George Santos May Be Gone From Congress, but His Trial Still Looms

For months since his expulsion from Congress, George Santos has blithely stoked political intrigue on social media and sold customized videos of himself on Cameo.

Now, he is arguing that all that publicity could taint his criminal trial next month.

In a flurry of pretrial filings, Santos’ lawyers have argued that the federal judge overseeing the case must take extra steps to screen potential jurors with a lengthy written questionnaire, and then obscure their identities from the public, if the proceeding is to be fair.

“Unlike typical high-profile cases, Santos’ situation intertwines political controversy, complex financial crimes and unprecedented media scrutiny in a manner that creates extraordinary challenges for seating an impartial jury,” the lawyers wrote, including a tally of 1,500 articles about him in New York newspapers.

How to select a jury is one of several pretrial disputes that Santos’ lawyers and federal prosecutors are expected to argue Tuesday in U.S. District Court on Long Island, where jury selection is scheduled to begin Sept. 9.

Santos, a former Republican member of Congress who represented parts of Queens and Nassau County, could technically still avoid a trial by pleading guilty to the 23 charges he faces, which include money laundering and aggravated identity theft. The House voted to expel him last year, and prosecutors are prepared to present evidence that he swindled donors, filed false campaign documents and faked unemployment to secure government checks.

Yet all indications are that Santos is moving swiftly toward trial. The court has summoned 850 potential jurors. Prosecutors said they had lined up “dozens of witnesses” to testify. And after rejecting an earlier attempt by Santos to narrow the case, Judge Joanna Seybert has kept it on a schedule that could result in a verdict shortly before Election Day.

Not everything is in dispute. Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office on Long Island told Seybert that they would not object to Santos’ request to conceal the identities of jurors from everyone but the judge and the parties in the case.

But they have forcefully opposed his request to add a lengthy questionnaire to screen jurors, arguing it would “complicate and delay” the proceeding. They argued that the proposed document — which includes 137 questions — would solicit information about the potential jurors’ political views and voting history that was not relevant to the case.

Besides, if Santos did not like the “media environment” around the case, prosecutors added, he had himself to blame.

“Far from taking precautionary steps to mitigate the impact of such publicity on prospective jurors, Santos — as he has done throughout these proceedings — spent much of the approximately nine months since his trial was scheduled making media appearances and publicly commenting upon this case,” they wrote.

The government has its own pretrial requests. Prosecutors are seeking to introduce evidence that Santos lied about his education and employment history and fabricated the existence of a large family firm. They wrote that his fabricated political biography, first reported by The New York Times shortly after his election in 2022, was “inextricably intertwined” with the charges against him and was important to understanding “Santos’ state of mind and intent.”

Buried in their filings, prosecutors disclosed for the first time that they had evidence that Santos had “failed to file federal or state tax returns for the tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022” at a time when they accuse him of committing a raft of financial crimes. (They added that they did not intend to discuss that evidence at trial.)

At the same time, prosecutors have moved to try to preemptively limit Santos’ potential defense strategy, asking the judge to bar him from arguing that he was the subject of a “vindictive or selective prosecution.”

Echoing former President Donald Trump, Santos has repeatedly called the case against him a “witch hunt.” Prosecutors said those claims were “baseless” and “entirely irrelevant to the question of his guilt of the crimes charged in the indictment,” and that allowing him to repeat them “would inject distracting and prejudicial assertions of improper government motive into the trial.” Santos’ team has not yet responded.

Prosecutors also shared a more prosaic complaint that the defendant has apparently not yet addressed. The government had handed over more than a million pages of records as part of the pretrial discovery process, they wrote. Santos’ team had produced just five.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .