George Santos asks court to allow travel for shopping & dining while awaiting trial

Out Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has asked a court to allow him to travel out of state for “dining” and “shopping” while he waits to appear in court for 13 criminal charges.

When Santos posted bail for the charges in early May, the court’s conditions allowed him to travel between New York and Washington, DC but required him to notify prosecutors and pretrial services when traveling elsewhere.

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In a Wednesday letter to Judge Anne Shields, Santos’s lawyer Joseph Murray — who attended the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol — asked the judge to allow Santos to travel within a 30-mile radius of DC.

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“In light of the small geographical area of the District of Columbia, there is a frequent need to travel outside the District of Columbia for usual and customary functions of someone who lives and works in the District of Columbia, such as dining, shopping, meetings, events, and even use of the local airports,” Murray wrote.

The lawyer noted, “Both the government and Pretrial Services have been consulted and have no objection to this request.”

The charges facing Santos include seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives, and one count of theft of public funds. Prosecutors allege that he illegally used campaign funds to buy designer clothes and other personal items. He has tried to fundraise off of these criminal charges.

Santos posted a $500,000 bond to appear in court for the charges. Though he said he’d rather go to jail than publicly reveal the names of the guarantors who posted his bond, they were later revealed to be his aunt and his father.

Santos has admitted to fabricating large parts of his personal history during his election campaign. Out Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and other House Democrats recently introduced a resolution to censure Santos for lying about his personal and professional life in order to get elected to Congress.

Santos has provided no substantial proof to back up his claims that his grandparents escaped the Holocaust, that he attended the Horace Mann preparatory school, that his mother died in connection to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, or that he lost four employees in the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting.

Santos was part of Rio’s drag scene in the late 2000s (despite initially claiming that he was never a drag queen). Santos also denied an accusation of check fraud in Brazil but later formally confessed to it. Some have questioned whether he married his ex-wife so that she could obtain U.S. citizenship through him. He also pledged not to seek re-election and then later announced his re-election campaign.

In March, the House Ethics Committee announced its investigation into whether Santos violated federal conflict of interest laws and engaged in sexual misconduct. 

Since joining Congress, Santos has cosponsored a bill to roll back LGBTQ+ civil rights and one to ban LGBTQ+ books from schools. He has also made public statements against transgender people, the so-called “radical rainbow mafia.” and he said that LGBTQ+ families “create troubled individuals.”