‘He was weird’: Publisher of Long Island newspaper that exposed Santos knew something was up years before election win

The North Shore Leader was the first newspaper to expose falsehoods made by George Santos before the midterm elections

The publisher of a Long Island newspaper that wrote the first exposé on George Santos said he suspected the congressman’s bad motivations during their first meeting, which took place years before his election win.

Grant Lally, the publisher of the North Shore Leader, thought he was a “completely non-serious candidate” after meeting him in 2020, during Mr Santos’ first run for office.

“He was weird,” Mr Lally told The Independent. “He acted strangely, he boasted, and at the same time he seemed to bask almost like a child in the attention he was getting.”

Mr Santos, who took his seat in the House of Representatives to represent in New York’s 3rd congressional in January, is currently under pressure to resign after it emerged he had fabricated much of his personal history during his campaign and long before.

Mr Lally, as well as being the publisher of The North Shore Leader, had also run for the Republican Party for the same seat in a previous election. In 2020, Mr Santos was seeking support for his run.

“My initial reaction was he was sort of childish and boastful, and he bragged about his money and his wealth, but he didn’t carry himself in the way that someone who had been successful in finance would carry themselves,” he added.

Two years later, when Mr Santos ran for the same seat again, The North Shore Leader wrote the first exposé expressing doubts about the reliability of his financial disclosures.

“It wasn’t a close call, because we knew that Santos … was a fraud, that there was something really wrong with him,” Mr Lally told The Independent.

The September story, published more than a month before the midterm elections, noted that Mr Santos’s personal financial disclosures showed an “inexplicable rise” in his net worth from $5,000 in 2020, when he had “no bank accounts, no stock accounts, no real property,” to $11mn in 2022. It also noted the inexplicable claims he had told made his personal wealth and properties, including that he "loaned" his campaign some $600,000, a sum that didn’t show up in his newly-filed 2022 personal financial disclosure.

Mr Lally said he noticed that Mr Santos was not spending the kind of money on his campaign that he said he had raised.

“We saw a discrepancy between what he was reporting and on his campaign finance disclosures and what we saw on the ground, because he had no campaign prior to the beginning of September. There was not a lawn sign, there was not a radio commercial, there was not a television commercial, there was not a headquarters open,” he said.

The newspaper, a conservative outlet that usually endorses Republicans, instead backed his Democratic rival in the 2022 midterm elections. Santos, nonetheless, won his election with 54 per cent of the vote.

The trouble really started for the Congressman-elect when the New York Times printed its own expose with the headline: “Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction.” The story picked up on the falsehoods discovered by the North Shore Leader and found a dozen more. The investigation found that Santos had lied about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, he had lied about the college he attended, he fabricated an animal charity, that the company from which he had earned a salary of $750,000 and dividends of $1mn did not have any online presence, that he lied about losing four employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, and that he faced criminal charges in Brazil for cheque fraud.

Mr Lally said he faced a “hostile” reaction from some Republicans when he first published the revelations, but that has changed amid a neverending avalanche of stories: “Virtually everyone at this point, including those who were disapproving at the time, said ‘this was the right thing to do. We needed to do this. Thank you.’”