George Santos grilled about his lies on TV: “I’ve been a terrible liar”

Out Rep. George Santos (R-NY) admitted “I’ve been a terrible liar” when questioned by English TV personality Piers Morgan about the many falsehoods Santos has uttered.

In the interview, broadcast on the Monday night installment of Piers Morgan Uncensored, Morgan recounted some of the falsehoods, stating, “’I was a Wall Street superstar, I was this, my family were this,’ and it was all untrue.”

Related:

Kyrsten Sinema slams reports that she is friends with George Santos

He said she called him “buddy.” She was not having it.

Morgan continued, “I don’t characterize these as mistakes. I think they’re part of your process of, cathartic process of redemption if you’d like. It’s gotta start from ‘I’ve been a terrible liar.’ I mean, would you be prepared to say that?”

When Santos began replying, “Sure, like I said—,” Morgan interjected, “Go on then…”

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Santos said, “Well, I’ve been a terrible liar on those subjects.”

Santos then asserted, “What I tried to convey to the American people is I made mistakes of allowing the pressures of what I thought needed to be done in order to — this, this wasn’t about tricking anybody, this wasn’t about, it’s…”

Morgan interrupted, saying, “Yes, it was.”

Santos replied, “No, no, no, let me finish.”

But Morgan said, “The whole thing was about tricking people.”

Santos responded. “Let me finish. It wasn’t about tricking the people. This was about getting accepted by the party here locally.”

"I've been a terrible liar…"

Piers Morgan grills republican George Santos, the man who's been branded the biggest fibber in politics.

Watch it on TalkTV at 8pm.@piersmorgan | @Santos4Congress | @TalkTV | #PMU pic.twitter.com/bNaIDJLlzG

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) February 20, 2023

Elsewhere in the interview, Santos had trouble remembering the date that he allegedly married the man he refers to as his husband. Previously, The Daily Beast found no public record that Santos had ever married a man. However, Santos said he would show Morgan his marriage certificate after the interview.

Morgan asked Santos if he has always considered himself as gay. Santos said, “No, no. My life wasn’t straightforward. I was very much in love with someone, and we got married, and it just didn’t work out.”

“Did she know that you might be gay?” Morgan asked. 

“I don’t think so, no,” Santos said. “It got messy.”  

Like most things in Santos’s biography, the truth is complicated.

Santos was married to a woman named Uadla Vieira Santos from 2012 to 2019. But he was part of Rio’s drag scene in the late 2000s, was a prominent “Gays for Trump” advocate in the late 2010’s, and reportedly dated men while the two were married. Their arrangement has led some to question whether he married so that she could obtain U.S. citizenship through Santos.

At another point in the interview, Morgan asked Santos about the politician’s repeated claims that he is Jewish. Santos replied that he had never claimed to be authentically Jewish.

“I would always say I was raised Catholic but I come from a Jewish family, so that makes me ‘Jew-ish,'” Santos said.

“I would say that my grandparents are Jewish on my mother’s side, so I am ‘Jew-ish.’ It was always a joke; people would laugh it up. I said it to a room with 1,000 people in November. People were hysterically laughing. It was funny to them, they loved it.”

“I don’t think Jewish people find it funny,” Morgan replied.

In December, the Republican Jewish Coalition said Santos was no longer welcome at the group’s events because he “misrepresented his heritage.”

Santos told Morgan that he has taken four DNA tests to prove his Jewish ancestry and is awaiting the results. Santos said he “grew up with the story” that his grandparents fled Nazi persecution in Ukraine and moved to Brazil. Genealogical and Holocaust records investigated by CNN don’t back up this claim or his claim to any Jewish heritage. In fact, birth certificates show that his grandparents were born in Brazil, but Santos told Morgan that his grandparents forged these documents.

Morgan later asked Santos about his numerous lies, stating, “Did you not think people would find this out? You’re not running to be like [on] a reality TV [show]. If you were going on Celebrity Apprentice —which I went on, right? — it doesn’t matter. You can embellish stuff about yourself, nobody cares right? But to run for Congress of the United States, and to just tell blatant lies about even your academic record. I’m just struck – not necessarily that a politician would lie – but that you would think no one would find out.”

“Well, I’ll humor you this,” Santos said. “I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat for Congress. And I got away with it then, and I guess –”

“Well that’s honest,” Morgan said. “So you thought actually, they’re not going to find out.”

Santos admitted, “No, I didn’t think so.”

"I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat for Congress… and I got away with it then."

George Santos tells Piers Morgan why he thought he could get away with lying about his background and education.@piersmorgan | @Santos4Congress | @TalkTV | #PMU pic.twitter.com/Bnv834NXt6

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) February 20, 2023

Santos’ constituents are still looking to remove him from office, and Republicans are quietly looking for someone to replace him. He is also facing multiple ethics complaints as local and federal investigators examine his campaign finances.

He has aligned himself with rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and said in an interview that LGBTQ+ families “create troubled individuals.”