With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative Elect George Santos has been catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.
Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated significant biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception uncovered by DailyExpertNews. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.
While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military awards they did not receive or misrepresentations about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a broad way.
Many candidates, faced with their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and JR Majewski, two Trump-backed Republicans who ran for the Senate and House in this year’s midterm elections.
Mr Walker, who lost the Georgia Senate runoff this month, has been dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters heard allegations of domestic violence, children born out of wedlock, ex-girlfriends saying he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his law enforcement work.
Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but the US Air Force had no records of him serving there. He lost in November.
Some of the country’s most prominent presidential candidates have also been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters; perhaps none more particularly than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign depended on a stark exaggeration of his business background.
While not as obvious a deception as Mr. Santos who said he worked somewhere he didn’t have, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful self-made businessman and hid evidence that he wasn’t, breaking with dozens years of precedent by refusing to release his tax records. . That data, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a very different picture – one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life backed by an inherited fortune.
Prominent Democrats have also faced criticism during presidential campaigns, withdrawing during primaries after being called out for more petty misrepresentations:
Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overestimating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton admitted to “mistalking” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport apron during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she used to highlight her experience of international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.
Most politicians’ offenses pale in comparison to Mr. Santos’ largely fictitious resume. Voters also did not know about his lies before they cast their votes.
The spread of misinformation and untruths
Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of not being outspoken during their campaigns, but were elected anyway.
Madison Cawthorn’s 2020 House Campaign
Madison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won the 2020 election and emerged as the toast of the GOP and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters elected him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 car accident that left him partially paralyzed “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was false.
Reporting at the time showed that Mr. Cawthorn’s Annapolis application, who has been confined to a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report he acknowledged in a 2017 statement that his application had been rejected. A spokesperson for Mr Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Cawthorn, whose tenure in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the GOP primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-year senator representing the Republican old guard.
Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaign
Andy Kim, a Democrat representing a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”
Although Mr. Kim had served as National Security Adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he played a key role in former President George W. Bush’s administration was less than ironclad.
A Washington Post fact-check found that Mr. Kim had an entry-level job as a conflict management specialist at the US Agency for International Development for five months.
Mr Kim’s then campaign manager defended Mr Kim and told The Post that he played a key role as a civil servant during the Bush administration, working in the Office for Africa on issues such as terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.
Voters did not seem too attached to the claims made by Mr Kim, who was elected to a third term in the House last month.
Marco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign
Marco Rubio jumped onto the national political scene in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as Speaker of the House. Central to his ascent and election to the Senate in 2010 was his personal story as the son of Cuban immigrants, whom Rubio repeatedly said fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.
But Mr. Rubio’s account did not tally with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the impartial fact-checking website found that Mr. Rubio’s story was false because his parents first moved to the United States in 1956, before Castro returned to Cuba from Mexico and took over the country in 1959 .
Mr Rubio said at the time that he had relied on his parents’ memories and had only recently learned of the timeline inconsistencies. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.
Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns
Mark Kirk, a five-term member of the House from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.
In the biography of Mr. Kirk was listed as having been awarded “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military award he never received. He later apologized, but that wasn’t the only discrepancy in his military resume.
In an interview with the editors of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of false statements about his service, including that he had served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that he once commanded the Pentagon’s war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.
Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies to his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or to his campaign’s inattention to the details of his decades-long military career.
Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq War. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.
Richard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaign
Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.
Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist, but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that it had never been his intention to give the impression that he was a war veteran and apologized. Mr Blumenthal insisted he was mistaken, but said those occasions were rare and he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.
The misrepresentation didn’t stop Mr. Blumenthal, the longtime Connecticut Attorney General, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling magnate. She spent $50 million on that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zoomed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.
Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaign
Wes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career took a nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military service and academic honors.
His troubles began when he stated on a 1994 voter’s pamphlet that he had fought in Korea as a member of the Army Special Forces. But the Oregon news media reported that Mr. Cooley had never been deployed to combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years’ probation.
The Oregon newspaper also reported that he has never received any Phi Beta Kappa awards, as he claimed in the same voter guide. He also faced allegations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.
Mr Cooley, who gave up his re-election campaign in 1996, died in 2015. He was 82.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
