On MSNBC on Saturday morning, the publisher of the local newspaper that raised concerns about George Santos’ bid for a House seat remembered a frightening first encounter with the then-candidate who came to get his paper’s endorsement.
Grant Lally of the North Shore Leader claimed in an interview with broadcaster Cori Coffin that he decided to meet with Santos after having previously run for the position himself.
Shortly into their meeting, the editors and he noticed something was strange about Santos, and their suspicions that he was lying to them intensified, as he told the host.
“Three years ago, in January 2020 and he reached out to us via a woman that we both knew, and wanted to sit down and wanted our support,” he recalled. “I had actually run for the seat many years before that, and he was looking for my support and so I sat down with him for about an hour and a half. I asked him a lot of questions, a lot of pointed questions, a lot of personal questions, not an unfriendly meeting at all, but he was really a weirdo right from the start.”
“He was evasive, he was also just basking in the attention that he was getting, which I thought was very weird for a guy who at the time was only 31 years old, but claimed to be a multimillionaire financier,” he added.
When asked about the New York Times’ extensive investigation into Santos’ allegations, he responded, “The New York Times did some great reporting and some great digging, and we felt very vindicated because we had called him out as a fake, we call him a fabulist, and he — it was beyond our wildest expectations. We didn’t think someone would lie about attending Baruch College. We didn’t think someone would lie about working at Goldman Sachs. I knew, by the way, that he wasn’t Jewish because the first time I met him, I asked him about his heritage and his background in Brazil, and I don’t think he expected it, so he actually told the truth.”
“Your paper is now calling on Santos to resign or be expelled. Do you think either these outcomes could happen?” host Coffin pressed.
“Look, I think, and you reported on the story just a minute ago, that he stole $3,000 from a disabled United States veteran who needed that money for an operation on his service dog,” Lally explained. “Santos put up a GoFundMe and raise $3, 000, stole the money, and then disappeared and the dog didn’t get it’s surgery, and the dog died.”
“This is pure evil, ” he continued. “No one can support him at this point. Even those who have been fist-pumping him, in a tentative way, that is all going to stop, because you can’t support this level of evil by everyone. So I think it will be a pretty close to a unanimous vote to expel him, and I think it’s coming pretty soon.
