Santos is released from prison after Trump commutes his 7-year sentence

Former Rep. George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn, was released from a federal prison on Friday night after President Donald Trump commuted his seven-year sentence for fraud.

His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that Santos was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey after 10 p.m. Friday night. “A great injustice has been corrected,” Murray said.

In a social media post, Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats. Calling the former member of Congress “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” Trump said that he believed that Santos’ sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.

The president also suggested he had been moved by Santos’ accounts of being in prison, which he had published in a regular column in a local Long Island newspaper.

“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Trump wrote on social media. “Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”

Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He served fewer than three months of his 87-month sentence.

He will also no longer be required to pay more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to his victims, according to a copy of the commutation posted online by Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney.

The commutation — which cuts Santos’ sentence short but does not wipe out his conviction — is part of a blitz of grants of political clemency that Trump has doled out to his political allies or other figures who have been embraced by his right-wing supporters.

For months, it looked as if Santos, who rose to political prominence as an adherent to Trump’s MAGA movement, would not be granted similar favor. Even as the president gave sweeping pardons to those charged in connection with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Santos’ appeals to get his sentence reduced were unsuccessful.

His commutation is the latest startling twist in an outlandish political odyssey that saw Santos move from a little-known conservative from Long Island to an infamous example of deceit and political fraud.

When he won his seat in 2022, Santos was heralded as a sign of a shift in Republican politics. Young, Brazilian American and openly gay, Santos seemed to signal an expansion of the party’s tent. His victory, in a Democratic-leaning district in Long Island, was celebrated for helping Republicans narrowly win control of the House.

But Santos’ congressional career was imperiled almost immediately, after The New York Times and other outlets exposed that his ascent was built on a spectacular web of lies.

Santos claimed that he was descended from Holocaust refugees. His mother, he said, had been in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He claimed to be a college volleyball star. And Santos boasted of extensive Wall Street experience that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.

None of that was true.

As more of Santos’ claims were exposed to be false or misleading, his Republican colleagues grew increasingly uneasy. When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of multiple criminal schemes, ranging from fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits and lying on official forms to using his political campaign to enrich himself, swindling money from donors for personal expenses and using one donor’s credit card to steal $11,000 for his personal use.

After a congressional ethics investigation found that Santos improperly spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans purchases, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to expel him from Congress in December 2023.

He became the first person in history to be expelled from the House without being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.

Less than a year later, Santos, who had for more than a year denied all wrongdoing, pleaded guilty in his criminal case. He acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other schemes, including lying to Congress, stealing money from campaign donors and fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits.

Rep. Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican who was among those leading the charge for Santos’ expulsion, decried the commutation Friday evening. In a social media post, in which he did not address Trump, LaLota wrote that Santos “didn’t merely lie — he stole millions, defrauded an election, and his crimes (for which he pled guilty) warrant more than a three-month sentence.”

Santos remains more popular among a cadre of far-right MAGA politicians outside New York, a few of whom publicly pushed for his release.

“Thank you @realDonaldTrump for commuting George’s sentence. It was the right thing to do,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a brash MAGA adherent, wrote in a social media post late Friday night.

She said in the post that she had spoken with Santos. “He is extremely grateful to be released from prison and he and his family are overjoyed,” she wrote.

Greene was one of the first to call for a commutation, sending a letter to the Justice Department in August. Around that time, Trump, who had by that point issued numerous pardons to staunch supporters, did not rule out offering one to Santos. But in an interview with Newsmax, Trump said that he had not yet been asked.

“He lied like hell,” Trump said at the time. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100% for Trump.”

In his post Friday announcing Santos’ commutation, Trump once again cited their shared political views, this time as a justification for his release.

He suggested that Santos’ transgressions — which include crimes that Santos acknowledged in court that he committed — paled in comparison to those of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has admitted that he misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War era.

“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump wrote.

In a statement to the Times, Blumenthal dismissed Trump’s comments. “This rant is fabricated nonsense,” he said. “There’s no excuse for commuting George Santos’ sentence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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