The George Santos fiasco provides a glimpse into the biggest background investigation failure I have ever seen. It was a failure on so many levels, but from the prospective of someone who does a lot of this kind of work, the “background investigation” conducted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had some huge mistakes.
For those who haven’t been following closely, back in November 2022, the members of his district on Long Island, New York elected George Santos to serve in Congress. He ran as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor,” as a graduate of Baruch College and NYU with a stellar GPA, and as someone who had worked for the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and owned a real estate portfolio of 13 properties worth millions of dollars.
After his election, it was revealed that he lied about:
- …that he put himself through college and got an MBA from NYU with “zero debt” (he had zero debt because he never attended)
He also has a criminal history, has used multiple aliases and even lied about HIS MOTHER’S DEATH! Who does that?
There have been reports that some people in his own party knew about some of this before he was elected, which is mind-boggling.
For now, I will focus on the background investigation conducted by the DCCC, which published an 87-page “research memo” (or “research book”). It’s a bit of semantics, but I will call this a background investigation. In political lingo, this is called opposition research (or oppo research), which is the practice of collecting anything and everything that may destroy the opponent’s campaign.
Before I get into the issues with the DCCC report, a few positives:
- The author did an amazing job of sourcing the information. There are links to tweets, articles and even screenshots from databases showing political contributions. Personally, I am a big fan of sourcing the work.
- It’s clear that they scoured news media and social media—like every single tweet and Facebook post. Doing this is time-consuming and resource intense, and so these searches are often skipped over because of that.
- I also appreciate the fact that they put in a caveat that “this is preliminary research, and further research will be necessary on George Santos.” As someone who does this work for a living, there are always limitations, and it’s important to note it (although they could have done a better job of making that more prominent).
So, here are the biggest mistakes that came out of the 87-page background investigation of George Santos:
1) Failure to Act
Background investigations don’t exist in a vacuum; one needs to act on the information for them to have any value.
To whoever wrote this report: I feel for you. I too have worked on cases where there was a clear need to dig further or act on the information provided. But, despite our best efforts, the people in control must make the decision to act.
2) Too Much Information
The average reader would have needed 3.5 hours to read the 26,000-word, 87-page report.
87. Pages. Is. Too. Long.
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3) Long-Winded “Significant Findings” Summary
The 87-page report contains an 10-page executive summary, which included that “Santos’s website had an issues page as of January 2021, but it was later taken down” and “Santos filed a Personal Financial Disclosure covering calendar year 2020.”
An executive summary should be a snapshot of the information, with the critical points clearly laid out concisely. Whoever reads this can get a pretty good idea of what they are about without spending 3.5 hours reading the whole thing.
Not 10 pages of mostly insignificant findings.
Get. To. The. Point.
4) Lack of Analysis
Put the pieces together. There was a lot of cutting and pasting of significant portions of news articles, but there was a lack of actual analysis.
For example, the facts that Santos had multiple evictions for a few thousand dollars and unpaid credit card bills for a few thousand dollars are not particularly earth-shattering.
But when you couple them with the fact that he claimed to be running his family firm with more than $80 million in assets, and he ran on a platform as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor,” that adds a little weight to the evictions and unpaid credit card bills.
5) Reliance on Personal Statements
I see this often. A person makes a personal statement about his or her own work history, education history or fantastic accomplishment, and it’s repeated as a fact.
One of my favorite examples of this was the fraudster Mouli Cohen, a self-described billionaire who claimed that President George H.W. Bush granted him “Millionaire Residency” status, the first such honor ever bestowed.
It was repeated everywhere, but it was total nonsense.
Repetition makes lies sound true.
6) Lack of Depth
The report indicated that Santos’ education included an undergraduate degree from Baruch and an MBA from NYU.
Santos earned neither.
Degree verification typically requires a signed release, which the DCCC didn’t have, so it’s hard to argue that they should have caught this. But don’t just regurgitate what Santos has said in public statements.
If someone was paying attention, however, he or she would have noticed that in some places Santos indicated earning a degree from Baruch, while in other places he said he earned degrees from both Baruch and NYU.
It should have been a sign to dig further or at least raised a yellow flag.
7) Thin Public Records Searches
The report did well referencing sources and links, even in the public record database area. But they were too reliant on commercial databases and didn’t go directly to the sources.
The public record research was really thin, and where they really messed up was the criminal record section.
From the report:
“Santos appeared to have no criminal record.
NOTE: Further research [is] necessary to determine whether Santos has a criminal record.”
Wait, what?
Where did they search? Did they search the fictional nationwide criminal database? And which is it? Does he have a record? Or is “further research” necessary?
I’ve talked about this endlessly before. Criminal records are misunderstood, so it’s best to be pretty specific about what was searched. Because it might bite you in the a$$.
Oh yeah, he did have a criminal record — in Brazil. Which I am guessing wasn’t part of their mythical criminal database.
8) Understand the Scope
Santos ran on a platform as a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” who had worked for the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and he reportedly ran his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets, including multiple properties.
None of that is true.
If the whole reason he is there is because of this, one would think that this is something that you would want to check the veracity of.
But they never bothered to check regulatory records to see if he worked at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, and they never bothered to check whether the “$80 million” family firm had any public-facing assets. If they did, there would have been some more yellow flags.
Avoiding Mistakes in the Future
This might be the last “George Santos” we see for a while in terms of pulling the wool over people’s eyes in such a public way.
But don’t be fooled; charlatans like George Santos are everywhere.
And this fiasco could have been easily avoided with a more intentional approach to the background investigation.
Humanity is my main concern