SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: George Santos Scandal Is Not Going Away

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Congressman SantosOn CNN last week, in a discussion about serial liar and now U.S. Representative George Santos, Heather Caygle, managing editor of the Punchbowl News, said: “More revelations are coming out.” Francesca Chambers, Washington correspondent for USA Today, followed up by saying: “It’s not going away.”

Indeed, the Santos scandal is not going away.

Never, since I started as a journalist based on Long Island in 1962, has there been so much strongly critical national coverage of a member of the U.S. Congress from this area. Not even close.  

And deservedly.

On the local level, as Suffolk County Republican Chairman Jesse Garcia said in a statement he issued last week: “George Santos’ lies and deceit have caught up to him, and the public has had enough of Mr. Santos. He is not welcome in our Republican Party and it is time for him to resign from the House of Representatives.” 

Suffolk County would have been, and long was, part of the 3^rd Congressional District which Santos was elected to represent. But six months before Election Day, a court order led to the district being reconfigured for a second time. Huntington Town and a chunk of Smithtown were cut out and its portions in Nassau County and Queens expanded.

A day before the Suffolk GOP chairman’s statement, a large grouping of Nassau Republican leaders and officials held a press conference at Nassau GOP headquarters calling for Santos to resign.

Said Nassau Republican Chairman Joseph Cairo: “He deceived the voters of the 3^rd Congressional District, he deceived the members of the Nassau County Republican Committee, elected officials, his colleagues, candidates, his opponents, and even some of the media. His lies were not mere fibs….His fabrications went too far. Many groups were hurt. He has no place in the Nassau County Republican Committee, nor should he serve in public service as an elected official. He’s not welcome here at Republican headquarters for meetings or at any of our events. He’s disgraced the House of Representatives, and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople.”

Hempstead Town Supervisor Don Clavin called Santos a “joke.” Said Clavin: “On behalf of all the board members, and, frankly, the 750,000 residents living in the Town of Hempstead, it’s time to go. You see a unified voice here. He’s unified the country in their opposition to him. He’s a national joke. He’s an international joke. But this joke’s got to go.”

Indeed, Santos has become a joke.

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS-TV last week, Colbert commented: “Santos has a long history of stretching the truth by never telling it. That’s so disappointing. I would expect more from the man who invented the automobile.”

Colbert said the “walls appear to be closing in” on Santos after the Republican press conference earlier in the day. He said: “In response to this stunning rebuke from his own party, Santos told reporters on Capitol Hill that he ‘will not’ resign.” But considering that what Santos says is repeatedly untrue, this, said Colbert, “means that he is going to resign.”

At this writing, it doesn’t seem likely.

It’s not just his thoroughly make-believe resume now at issue. As the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center said in a complaint it filed with the Federal Election Committee last week: “Particularly in light of Santos’ mountain of lies about his life and qualifications for office, the commission should thoroughly investigate what appears to be equally brazen lies about how his campaign raised and spent money.” The complaint raised the issue of “unknown individuals” having “illegally funneled money” into Santos’ campaign. It accused Santos of using campaign funds for personal expenses including rent on an apartment in Huntington.

Investigations into Santos now include those by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, the New York State attorney general, and the district attorneys of Nassau County and Queens, and authorities. Also, authorities in Brazil are seeking to revive a fraud case against Santos.

The House of Representatives has the power to expel a member, but a major factor here is its new speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California, whom Santos voted for. McCarthy declared about Santos last week: “The voters elected him to serve.” Key to this, said chief CNN political correspondent Dana Bash, on the panel on the “Inside Politics” CNN segment with Caygle and Chambers, is what a Santos departure would mean to McCarthy. If Santos is expelled and a special election held in the Democratic-leaning 3^rd C.D. and a Democrat wins, without Santos McCarthy would be down a vote in the four-vote margin, she noted, that got him elected speaker. And, with a new House rule just approved, a single member can call for a new election for speaker—thus that vote could be repeated. The vote on the 15^th ballot was 218 for McCarthy, 214 for Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn.

Jefferies last week called Santos “a complete and total fraud” who “lied to the voters” of the 3^rd C.D. and “deceived and connived his way to Congress.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: George Santos

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Congressman George Santos (R) CD 3There have been many excellent representatives in New York’s 3^rd Congressional Districts which for many years included Suffolk County—taking in Huntington Town and a chunk of Smithtown. But just months before last year’s election, in May, as a result of a court-ordered second redistricting of the 3^rd C.D., Suffolk was removed and the district’s segments in Nassau and Queens expanded.

Fine representatives through the years included, on the Republican side, Peter King, a former straight-shooting Nassau County comptroller, and on the Democratic side, Robert Mrazek, a former Suffolk legislator; Jerome Ambro, who’d been supervisor of Huntington Town; Steve Israel, a former deputy to the Suffolk County executive; and until the start of this year, Tom Suozzi, a former Nassau County executive. 

And now has come George Santos!

Integrity is something we look for in government leaders—especially when it comes to high federal positions as members of the U.S. Congress. These are tremendously important posts with the power to take our money through taxes and our lives—by declaring war.

Santos fabricated a thoroughly phony history of himself in running in the 3^rd C.D and has continued to lie through last week. As a column in The Washington Post began: “Even by the lower standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of the falsehoods from the newly elected House Republican has been breathtaking.”

Newsday in an editorial two weeks ago got it right. “Disgraced Santos should step aside,” was its title. “The blathering and evasive non-explanations now uttered by George Devolder-Santos for his invented back story convince us more than ever that he’s uniquely unfit to serve in Congress….Santos has been caught lying to a bizarre degree—about success in finance, about having degrees from college and grad school, about owning real estate. He’s even gratuitously dissembled for years about such personal matters as his religion and his domestic involvement. Now Santos admits to some astonishing fakery but is still defensively dodging.” 

“Anyone who lies so blithely about who he is or what he does cannot be trusted with public power,” declared Newsday.

Newsday described him as a “serial fabulist.”

Last week, as the House of Representatives wrestled for days about who would be its new speaker and thus was unable to do any other work—including having new members sworn in, Santos issued public statements saying he had been sworn in and also that he voted as a House member on five bills as early as December 22, before he was to take a seat. Reporting on this, the news site Alternet pointed to how Santos “has a long list of lies attached to his name, and that list continues to grow by the day.” 

As the person he is supposed to replace in the House, Tom Suozzi, in a piece last week in The New York Times, wrote: “I’m being succeeded by a con man.” Just out in The Atlantic magazine is a piece by Steve Israel titled: “How a Perfectly Normal New York Suburb Elected a Con Man.”

As another former 3^rd C.D. representative, Peter King, said last week in Newsday, security issues are involved.  “No one will be able to trust him or believe him. It would be risky to share any information with him,” said King, particularly about “national security or homeland security.”

            “Do you have no shame?” asked Tulsi Gabbard, a former House member from Hawaii, declared in a TV interview with Santos last month.

But Santos has no shame. His brazenness is matched only by his complete lack of sensitivity to his situation. A story in Newsday on his first days as an “outcast” at the Capitol. When Santos balloted a vote for speaker, there was a cry from a member: “Mentiroso!” (Liar in both Portugese and Spanish.) 

To be given credit for first exposing Santos is a small Nassau County newspaper, the North Shore Leader. “The Leader Told You So,” is the headline of an article by Niall Fitzgerald now on its website. It begins: “In a story first broken by the North Shore Leader over four months ago, the national media has suddenly discovered that U.S. Congressman-elect George Santos…is a deepfake liar.”

The journalism of the North Shore Leader demonstrates the importance of investigative reporting on the local level. It was only after the election that The New York Times ran a front-page expose on Santos which has set off enormous media attention. 

Santos is being investigated by the Nassau and Queens district attorneys and faces state and federal inquiries. As Linda Lacewell, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the New York Daily News last week: “Santos may face a dilemma if federal investigators ultimately ask to interview him. Will he take the Fifth Amendment? If not, is he capable of telling the truth? If he lies over the course of a federal investigation about a material matter and it’s deliberate, that could be a separate federal offense…”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Jan 2023 Thoughts Turn To Bellone's Replacement

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone is finishing his 12th year of officeThis new year is the last year as county executive for Steve Bellone. The eighth Suffolk County executive (H. Lee Dennison was the first, taking office in 1960), Bellone, a Democrat from North Babylon, is term-limited after 12 years in office. 

He was a member of the Babylon Town Board and that town’s supervisor before his election in 2011 as county executive—the top job in Suffolk County government. He is a lawyer.

Dave Calone of Setauket, a lawyer, too, and a former federal and state prosecutor, announced this summer that he is seeking to be the Democratic candidate for county executive in 2023. Calone has also held several positions on Long Island among them being a trustee of the Long Island Power Authority and a board member of the Community Development Corp., an affordable housing nonprofit. In launching his campaign, he noted he already had $1 million in campaign contributions. 

Democrat Jay Schneiderman said in November that he is considering a run for the position. “I’ll be a good candidate,” declared Schneiderman, who is the only person to ever serve as a supervisor of two Suffolk towns—first East Hampton and then, after 12 years as a Suffolk County legislator, supervisor of the Town of Southampton. He resides in Southampton and has western Suffolk roots: he grew up in Hauppauge.

No Republican has announced her or his candidacy yet for county executive. But Suffolk Republican Chairman Jesse Garcia says his party has a “deep bench” of potential GOP nominees and he is optimistic that the Republican candidate will win. 

There has not been a Republican Suffolk County executive since Robert Gaffney, an attorney and former FBI agent, who served three terms from 1991 to 2003. Previously, Gaffney, who then lived in Miller Place, had been a state assemblyman.

But 2023 could be a good year for a GOP candidate for county executive considering Republican wins in Suffolk this past year and the year before. In 2021, a Republican majority took control of the Suffolk County Legislature. And last year, in what was described as a the “red wave” that moved across Long Island, Suffolk GOP wins included Nick LaLota, former chief of staff of the legislature and a trustee of the Village of Amityville, to the U.S. House of Representatives in the lst C.D. 

Republican sources, meanwhile, say that Brookhaven Town Supervisor Edward Romaine of Center Moriches might become the GOP candidate for county executive this year. 

Brookhaven Town’s 70th supervisor, Romaine was elected to that office in a special election in 2012. He left the Suffolk County Legislature to run for town supervisor following the tragic death of his son, Keith, a town councilman. Keith, of Moriches, died at 36 after being struck with pneumonia. Ed left the legislature committed to do what Keith would have pursued in Brookhaven Town.

Ed was a history teacher in the Hauppauge School District, where he taught for 10 years. In 1980, he entered public service as the Brookhaven’s first commissioner of Housing and Community Development and was later appointed its director of Economic Development. 

He was a member of the Suffolk Legislature from 1986 through 1989 when he was elected Suffolk County clerk, a position he held for 16 years. In 2005, he returned to the legislature and was re-elected three times—leaving to run for Brookhaven Town supervisor. In 2003 he ran for county executive but lost to then Democrat, since a Republican, Steve Levy.

Said Calone in a statement in July: “I’m running for county executive to make sure everyone benefits from the same kind of opportunities that I have enjoyed growing up in Suffolk County. I’m eager to get to work for the people of Suffolk, to enable everyone to have the chance to get a good paying job, to protect our clean air and water, to help families afford to live here, and to create safe, thriving communities.”

Calone co-founded the Suffolk County Forward program, an effort to provide support to county businesses and workers when COVID-19 struck, served as chairman of the county’s Superstorm Sandy Review Task Force, and created the Long Island Emerging Technologies Fund.

He tried to be the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 in the lst C.D. but was defeated in a Democratic primary by Anna Throne-Holst, then the Southampton Town supervisor. She lost to Republican Lee Zeldin in the general election.

Schneiderman, after graduating from Hauppauge High School—where his history teacher was Ed Romaine—attended Ithaca College and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry. He then was awarded two Masters of Arts degrees, one in education from the State University of New York at Cortland, and one in administration from Long Island University-C.W. Post.

He was a teacher of science, mathematics—and also music. Schneiderman is an accomplished drummer. Meanwhile, he also managed his family’s motel in Montauk and subsequently formed his own property management company.

Schneiderman’s first position in government came in 1991 when he was appointed a member of the Town of East Hampton Zoning Board of Appeals. He became its chairman in 1996. He served in that capacity until 1999 when he was elected to the first of two terms as the supervisor of the Town of East Hampton.

In 2003, he was elected a member of the Suffolk County Legislature, serving as its deputy presiding officer from 2014 to the end of his term in 2015. He was term-limited as a county legislator but having moved to Southampton was eligible to run for the supervisor’s job in that town. In 2018, he ran for Suffolk County comptroller but lost to the incumbent, GOPer John M. Kennedy, Jr. of Nesconset. First elected Southampton Town supervisor in 2015, Schneiderman is term-limited from running for Southampton supervisor this year.

Of running for county executive, he says: “I have the right resume for the job.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: 2022 Overshadowed By Russia

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s far from Suffolk County, but I’ve been to Russia many times. And the year 2022 was overshadowed for me—and I’m sure many others in Suffolk and the United States, in fact the world—by what Russia has been doing.

“Russian Missiles Plunge Millions Into Frigid Dark,” was the headline of the lead story on the front page of The New York Times two weeks ago. The subhead: “Ukrainians Ask for Relief as Fears About Fresh Offensive Grow.” Another subhead: “Huddling For Warmth.”

The next day in The Times there was a large photo covering the upper left of its front page with the caption “Moments of Unspeakable Grief.” It depicted two elderly people at the door of their bombed home—the man crouching, holding his head, the woman in tears. The caption continued, “In the aftermath of an attack in Kherson, the horrors of war in Ukraine take on a deeper meaning when seen close up.” It directed readers to an inside page of photos and narrative that included: “At another badly damaged house, paramedics carried out a bedridden 85-year-old woman, Lyudmila…”

How can a nation of intelligent people with a love for poetry, music, dance and literature be involved in a murderous, barbarous attack on the population of its neighbor? 

The reason is Vladimir Putin, the former KGB colonel drunk with power, aiming to reconstitute a “Greater Russia”—whether the people of the nations he seeks to annex and dominate like it or not.  

And this is, despite Russia, after World War II and losing 20 million people and itself invaded by Germany, being a founding member of the United Nations and joining in a basic tenet of the new organization prohibiting member states from the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” 

The savage invasion of Ukraine which Putin initiated and has been directing is a flat-out violation of that principle. The brutality of Russia’s invasion, its killing of innocent people, its war crimes—horrendous!

At our synagogue, Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, a “Welcome Circle,” working with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, has brought a Ukrainian family to the safety of the United States. They are not Jewish; they are Ukrainian Orthodox. The family consists of a 37 year-old mother, Viktoriia, and her two sons, 15 year-old Yaroslav and 10 year-old Nikita. They are living in a house in Sag Harbor provided by a congregant. The boys are happily matriculated in Sag Harbor schools. 

Ron Klausner, the synagogue’s co-president, related the scene at Kennedy Airport: “We welcomed them into our outstretched arms, all of us crying with relief. Their luggage—life savings—consisted of one medium and one carry-on luggage, two guitars, three small knapsacks, a small dog and a cat. They wore their only set of clothes.”

The family is from a town in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russians invaded it in 2014 and have held siege ever since. Viktoriia’s parents remain in a town still occupied by Russian soldiers. 

Klausner related that with her sons (and their dog and cat) “Viktoriia escaped and managed to travel from Slovyansk to Piensk, Poland and then, after connecting with us through HIAS, to Posnan, Poland, Berlin and finally to Frankfurt to board the plane to the United States. It was not the same as boarding a ship in steerage to cross the Atlantic like so many of our ancestors did but the trip was nevertheless long, grueling and traumatic.”

“Thanks to a most generous donor the family is now living in a fully furnished house in the Village of Sag Harbor until Spring. They can easily walk to town, school, shopping, the beach, the library and the food pantry. The house is a dream come true for them. The family all started crying when they first walked into the house…after living in a mold infested basement in Poland,” said Klausner. “One of the most important values of our faith is to welcome the stranger among us, just as we were once strangers in a new land. I can tell you that each member of the Welcome Circle has been moved to tears by the courage of this family and the awareness of the life altering impact of our actions.”

I went to Russia seven times invited by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, environmental advisor to Russian Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin, to give presentations on environmental and energy issues, all over the huge nation. Yablokov, who died in 2017, was regarded as the father of the environmental movement in Russia, the country’s most eminent environmental scientist. 

The last trip I made to Russia was exactly 20 years ago—in 2002. I gave the keynote address at a conference in Tomsk in Siberia, and also a presentation at Tomsk Polytechnic University. Putin had been in power for three years and already things were changing. As Dr. Yablokov stated in 1999: “The result of Putin’s politics is fascism.”

I would not return to Russia under any condition now with Putin having hijacked the country. In 2002, as the Delta jet was a half-hour out of Moscow, heading to New York, I breathed a sigh of relief being outside Russian airspace. Putin and his vicious, illegal war must be stopped. What he is doing and the resulting devastation is indeed causing unspeakable grief. 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Rob Trotta Police Bill (Part II)

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP 

By Karl Grossman

The bill by Suffolk Legislator Rob Trotta—a retired Suffolk Police uniformed officer and detective—to prohibit members of the Suffolk County Police Department from “engaging in political activity” has been described by Newsday as the “Suffolk version of the federal Hatch Act.” It’s the U.S. law that restricts civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in political activity.

Trotta, with the Suffolk County Police Department up to his election to the legislature has been—despite his county police background—highly critical of political activities of Suffolk police unions led by the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association.

This is not just his issue. Newsday has published investigative pieces and editorials on the matter. The New York Times spotlighted the issue in Suffolk with a spread last year that featured a column by Farah Stockman, an editorial board member of The Times, headlined: “The County Where Cops Call the Shots.” It began: “Rob Trotta, a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a cop for 25 years, might be the unlikeliest voice for police reform in America. He’s full of praise for the rank and file….Yet Mr. Trotta has railed for years about the political influence of police unions in Suffolk County, Long Island, a place where the cops are known to wield exceptional clout. He’s a potent messenger, since he can’t be smeared as anti-cop. He wore a badge and walked a beat.”

I know the Suffolk County Police Department well having been hired in 1964 by the daily Long Island Press to cover the department and courts in Suffolk. Every weekday morning I sat with the department’s commissioner, John L. Barry (for whom its headquarters in Yaphank is now named), before walking down the halls of the then headquarters in Hauppauge, dropping in at its various bureaus to gather news.

The Suffolk County Police Department was born in the wake of scandal, known as the “Suffolk Scandals,” which involved a series of special state prosecutors sent here in the 1950s and uncovering corruption in governmental and law enforcement areas.

A top priority of Jack Barry, who had been a detective investigator in the Suffolk district attorney’s office, was keeping the new department scandal-free. It was formed in 1960 after a countywide referendum. That was the commitment of other top commanders in the department with whom I would also connect.

What Legislator Trotta has been challenging is a phenomenon of relatively recent years: police unions in Suffolk with enormous clout endorsing and giving campaign contributions to politicians and, Trotta charges, in return getting lavish contracts.

The issue of the clout of police unions is not unique to Suffolk. Last year in Salon magazine, former U.S Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a piece headed: “The unchecked power of police unions.” He declared at the start: “Look, I was Secretary of Labor. I’m in favor of unions.” Still, he railed about an “investigation that found police unions spent about $87 million in influencing state and local legislation over the past two decades, and at least $47.4 million on campaign contributions and lobbying at the federal level.” 

I, too, am very much in favor of unions. At the Long Island Press, I was a member of the Newspaper Guild, and as a SUNY Old Westbury professor of journalism for the past 44 years, a member of United University Professions. 

However, as Trotta, of Fort Salonga, began an essay earlier this year in Newsday: “Why have Suffolk County law enforcement unions unethically and in my view illegally spent over two million dollars on the campaigns of former District Attorney Tim Sini and County Executive Steve Bellone? Because they could. The pair, like the overwhelming majority of local politicians from both parties, have eagerly benefited from the expenditures with little regard for their questionable origins. And, as a result, the power and influence of the unions has continued to grow exponentially, evident by contractual raises received…” 

“Law enforcement unions blatantly disregarding the law to garner political favor at taxpayers’ expense is disgraceful, and cannot be allowed to continue,” he said. “My repeated calls for action and pleas to bring an end to these corrupt practices have been continually ignored by virtually every elected official and agency from several police commissioners, Bellone and Sini to the state attorney general, state Board of Elections and many more. While disheartening, their unresponsiveness has come as no surprise, as these individuals and agencies are benefiting from donations and other support directly or indirectly.”

“These actions also violate the Suffolk County Police Department’s own rules and procedures, which cite state election law. While the union’s actions should not reflect negatively on our hardworking rank-and-file police officers, unfortunately, it is hard to escape the stain of such impropriety,” Trotta continued. “Trust in government is paramount in our society. When those entrusted with preserving law and order knowingly break the law to manipulate public policy and enrich themselves, they must be held accountable or that trust will be forever broken.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.