Four months after his prison sentence was commuted by Donald Trump, George Santos went on social media to say that he’d be at the State of the Union (SOTU) address in February to cheer the president on.
“I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys,” Santos said in a video posted to X the day before the speech.
Related
He never showed up.
“Watching SOTU from an airport tv was not part of the plan! FML,” Santos posted during the president’s remarks, using an abbreviation that stands for “f**k my life.”
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
According to sources familiar with his actions, however, not showing up was always the plan.
Santos was playing the prediction markets, three people with direct knowledge of the matter told NPR. Santos is now under investigation by the Justice Department as a result.
Weeks ahead of the SOTU speech, bettors on the prediction market Kalshi were laying odds on who would attend the Joint Session of Congress. That list included Santos, who sent odds soaring when he made his first post to X the day before the speech.
The same odds crashed when he posted from the airport.
In between, according to sources, Santos bet on himself not showing up, and reaped tens of thousands of dollars for the accurate “prediction.”
Kalshi detected Santos’ trades, froze his account, and referred the case to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice, NPR reports. Both agencies opened investigations into the disgraced former congressman.
Neither the DOJ nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission returned requests for comment.
But Santos did.
“Well, that’s news to me,” he told NPR when asked about an insider trading investigation.
“I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no,” Santos replied when asked if he had a Kalshi account.
He then said that he would call the co-founder of Kalshi, “fellow Brazilian” Luana Lopes Lara, whom he claimed to know personally, to get to the bottom of a possible probe.
A source familiar with the Kalshi investigation said Santos doesn’t know Lara.
For anyone familiar with Santos’ story, that deception and the accusations leading up to it come as no surprise.
The former New York rep, 37, was charged with fraud in 2023, after The New York Times and other outlets reported that he lied extensively about his biography.
He claimed to be Jewish. He is not. He said his grandparents died in the Holocaust. They did not. Santos had a fake animal charity. Roommates accused him of stealing rent.
But it was lying on official campaign forms and stealing from donors, among other schemes, that earned prosecutors’ attention. He was eventually expelled from the House less than a year after taking office — only third House member in history to earn that punishment — and he was sentenced to seven years in prison for his campaign crimes.
President Trump commuted Santos’ prison sentence last October, after Santos had served less than three months behind bars. Before Trump’s “weaponization” slush fund was withdrawn by the Justice Department this week, Santos was looking for a piece of the action.
If under investigation, Santos is the third high-profile target of a prediction market probe in recent weeks. In April, federal prosecutors charged a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier with reaping $400,000 off the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
Last week, the DOJ charged a Google employee for making more than $1 million betting on search trends based on confidential information from the tech giant. Both traders made their bets on Polymarket.
President Trump’s son, Eric Trump, was recently appointed a “special advisor” at Kalshi.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.