The serial scammer and ex-Representative is heading to prison. But can we really call this justice when far worse people are walking freely around the halls of power?
For George Santos, it’s the end of the road. Last month, the former Representative was sentenced to 87 months in prison—seven years, plus a quarter of one—on charges of identity theft and wire fraud, to which he’d pleaded guilty last August. As part of his plea agreement, Santos admitted that he stole credit card information from people who donated to his congressional campaign, specifically targeting “elderly persons suffering from cognitive impairment or decline”; that he transferred donations meant to buy political ads into a personal account and spent them on designer clothes; that he lied about being unemployed and defrauded the New York State Department of Labor out of $24,000; that he “vastly overstated his income and assets” on House disclosure forms; and several other forms of financial deception and fraud. He now has less than three months of freedom remaining before July 25, when he’ll have to report to a federal prison to begin serving his sentence.
Upon learning the news, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington described Santos’s sentencing as a “win for government ethics.” But that’s a little too optimistic. First, because imprisoning someone for non-violent offenses can hardly be called a “win.” But more importantly, when it comes to corruption, deceit, and sleaze, George Santos was an amateur—and people far worse than him are still running Washington.
In the first place, it’s not clear that locking George Santos in a cell will particularly help anyone, because imprisonment as a practice generally does more harm than good. I don’t expect this to be a popular point, because Santos is both obnoxious and obviously guilty, but it’s true. If we’re critical of the prison system, we have to remain so even when someone particularly unsympathetic is pushed into it.
Of course, Santos’s lies and scams have done real harm. The detail about him singling out vulnerable elderly people as victims is despicable, and he should have to pay back the people and organizations he’s defrauded in full. (In fact, he has been ordered to pay a minimum of $373,749.97 in restitution.) But there is a difference between substantive justice and pointless retribution, and throwing Santos into the punishment system is the latter. He’ll likely have to deal with atrocious medical care, the threat of violence from guards and other inmates, and everything else that makes U.S. prisons horrible, and it will do nothing to benefit his victims. In fact, it’ll cost taxpayers approximately $42,672 per year to keep Santos locked up, which is the average for a federal prisoner. (For the fans of DOGE who claim to be worried about wasteful government spending, imprisonment for non-violent crimes should be an obvious target.)
Santos says he is worried about being physically or sexually assaulted in prison and that he doesn’t trust the Bureau of Prisons to keep him safe behind bars. It’s a reasonable fear. According to some statistics, LGBTQ prisoners like Santos are “six times more likely to experience sexual assault and violence than the general prison population.” Those conditions do not constitute justice, no matter what someone has done, and it’s faintly repulsive to see people who consider themselves liberals gloating and joking about the imprisonment and suffering of someone they dislike. They have more in common with the worst MAGA supporter chanting “lock her up” at Hillary Clinton than they realize.
Beyond this, though, there’s reason to be cynical about the idea that Santos’s sentencing is any kind of “win for government ethics.” In fact, we could see it as just the opposite: as proof that the only way for a member of Congress to face consequences for corruption is if their corruption is cartoonishly blatant and ridiculous. Remember, we’re talking about a guy who lied about having brain cancer, falsely claimed his family members experienced both the Holocaust and 9/11, made campaign disbursements of exactly $199.99 to avoid keeping receipts, and reportedly stole puppies from the Amish,1 among other bizarre episodes. In his brief political career, Santos did everything except grab a megaphone and yell “Look out, everybody! Fraud coming through!” The same is true for “Gold Bar” Bob Menendez, who was convicted of bribery after he accepted the eponymous gold bars as gifts from Egyptian businessmen and hid them in his closet. When he was caught, Menendez spun a pretty Santosian tale of his own, claiming that he couldn’t help but hoard valuables because his family’s wealth had once been confiscated by Fidel Castro. (As the New Republic pointed out at the time, it’s “unclear” if that really happened.) But by the standards of Washington, D.C., people like Santos and Menendez are strictly small-time. There are plenty of other politicians who abuse and manipulate public office for personal gain in much grander ways, along with those who are complicit in things like war crimes and the destruction of the environment for profit—and they’re getting away with it all scot-free.
For example, it’s an open secret that members of Congress commit insider stock trading on a regular basis. Under the 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, this is illegal. But as the Campaign Legal Center notes, “No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading” under the Act, and even if they were, the only penalty it mandates is a $200 fine, which makes the law completely toothless. In practice, legislators just ignore it and make shady stock deals whenever they want. The financial blog Unusual Whales tracks these deals and makes a yearly report on them, and in the latest edition, it found that members of Congress did significantly better on their portfolios than the market as a whole: based on public filings, “Democratic lawmakers were up an average of around 31% last year while Republicans saw a 26% increase, compared to the S&P’s 24.9% rise.” Certain lawmakers did a lot better, with Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC) posting a 149 percent gain on his portfolio and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-NY) gaining 142.3 percent in 2024. Many members of Congress are also habitually late in reporting their transactions, with a 2023 Business Insider investigation finding that 78 of them had missed filing deadlines, sometimes by “up to three years”—the dubious record held by Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY).
By itself, of course, a better-than-average return on one’s investments is not proof of insider trading. Neither is failing to report your trades promptly. But there are incidents that raise strong suspicion, and they’re completely bipartisan. On the Republican side of the ledger, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) recently made a highly lucrative deal: according to Newsweek, she purchased “shares in Lululemon, Dell Technologies and Apple Inc” on April 3 and 4, with 26 individual trades “ranging from $1,001 to $15,000” in value. That’s after Donald Trump announced his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, causing the stock market as a whole to plummet, and before Trump announced a 90-day pause on the tariffs on April 9, causing the market to rise again. All three companies rely heavily on imported materials, especially Apple, which currently can’t make iPhones domestically. So if Greene didn’t use inside information about Trump’s decisions to make her trades, she certainly got remarkably lucky. For his part, Trump contributed to the appearance of misconduct by posting on Truth Social that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” shortly before he announced the April 9 tariff pause. His post prompted Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) to demand an investigation into whether the president committed “market manipulation,” which certainly seems like a reasonable question to have.
There are plenty of other examples like this from congressional Republicans. Just to name one, the New York Times reports that former Senator David Perdue made 2,596 stock transactions during his single term in office, accounting for “nearly a third” of all trades by U.S. senators from 2015 to 2021. Like with Greene, some of his activity was distinctly suspicious. For instance, Perdue made 61 separate trades of the computer security company FireEye’s stock, “at one point owning as much as $250,000 worth of shares in the company,” while he also sat on the Senate cybersecurity committee and loudly voiced concerns about the possibility of cyberattacks by foreign countries. Perdue also “bought and sold shares of a number of financial companies his panel oversaw, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Regions Financial” while he was on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. Then, in 2020, he “abruptly sold virtually all of his stock holdings — between $3.2 million and $9.4 million worth” when they started to attract scrutiny. Unlike George Santos, he never got into legal trouble for any of this, and is now set to become Donald Trump’s ambassador to China.
On the Democratic side, there’s the Pelosi family. Allegations of insider trading have dogged both Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her husband Paul, who’s a professional investor, since 2011.2 Back then, CBS’s 60 Minutes reported that the Pelosis had bought 5,000 shares of Visa stock during the company’s 2008 initial public offering. For context, 2008 was also a year when the House was debating “legislation that would have hurt credit card companies,” including the Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008, which failed to advance to a vote. As 60 Minutes pointed out, the Speaker of the House would be ideally placed to influence the fate of a bill like this, or at least know the likely outcome before the general public.
Years later, in 2024, the Pelosis would sell off 2,000 of their Visa shares just weeks before the Department of Justice sued the company for monopolizing debit networks, leading to still more suspicion about the timing. In 2023, they made a similar move with Google’s parent company, selling 10,000 shares of Alphabet Inc a month before the DOJ opened an antitrust suit against it. In 2022, they bought $1.95 million in Microsoft shares just days before the company won a valuable contract to provide virtual-reality headsets to the U.S. military. And this year, Paul Pelosi made another huge stock sale, this time dumping roughly $5 million worth of shares in the chipmaker Nvidia on January 1—less than a month before the company’s share price plummeted thanks to the release of China’s DeepSeek AI, an event members of Congress could plausibly have been warned about in advance. (It’s also notable that the Nvidia sale took place on a holiday, when any news coverage would be drowned out by New Years’ celebrations and the terrorist attack in New Orleans.)
By itself, none of these incidents is proof of criminal wrongdoing. The thing about insider trading is that it’s extremely difficult to prove, unless the trader admits to it directly. But taken as a collection of data points, they form a pattern—and it doesn’t help that Nancy Pelosi has vocally opposed the idea of banning members of Congress from trading stock, insisting that “We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that” when she was asked in 2021. Ironically, she and Paul are a perfect example of why the United States should not have a “free-market economy.” When the market is so “free” that even public servants can speculate on it, it creates perverse incentives that make it impossible to truly trust the people in power.
Even that is mild, though, compared to the members of Congress who have financial ties to the weapons industry. According to an analysis of public financial disclosures from 2023, “at least 50 U.S. lawmakers or members of their households are financially invested in companies that make military weapons and equipment,” and “the total value of the federal lawmakers’ defense contractors stock holdings could be as much as $10.9 million.” That creates a direct conflict of interest when those legislators are called upon to vote on military contracts and the overall Pentagon budget—which is larger than the next 9 countries’ military spending combined and has now reached a proposed $1 trillion. (The Pentagon, incidentally, has never passed an audit, yet the billions of dollars that can’t be accounted for are never taken as a reason to stop increasing the budget). Quite literally, our lawmakers make money when they allocate our tax dollars to war and death instead of more beneficial uses.
That same 2023 analysis, by Sludge journalist David Moore, names some prominent names. Political consultant Thomas Daffron, it reveals, is married to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and holds “between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in each of Boeing and RTX [Ratheon],” even as Collins herself sits on the Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee and has a say in Boeing and Raytheon’s lucrative contracts. Or there’s Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO), who holds “up to a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of stock in RTX,” or Senator Jerry Moran, “another Defense Appropriations subcommittee member [who] holds up to $50,000 in the stock of Boeing.” Notably, Hickenlooper, Moran, and Collins all voted against Senator Bernie Sanders’ recent resolution to block $8.8 billion in arms sales to Israel, where American missiles and fighter jets are being used to commit blatant war crimes. Along with ideology, they have a financial incentive to ensure the bombs keep coming. When the blood flows red in the streets of Gaza, their portfolio apps turn green. Compared to that level of depravity, George Santos seems charming.
Or, for another journey into darkness, consider the politicians who make money when the environment we all have to live in is destroyed. Former Senator Joe Manchin is probably the most famous of these. His family owns a coal company called Enersystems Inc (which is managed by his son, Joe Manchin IV), and he dedicated a lot of his time in office to blocking climate reforms and proposing “dirty deals” to benefit the fossil fuel industry. Importantly, this agenda directly harmed his constituents in West Virginia, where things like black lung disease among coal miners are persistent problems. But it also helped his pocketbook. Manchin is gone from Congress now, but he’s not the only one with deep fossil-fuel ties. According to a 2023 investigation by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, ten different senators collectively own “up to $1.2 million in Big Oil stocks,” with the single biggest portfolio belonging to a familiar name: Senator Jerry Moran, who owns “between $119,006 and $360,000 in Exxon and Chevron” and is a “vocal critic of climate regulation.” Perhaps we should name the next devastating storm to hit the Gulf Coast “Hurricane Jerry” in his honor.
We can find plenty of malefactors in state and city governments, too. There’s Ken Paxton, the infamous Attorney General of Texas, who just barely dodged a litany of corruption charges in his 2023 impeachment trial. (Paxton was impeached in the Texas House, but not in the Senate, where his wife is a legislator.) Or there’s New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, who got his own corruption charges dropped after he agreed to cooperate with the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. He may soon be replaced by former governor Andrew Cuomo, an accused sexual abuser. Once again, both Democrats and Republicans are part of this morass; in their dedication to graft and sleaze, at least, politicians truly reach across the aisle.
And then there’s the biggest and nastiest crook of all, Donald Trump. The liberal press has made a lot of hay from the fact that Trump is a convicted felon who has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels case. But actually, being a “felon” in America isn’t the most damning label, since our criminal system is rife with injustice and it’s pretty easy to become one for all kinds of reasons. The more horrible thing by far is the fact that Trump was found to have committed sexual abuse by the judge in the civil suit brought against him by E. Jean Carroll—and not only did it fail to put a dent in his political career, but he has now assembled a cabinet of other people with sexual assault or abuse allegations against them, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Linda McMahon (the latter of whom was accused of ignoring sexual abuse that was allegedly committed by an employee of her company). Trump has also been pulling off distinctly Santosian financial schemes, most notably with his “$TRUMP” cryptocurrency, which caused at least 764,000 of his loyal supporters to lose money while 58 investors made millions. Because of the anonymous nature of crypto, we don’t yet know the identity of those 58 people, but the Trump family and their associates made an estimated $100 million in trading fees for $TRUMP. And since the Trump administration has eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, scams and grifts of all sorts will be easier to commit in the future.
We could keep going like this all day, listing examples of chicanery and malfeasance from the most powerful people in the land. There’s the Supreme Court, where Clarence Thomas has been indulging in luxury vacations paid for by his dear friend Harlan Crow, the billionaire. That definitely has nothing to do with the several court cases where Crow had a financial interest and where Thomas has voted and written opinions favorable to Crow and other billionaires like him. Nope, totally aboveboard. Or there’s the constant “revolving door” of private-sector hiring in which public officials form cozy relationships with business leaders (especially in the weapons industry) while in office, then reap the reward when they’re given cushy jobs at the very companies they once regulated. And then there’s campaign donations, where the limits on spending have been completely shredded since the Supreme Court (including Clarence Thomas!) ruled that money is speech in the Citizens United case. Since then, both Big Tech interests like the cryptocurrency industry and foreign policy lobbies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have been allowed to effectively buy elections, dumping millions of dollars into congressional races to unseat whoever displeases them. In Washington, practically everyone and everything is for sale.
With all this in mind, it’s clear that George Santos is not the only crook, fraud, or criminal in the U.S. government. For that matter, he’s nowhere near the worst. Compared to the schemes of more powerful and (supposedly) respectable elected leaders, his were downright picayune. Santos stole credit card numbers and pedigree puppies; other members of Congress enrich themselves to the tune of millions on the stock market, vote on bills where they have a direct financial interest in the outcome, and rake in cash from war, bloodshed, and environmental devastation around the globe. Or, as the late Howard Zinn put it: “The jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.”
George Santos is not being imprisoned because he was corrupt or fraudulent. If that were how things worked, half of Congress would be going with him. Corruption is the air these people breathe, the water they swim in. No—he’s being imprisoned because he was corrupt badly. He was too clumsy, too loud, and too boastful about it. Tellingly, when the House of Representatives expelled him from its ranks back in 2023, it did not cite his thefts or his lies as the main reason; instead, its official statement said that his conduct was “beneath the dignity of the office” and he had “brought severe discredit to the House.” In other words, he didn’t play by the rules of the great game. He drew too much attention to his corruption, and, by extension, the corruption of others. If he’d learned to scratch the right backs, attend the right dinners, and put up a more respectable front, he might still be sitting proudly in the halls of the Capitol, right alongside the Pelosis and Hickenloopers of the world. Instead, Congress got rid of him, just as a mafia family might cut loose its most oafish nephew if he becomes a liability. The criminal punishment system did the rest.
Sure, Santos is guilty. But we shouldn’t confuse his sentencing for justice, let alone celebrate it as a “win for government ethics.” An actual win would require a lot more effort. At the bare minimum, we’d have to ban members of Congress from trading stocks altogether. Legislation to do just that has been introduced on multiple occasions, but the bills mysteriously keep failing to pass, under both Democratic and Republican leadership. We’ve also got to close that “revolving door,” putting tighter restrictions on what kind of job a public official can take after they leave office. And even if we oppose imprisonment, there’s no reason public corruption can’t result in some other penalties, like hefty fines and a stint in community service. These are not complicated measures. Only the political will is lacking to carry them out. It’s much easier to just lock George Santos up and call it a day. As usual, Howard Zinn was right; all we’ve done is imprison one small-time crook, and far, far worse people are still running the world. It’ll stay that way until we drive all the thieves and frauds out.
1. Given that community’s ugly history of animal abuse, though, he may actually have done the dogs a favor.
2. In statements to the press, Rep. Pelosi’s spokespeople often say that she “does not own any stocks herself,” which is technically true but misleading; it’s Paul who does the trading, and since their marital finances are linked, many reporters refer to them as a single economic unit, “the Pelosis.”
