I’m guessing we’ll have to wait for the Broadway play or the Netflix mini-series or the feature film before we get to see George Santos on the witness stand. At least the Feds didn’t accept any of his attempts to negotiate a prisonless plea deal. Meanwhile, let’s hope that Nick Fandos exploits the entertainment value of the trial in his coverage. Yesterday’s pre-trial coverage was, alas, pretty dry, not even noting that Santos claimed that Vance’s dress up period was bad drag.
Fandos did point out the irony— or was it just some doomed strategy?— of Santos whining that all that publicity he generated on Cameo and other outlets where he made a spectacle of himself could taint his criminal trial that starts in less than a month. The prosectors told the judge that “Far from taking precautionary steps to mitigate the impact of such publicity on prospective jurors, Santos— as he has done throughout these proceedings— spent much of the approximately nine months since his trial was scheduled making media appearances and publicly commenting upon this case.”
“In a flurry of pretrial filings,” reported Fandos, “Santos’ lawyers have argued that the federal judge overseeing the case must take extra steps to screen potential jurors with [an absurd 137 question] written questionnaire, and then obscure their identities from the public, if the proceeding is to be fair. ‘Unlike typical high-profile cases, Santos’ situation intertwines political controversy, complex financial crimes and unprecedented media scrutiny in a manner that creates extraordinary challenges for seating an impartial jury,’ the lawyers wrote, including a tally of 1,500 articles about him in New York newspapers.”
There’s still a chance the September 9th trial won’t happen because there’s always the chance that either
Santos will plead guilty and throw himself on the court’s mercy
Santos will accept prison in his plea bargain
The prosectors feel they have a pretty open and shut case and can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Santos swindled donors, filed false campaign documents and faked unemployment to secure government checks. They have dozens of witnesses ready to testify. There should be a sentence just before Election Day.
Prosecutors are seeking to introduce evidence that Santos lied about his education and employment history and fabricated the existence of a large family firm. They wrote that his fabricated political biography, first reported by the NY Times shortly after his election in 2022, was “inextricably intertwined” with the charges against him and was important to understanding “Santos’s state of mind and intent.”
Buried in their filings, prosecutors disclosed for the first time that they had evidence that Santos had “failed to file federal or state tax returns for the tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022” at a time when they accuse him of committing a raft of financial crimes. (They added that they did not intend to discuss that evidence at trial.)
At the same time, prosecutors have moved to try to pre-emptively limit Santos’s potential defense strategy, asking the judge to bar him from arguing that he was the subject of a “vindictive or selective prosecution.”
Echoing Trump, Santos has repeatedly called the case against him a “witch hunt.” Prosecutors said those claims were “baseless” and “entirely irrelevant to the question of his guilt of the crimes charged in the indictment,” and that allowing him to repeat them “would inject distracting and prejudicial assertions of improper government motive into the trial.” Santos’s team has not yet responded.
Prosecutors also shared a more prosaic complaint that the defendant has apparently not yet addressed. The government had handed over more than a million pages of records as part of the pretrial discovery process, they wrote. Santos’s team had produced just five.
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