Tonight, the official
House Republicans Twitter account
urging it's one and a half million
followers to follow embattled
Republican Congressman George Santos,
an apparent show of support
despite Santos
a long list of lies,
which, as you know now
the religion school
is mother being a soccer basketball
I'm sorry, volleyball player
at Baruch College.
It goes on and on and on
and it comes as he faces
growing questions legally.
Right, about his campaign's expenses
that do not appear to add up.
And this is serious stuff.
Santos, his campaign
in this
just one
little instance here
listed 37 expenses for exactly $199.
$0.99.
To be clear,
that is $0.01 below the threshold
for acquiring receipts. Right.
So you can get reimbursed without proving
you spent money.
Expenses totaling $7,400.
$199.99 spent on almost anything
you could think of.
Uber's hotels, airplanes,
train, travel, Best Buy, BJ's Staples
and Target Front.
Now The Washington
Post reporter
who has done a lot of digging
on these expenses,
Philip Bump,
also the author of the new book
The Aftermath
The Last Days of the Baby Boom
and the Future of Power in America.
So Philip
you point out that
40% of these transactions
are for typical expenses,
five Uber trips,
all in the same amount of $199.
$0.99 What about those?
Yeah. I mean, it's sort of fascinating.
One of the things I try to do
is figure out
is there any rational way
in which you can consistently
come up with this $199, $0.99 figure
And so I looked at things
like tipping rates.
So we went to the same restaurant
Queens regularly. Right.
If you go to a restaurant,
you can round up your tips
so that you get to one 99, 99.
Uber's little trickier
you've taken over before, which I suspect
most people have tipping on there is not.
You don't normally get pointed
at a specific number of dollars
and cents to do so.
But, you know,
it is possible
that for that category of expense,
maybe they've been able the
numbers to get to that big
OC and you point out
to specific transactions,
this is out of the out of the
tipping range but where you say
the $199.99 charges
are actually contradicted
by the actual known rates for a company
called Clear
and airport parking
so tell me about these.
Yeah.
So here
it's hard
to actually come up with an excuse.
So clear, for example,
which people may be familiar with you.
You pay them a fee
and then you get through airport
security faster.
Basically, that's $189 a year.
Now there's no way to get from there
to $199. $0.99.
I looked to see if,
you know, maybe if you add sales tax,
but you have to have
a very specific sales tax of 5.815%
in order to get from one 89 to 19999.
The odds of that are pretty low,
particularly given
that this campaign is in Suffolk County
where the sales tax is well above that.
And then of course, you have a thing
about parking JFK
where the parking fees were incurred.
In order to park there,
you have to pay an even dollar amount.
You can't get to one 99 99
unless JFK that they decided
to prorate parking to the second.
And the person had stayed exactly
two days, 3 hours, 59 minutes
and 58 seconds.
In that case, you get one item
that's simply not ours.
That is certainly not
how it works at JFK.
Okay.
But look,
this is no laughing matter
because obviously this all raises
the question
of whether
it was putting in a whole lot of receipts
right under the amount required
for receipt
to get reimbursed for money
that well wasn't, you know,
just to get money.
Right. To have the campaign fund himself.
So is there any excuse for
all of this that isn't that
Well, that's the right.
So once once you eliminate
the possibility, these are just you know,
it happens to be coincidence.
You wonder why this occurred
so that the campaign itself
said back in December
when this first came to light,
they said that there was a database error
and that they're filing amended
reports with the FEC
that would reflect this.
Well,
the data that I feel this week,
the most updated reports,
they still exist
regardless of the database.
And it's important.
Remember,
if these did go over $200,
they necessarily, by law,
must have receipts
so they should have been able
to fix them.
They haven't done so.
There's no good
excuse for why
these figures are where they are.
And it just leaves
open the mystery of
why was it important
for the campaign to land precisely
this one 99 99 number
where they didn't
have to have receipts at all.
And I know
and I know we have to pose as a question.
I do say, of course,
there are some obvious answer
staring us in the face
and we'll see if that ends up
being the case or not.
All right, Philip,
thank you very much for that detailed
work and reporting.
As I say, this this forensic reporting
and actually
doing the math
on what sales tax would get to
what number and doing
the tip is is a lot of work.
Ellie Hoenig is with me now.
He is our senior legal analyst,
also the author of the
new book Untouchable
How Powerful People Get Away With It.
So, Ellie, the start here with Phil
Phillips reporting.
So these are serious things, right?
This is
this would be if this happened,
this would be breaking a law,
this would be fraud,
this would be prison,
this would be the end.
What do you think is happening here?
So it would be all of those things.
It would be fraud.
It be campaign finance violations.
We know prosecutors are investigating.
And by the way,
they should pay attention
to Phil's work there.
He should work for the FBI.
That's remarkable reporting
that Phil did the biggest tell to me,
Erin, is that
prosecutors have asked the FEC,
the Federal Election Commission,
to stand down.
And that's what you do
when you're serious about a case
as a prosecutor.
You don't want regulators.
You don't want agencies
getting in the way.
You want to do what you need to do first.
And so to me,
that tells me a lot
about where prosecutors
think this is going
in a very serious direction.
From.
All right.
So your new book is about powerful people
getting special treatment
and avoiding charges.
Santos,
you actually wouldn't wouldn't
put in that category at this point.
I mean, we'll see what happens.
I don't think he's powerful enough.
Not powerful enough. Right.
That was maybe under the radar.
But you talk a lot
about Donald Trump in your book,
and we know the Manhattan D.A.
right now has convened a grand jury
specifically to look at alleged
hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
This is something you had
been talking about for a while.
They're actually going to do it.
What do you think this signals?
So if you're interested in a look inside
prosecutor's office,
I actually provide that in this book.
And what jumps out to me
is I report on the fact
that federal prosecutors
across the street from the Manhattan D.A.
at the Southern District of New York,
my former office
did this exact same investigation
or investigated the exact same conduct
two years ago.
And if you look at the witnesses
that we're hearing day by day,
who the Manhattan D.A.
is putting in front of the grand jury,
that is the same list of witnesses
who the FDNY looked at two years ago.
What I found so interesting
and really in a sense, disturbing
in the reporting that I have in this book
is that when it came time to decide
do we charge Donald Trump
two years ago, he's out of office now.
Yeah.
The team
thought they had sufficient evidence,
but they decided not to do it
for political reasons.
As one person on the inside
put it to me
for, quote, prudential concerns
And so I think there's
a perfect example of Donald Trump
dodging justice dodging.
Although now
with this coming back up again,
it raises the question
and I read so significant that you say
they thought they had the evidence then.
So it wasn't that they failed.
And they're trying again. Right.
They thought they had it.
And now someone else might say,
you know what,
I'm not going to be afraid to hit
the pinata. Yeah.
So you believe
Trump has escaped justice
for so long that you call him
a lawless Houdini? Yeah.
Why do you think he has been so lucky?
Because let's just be honest.
He's had a very long career Yeah.
In a world
in a city
where people are looking at stuff.
Yeah.
I argue in the book
that it's not Locke,
that it's actually the residue of design
by Donald Trump
and failures to some extent
by prosecutors.
I draw comparisons in the book
between Donald Trump
and some of the
big time
criminals who I used to investigate
specifically mobsters.
It's become sort of trendy to say
Donald Trump's like a mob boss.
I used to prosecute actual mafiosos
here in New York City.
And as I went back through my old cases,
I saw so many similarities
between the tactics
they use, the intimidation tactics,
the way that they know how to say things
without quite saying them
send a signal to people.
And Donald Trump,
we see using the same tactics.
And I think
that's frustrated prosecutors.
But also,
I argue prosecutors
haven't stepped up to the
challenge adequately.