AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) is out of prison, thanks to President Donald Trump commuting his 87-month sentence, but the serial fabulist may find his freedom to be short-lived.
Santos made a splash during his one (and, thus far, only) term in Congress, getting busted for a mind-boggling series of lies before getting expelled in December 2023 following a damning Ethics Committee report and one of his fellow Republican congressmen accusing Santos of defrauding him and his mother.
After his unceremonious exit from Congress and a special election to fill his seat, Santos made an attempt to run again for a different New York district despite his arrest for 13 federal charges including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making false statements to Congress. A superseding indictment followed with ten additional felony counts against Santos.
Santos ended up pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud and identity theft and was sentenced to the maximum possible 87 months in prison, plus two years of supervised release. Before his incarceration began, he publicly pleaded
Last Friday, Trump announced he was commuting Santos’ sentence, after he had served slightly less than three months of it. Santos was released from prison just before 11 pm ET Friday.
The commutation drew outrage from critics all across the political spectrum, especially since it erased $373,750 in restitution Santos had been ordered to repay to his victims, campaign donors he defrauded by repeatedly charging their credit cards without their authorization.
However, a presidential pardon or commutation only affects federal crimes, not anything at the state level. The Nassau County (New York) District Attorney’s Office, covering the Long Island county included in Santos’ former congressional district, would not rule out pursuing state criminal charges against him.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly released a statement Tuesday regarding Santos.
“Since first learning of George Santos’ actions, I have been at the forefront of bringing him to justice,” said Donnelly. “I am proud of the work my office has done, and the conviction achieved in partnership with the U.S. Attorney’s office. While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation.”
A spokesperson for the DA’s office “declined to elaborate,” reported ABC News, and it is not clear what specifically the prosecutors may
Still, many of the allegations in the federal indictments against Santos could lead to state-level criminal charges, as Harry Litman wrote for The New Republic.
After several paragraphs exhuming Santos’ decades-long history as a “sociopathic flimflam man” and perhaps “the most shameless thief and prolific fraudster ever to sit in Congress,” Litman excoriated Trump’s commutation as a decision that “turns farce into rot — a corruption of the justice system itself.”
“But here’s the twist: This outrage might actually be reversible,” Litman continued, explaining how a New York law had been passed in 2019 that closed the “Manafort loophole,” named after another Trump ally who escaped state prosecution after Trump pardoned him for federal offenses.
Under this law, New York’s double jeopardy protection has a key exception for any defendant who received “a reprieve, pardon, or other form of clemency” from the president, specifically “designed to ensure that political allies of a president couldn’t evade state justice through federal favors.”
Litman emphasized that the New York law “rests on solid constitutional ground,” with Supreme Court precedent clearly viewing state and federal criminal justice systems as “separate sovereigns.”
“A federal pardon ends only federal exposure; it doesn’t block state prosecution,” wrote Litman, and Santos is now “squarely within the statute’s reach.”
Public records show that several of Santos’ victims live in Nassau County, Litman noted, and his alleged conduct from the federal indictments “fits comfortably under [New York] statutes for scheming to defraud, grand larceny, falsifying business records, and identity theft.”
Donnelly already has a file on Santos; the Nassau County DA launched an investigation into him in 2023, and paused it once the feds went after him.
“Now that Trump has wiped away the federal judgment, she can—and should—reopen it,” Litman argued. “Nothing in the Constitution or state law prevents her from doing so, and everything in the public interest argues for it. Santos’s serial deceit, exploitation of donors, and theft of public trust demand a reckoning no presidential flourish can erase.”