Aset of updated campaign finance reports are deepening the mystery surrounding the source of high-dollar loans that Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) made to his campaign last year.
Santos’s campaign previously reported that a pair of six-figure loans from the candidate — one for $500,000 that was made last March and another for $125,000 in October — came from his personal funds.
But in an amended filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday, Santos’s campaign unchecked a box indicating that the $500,000 loan came from personal funds. Similarly, a separate updated report left the same box unchecked for the $125,000 loan. The changes were first reported by The Daily Beast.Further complicating the matter is the fact that filings from later in 2022 still mark the $500,000 loan as coming from personal funds, leaving the source of the money unclear. Campaign finance experts are struggling to unpack the latest disclosures from Santos’s campaign, which they say are riddled with potential errors and discrepancies.“Nobody can make sense of them,” said Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit watchdog group. “It seems impossible at this point that there is some sort of oversight.”“It’s just an astounding number of financial questions,” he added. “I’ve been doing that for more than a decade and I’ve never seen anything like this.”