Credit...Photo illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock
One of the worst things that can happen to a politician is that someone will write about you in the newspaper. The most recent example: On Monday, The New York Times reported that Representative-elect George Santos appears to have misrepresented staggeringly large portions of his résumé.
Mr. Santos, who is due to be sworn in next month to represent a New York district that includes parts of Long Island and Queens, appears to have made false claims about his education, his employment history and the operation of an animal rescue charity. He talked on Twitter about being a landlord but does not appear to own property in New York City or Nassau County, according to the Times reporters’ review of property records and financial disclosures. He even claimed four of his employees died in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., but Times reporters could not find any public connections between any of the victims and his reported companies. (His lawyer said that the reporters “are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”)
This pattern of apparent deception raises serious questions about his sudden possession of enough wealth to self-fund a campaign.
But the even bigger question is: How did no one catch this until now? Didn’t anyone do any opposition research on this guy? Didn’t reporters look into him before the election? What happened here?
It will probably be impossible to determine definitively. But my answer is that if you look closely, Democrats did do the basic outlines of this opposition research, just not enough for the full picture to come into view. In the end, many people missed the biggest story about him: that he may be a serial fabulist. Instead, Democrats emphasized a different story about Mr. Santos, for reasons that make a lot of sense.
To lay my cards on the table: I was not involved in this race, nor did I do political work at any level in New York this past cycle. But I do have 12-odd years of experience doing opposition research for Democrats, so hopefully I am qualified to offer a response.
Let’s go through the opposition research process. A junior researcher is tasked to write a “book” — a comprehensive report laying out a buffet of opposition research attacks on a given opponent. Then a senior researcher oversees and edits the book. As the Democratic candidate was not chosen until Aug. 23 in a district Democrats won comfortably in 2020, this process probably started late and was rushed.
Think back to that animal-rescue nonprofit, which reportedly was not registered as a charity. How did Mr. Santos get away with that unnoticed? He didn’t, exactly. We have a copy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s research book on Mr. Santos, polished for public consumption and posted online in August. Sure enough, we see that Mr. Santos’s charity is documented as unfindable in an I.R.S. database.
Documented, too, are evictions during the 2010s and instances of undisclosed personal finances that appear in the Times story. They’re in small sections interspersed through a nearly 90-page document, yet they’re there. Maybe given more time, the researchers could have gone further to confirm the nonprofit’s lack of state filings or could have contacted his former landlords.
What about Mr. Santos’s apparently lying about his employers and education? The Times reported that Baruch College could not confirm that he graduated in the year he claimed, and companies he has listed, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, found no record of his employment. Often, opposition research is the dark art of searching databases and copying and pasting information so you can write prompts for reporters. You’d be shocked to know what a 20-something given enough time and direction can find out about a person. But oppo researchers are not private investigators, and it’s helpful to consider their sources. During their work, a researcher may notice there’s not a single piece of evidence outside of the candidate’s own claims about his or her history.
So how do you verify? There are sources like yearbooks and services used by employers for education checks, or you can always try asking politely. Employers and universities are under no requirement to share this information with anyone who calls — including a random person asking for the sake of political research. (Though I stress: The odds are better than you think if you ask.) An alternative solution is to bug newspaper reporters to ask those questions and hope their paper’s reputation compels an answer.
Reporters asking questions is what happened to Mr. Santos, as employers and schools spoke with The New York Times. Whether anyone else tried to this extent before, we don’t know. Certainly this story shows why researchers — and reporters — should kick the tires on even small claims by a candidate.
Let’s return to the research process: After a book is completed, communications staff members, campaign officials and consultants are briefed on the best hits the researchers could find for pitching to reporters and for advertising purposes. We can see one outcome of those briefings in a research-packed news release from the D.C.C.C. that blasted Mr. Santos as a “shady Wall Street bro.” Specifically, it highlights the absence of the nonprofit in the I.R.S. database and his previously undisclosed personal finances. It’s not the exact story, but months ago, a Democratic operative had the thought to call him “untrustworthy.”
Then what happened? The D.C.C.C. research department probably moved on to the next project. This year, as they do every two years, Democrats competed in hundreds of House races. The junior staff member may even be moved to a position at a technically distinct division and be legally unable to communicate with his or her former co-workers. That’s how some lines of inquiries never progress beyond PDF files.
Gently, however, I would suggest that the rest of the prepared Democratic research is quite compelling. Mr. Santos claimed he was at the Ellipse at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, claimed in a video captured by trackers to have assisted with legal fees for Capitol rioters and said he supported a national abortion ban. Heavy stuff! That’s along with your standard politically toxic Republican agenda of cutting taxes for the rich while pursuing some form of partial privatization for Social Security.
We’re waiting for the final data, but Republicans probably carried this New York district for governor and senator. And that’s despite Senator Chuck Schumer’s spending $41 million to his opponent’s $545,000 statewide. Perhaps a stronger attack on Mr. Santos as a possible fraud would have allowed his Democratic opponent to escape such gravity.
Could Mr. Santos’s opponent and Democratic operatives have pursued this story harder and found out much more? I can imagine why that didn’t happen: We’re talking about what appeared to be résumé embellishment, evictions and legal liabilities. These are not always shocking things on their own in politics; it’s the extent of Mr. Santos’s apparent false claims that’s highly unusual.
The message Democrats chose instead whiffed across New York, but it took the party to a historically strong midterm cycle nationally. When the only thing you don’t get more of on a campaign is time, what are you going to spend it talking about?
Tyson Brody is a research and communications consultant who has worked for Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.
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