George Santos loses verdict on anonymity of his bailors
A Long Island federal magistrate on Tuesday ruled against Representative George Santos’ request to keep secret the identities of people who last month guaranteed his $500,000 bail but delayed their release to give the New York congressman time to appeal .
Judge Anne Y. Shields’ decision was a victory for media organizations, including The New York Times, which had argued that the identities of those who contributed to Mr. Santos’ release following his indictment last month were a matter of intense discussion. public interest.
Mr Santos’ lawyer strongly opposed disclosing the names of the so-called guarantors, arguing in a letter Monday night that if they were identified in public they would be “likely to suffer great distress, lose their jobs lose, and God forbid, may suffer bodily harm.”
The lawyer, Joseph Murray, argued that Mr. Santos, 34, was willing to go to prison to protect the anonymity of his bailors, and asked the judge to give the bailors time to potentially withdraw.
“My client would rather surrender to pre-trial detention than subject these bail bondsmen to what will inevitably come,” Mr Murray wrote.
Judge Shields was not convinced by those arguments. But she gave Mr. Santos until Friday afternoon to appeal her decision to a Long Island district court judge.
In addition to keeping the names secret for now, Judge Shields took the unusual step of upholding her decision.
The prosecutors had not objected to the identification of the guarantors.
Legal experts said there was little chance Mr Santos would actually be detained, even if his bail bondsmen pulled out, as his lawyer suggested. But the threat of their withdrawal raised the prospect of new legal and ethical complications as the Republican congressman challenges allegations of fraud, money laundering and stealing public funds.
Opposing the unsealing motion, Mr Murray said one of Mr Santos’s three original sureties had already “changed his mind and backed out”, implying the reversal was linked to the intense media coverage of the case.
The settlement has also apparently caught the attention of the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which is already investigating Mr. Santos over a range of possible wrongdoings related to his campaign for a Queens and Long Island House seat and tenure.
Mr Murray shared a letter with the court on Monday showing that the committee’s top Republican and Democrat had written to Mr Santos in mid-May, shortly after the indictment, asking for information that could help determine “whether you may have a request submitted or an improper gift in connection with the sureties.”
House members must adhere to strict ethical rules, including a policies restricting the type of gifts – broadly defined as “something of monetary value that you don’t have to pay for” – that they can receive from people outside their family.
The committee asked Mr. Santos to identify the co-signers of the bond and to disclose “any payments made by you or on your behalf to the co-signers as compensation for securing the bond.”
The Ethics Committee has not previously provided specific guidance on whether a surety bond is considered a gift if no collateral is exchanged. But ethics experts and lawyers who previously worked for the commission said Mr Santos’ bail package could very well be considered a gift, making it a violation of the rule if the bailors are not family members.
“It’s definitely something of value,” said Donald Sherman, a former ethics committee consultant who now works at Washington’s government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. “Could he have gotten out without it?”