There was a lot more detail in the latest complaint. What’s not in there is even more intriguing.
But while the superseding indictment lays out a number of brazen fraudulent schemes—stealing financial information from donors and family members, making an array of unauthorized political contributions, and pocketing some of the money personally—prosecutors made clear that they have not disclosed the full breadth of their knowledge of Santos’ alleged political crime spree.
There is one particularly glaring omission in the new federal complaint: the source of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in shady personal loans that Santosthat the money was, eventually, real—hitting the campaign’s account months later in a series of alleged loans totalling, backfilling the $500,000 vacuum in the campaign’s record books and keeping it solvent throughout the last weeks of the contest.
“As we sort of knew all along, the cash behind his candidacy was basically money from others washed through a paper-thin ‘business’ set up right as he was running for Congress,” Ghosh told The Daily Beast.Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, observed that there are “many, many, many, potentially criminal explanations.”
Even if this were true, Santos would still have trouble explaining such an acute and astronomical injection of personal cash right around the election. But, as with so many of Santos’ claims, this one now appears totally false. Prosecutors describe the Devolder Organization not as a sole proprietorship, but a limited liability company with Santos as “sole beneficial owner.” Still, Ghosh observed that “even in the event that the company was some sort of unincorporated entity, it’s important to note that even in that case we’re still looking at a contribution in the name of another.”
The second scenario envisions Santos transferring the proceeds earned from legitimate Devolder Organization business transactions—such as brokering a yacht between two business clients, asSantos did right around the time he was making these loans. That fact pattern, experts said, would be putting corporate funds into a campaign—a point underscored by the claim that those funds came straight from the Devolder Organization’s bank account.
“But assuming that Santos had some customers who paid his business for legitimate purposes, a candidate cannot treat their corporate bank account as a personal piggy bank,” Fischer said. “Santos could still have violated campaign finance law if he treated corporate money as his personal funds.”
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