Just caught this on my newsfeed. Bloomberg reports that George Santos has named himself as his own campaign treasurer. Naturally, when someone has been under the gun for ethical issues, and has been indicted on 13 felony charges, the certainly need all the transparency they can get. He is not resigning, and actually running for reelection. So surely he needs to find some highly respected person to handle the campaign money. After presumably doing a thorough search, he has appointed a guy named George Santos. You can’t make this stuff up. He gives new meaning to self parody.
He has upheld his usual level of professional and ethical standards in this decision, I see.
In paperwork filed with the Federal Election Commission, Santos named himself as both treasurer and custodian of records, listing a Washington post office box as his official address.
Santos follows a line of people overseeing his campaign finances since his November election: Nancy Marks, a longtime New York GOP operative who resigned as his treasurer in January; Thomas Datwyler, who denied ever accepting the job after his name appeared on FEC paperwork; and Andrew Olson, who had never served as a campaign treasurer and whose only identifying information was a Google email address.
He doesn’t realize how terrible this looks. Wasn’t Anthony Devolder, or Anthony Zabrovsky available?
Apparently, he was handling this campaign cash all along without disclosing this to donors. But upon officially filing the paperwork, he had to actually name a treasurer. While it is not illegal to be your own campaign treasurer, nobody but nobody does this. If you are running for office, you want someone with some actual experience doing this as to have some separation between yourself and the cash flow. If something goes wrong, you’ve got some deniability. (If I had known a Nazi had donated to my campaign, I would have immediately returned the money.) Even if you are a professional accountant, with so many balls up in the air, you could make some incredible screw ups.
The road goes on forever and the (republican) party never ends.
I posted this earlier and got a ton of code making it unreadable. Might have been a Firefox update gone bad. Unpublished and redid in Chrome. Sorry for the screwup.