Having pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, money laundering, and identity theft, among others, a former congressman, George Santos, will report to prison in the coming days to begin his more than seven-year sentence.

Santos leaves behind a mountain of campaign debt as he heads off to prison. On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has been ordered to pay, Santos is sitting on more than $800,000 worth of debt in his campaign account. According to the Federal Election Commission, Santos has only about $400 worth of cash in the account as of Sunday. 

According to the FEC report detailing his debts, Santos owes more than $60,000 to a law firm, $10,000 to an Italian restaurant where he hosted his 2022 victory party, and more than $27,500 to a staffer who worked on his campaign. 

Santos won an upset victory in 2022 to represent parts of Long Island and Queens in the House of Representatives. Before he was even sworn in as a lawmaker, he was accused of fabricating his educational and professional background. 

Shortly after the New York Times reported on his fabrications, law enforcement, the Republican-led House, and journalists began digging deeper into the congressman’s background. 

By the end of 2023, the House Ethics Committee released a report detailing Santos’s many alleged crimes, including misuse of campaign funds for things like botox, credit card payments, and personal trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. 

After initially denying the accusations, Santos admitted to his crimes and pleaded guilty in August 2024. “Pleading guilty is a step I never imagined I’d take, but it is a necessary one because it is the right thing to do. It is not only a recognition of my misrepresentations to others, but more profoundly, it is my own recognition of the lies I told myself over these past years,” Santos told reporters after pleading guilty. 

“I’m taking responsibility because I have to,” he said, growing emotional. “I offer my deepest apologies.”

He was sentenced to 87 months in prison by Judge Joanna Seybert of the Eastern District of New York. She said she had to do so in order to protect the public from a fraudster like the ex-congressman. 

“Where is the remorse?” Judge Seybert asked at sentencing, according to a report from the Times. “Where do I see it?”

“Mr. Santos, words have consequences,” she said. “You got elected with your words, most of which were lies.”

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson on his podcast, Santos said he was scared of going to prison, wondering aloud if he would be attacked or even killed. 

“I don’t know that I survive it,” he told Mr. Carlson. “They’re putting me in a violent prison. It’s a medium [security] facility. I’m not a streetwise guy, I don’t know how to fight, I’m a gay man — statistics tell you what happens to gay men in prison. I don’t know that I survive this.”

After he was expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023 — making him only the sixth lawmaker in history to face such a punishment — Santos embarked on a new commentary career. He started charging hundreds of dollars for personalized videos on the Cameo platform, where famous people can be paid directly for direct-to-video messages.

He claimed that he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a matter of months. Santos also launched his own podcast. 

Santos said earlier this year that he would try to seek a pardon from President Trump, who has been on a prolific spree of granting relief to some of his allies since returning to the White House. 

“I’m heading to prison, folks and I need you to hear this loud and clear: I’m not suicidal. I’m not depressed. I have no intentions of harming myself,” Santos wrote on X earlier this month. “If anything comes out suggesting otherwise, consider it a lie …full stop.”

Under that post, a user asked Santos why he hadn’t received a pardon from the president. Santos responded by saying only that “Speaker Johnson blocked it.”