reported — overpaid somebody, who’s put me in, at this point, in an array of trouble, which was Nancy Marks,” Santos said. “Now everybody kind of knows who she is, and it’s out in the open.”

“With that being said, it’s frustrating to me that I have to sit here and now have to defend myself from things that I paid someone else to do,” he added.