<div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-0"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Former Representative <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/nyregion/george-santos-timeline.html" title="">George Santos</a> of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn, was released from a federal prison on Friday night after President Trump commuted his seven-year sentence for fraud.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said that Mr. Santos was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey after 10 p.m. on Friday night. “A great injustice has been corrected,” Mr. Murray said.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">In a <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115391767709119144" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">social media post</a>, Mr. Trump suggested that politics had been a major factor in his decision, commending Mr. Santos for sharing his views and contrasting him with Democrats. Calling the former congressman “somewhat of a ‘rogue,’” Mr. Trump said that he believed that Mr. Santos’s <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/nyregion/george-santos-sentencing-prison.html" title="">sentence</a> was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">The president also suggested he had been moved by Mr. Santos’s accounts of being in prison, which he had published in a regular column in <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://southshorepress.com/stories/675481419-santos-from-behind-bars-solitary-confinement" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">a local Long Island newspaper</a>.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-1"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-1"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/nyregion/george-santos-guilty-plea-court.html" title="">pleading guilty</a> to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He served fewer than three months of his 87-month sentence.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">He will also no longer be required to pay more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to his victims, <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://x.com/EdMartinDOJ/status/1979311737943003393" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">according to a copy of the commutation posted online</a> by Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">The commutation — which cuts Mr. Santos’s sentence short but does not wipe out his conviction — is part of a blitz of grants of political clemency that Mr. Trump has doled out to his political allies or other figures who have been embraced by his right-wing supporters.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">For months, it looked as if Mr. Santos, who rose to political prominence as an adherent to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, would not be granted similar favor. Even as the president gave sweeping pardons to those charged in connection with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Santos’s appeals to get his sentence reduced were unsuccessful.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-3"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-2"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">His commutation is the latest startling twist in an outlandish political odyssey that saw Mr. Santos move from a little-known conservative from Long Island to an infamous example of deceit and political fraud.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">When he won his seat in 2022, Mr. Santos was heralded as a sign of a shift in Republican politics. Young, Brazilian American and openly gay, Mr. Santos seemed to signal an expansion of the G.O.P.’s tent. His victory, in a Democratic-leaning district in Long Island, was celebrated for helping Republicans narrowly win control of the House.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">But Mr. Santos’s congressional career was imperiled almost immediately, after The New York Times and other outlets exposed that his ascent was built on a spectacular web of lies.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos claimed that he was descended from Holocaust refugees. His mother, he said, had been in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He claimed to be a college volleyball star. And Mr. Santos boasted of extensive Wall Street experience that allowed him to report loaning his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">None of that was true.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">As more of Mr. Santos’s claims were exposed to be false or misleading, his Republican colleagues grew increasingly uneasy. When he was indicted in 2023, prosecutors accused him of multiple criminal schemes, ranging from fraudulently claiming unemployment benefits and lying on official forms to using his political campaign to enrich himself, swindling money from donors for personal expenses and using one donor’s credit card to steal $11,000 for his personal use.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-5"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-3"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">After a congressional ethics investigation found that Mr. Santos improperly spent campaign funds on Botox, designer fashion, cosmetics and OnlyFans purchases, more than 100 Republicans joined Democrats to expel him from Congress in December 2023.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">He became the first person in history to be expelled from the House without being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Less than a year later, Mr. Santos, who had for more than a year denied all wrongdoing, pleaded guilty in his criminal case. He acknowledged his involvement in a variety of other schemes, including lying to Congress, stealing money from campaign donors and fraudulently collecting unemployment benefits.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">At Mr. Santos’s sentencing, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York at the time, John J. Durham, described the conviction as a warning. “To Mr. Santos and other dishonest individuals of that ilk, who lie, steal identities and commit frauds to get elected to public office,” he said, “public officials who criminally abuse our electoral process will end up in a federal prison.”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">A spokesman for the Eastern District declined to comment on Friday night.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Mr. Murray, thanked Mr. Trump in a statement, in which he called him “the greatest president in U.S. History” and said that he was “so proud to be an American.”</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-7"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-4"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos’s commutation may cause a political headache for many of his Republican colleagues, especially on Long Island, where four congressional seats have been hotly contested battlegrounds in recent elections.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Representative Nick LaLota, a Long Island Republican who was among those leading the charge for Mr. Santos’s expulsion, decried the commutation on Friday evening. In a <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://x.com/nicklalota/status/1979324026200953003?s=46&amp;t=N02_GmcBb6ftJi1k1PAQhg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="">social media post</a> where he did not address Mr. Trump, Mr. LaLota wrote that Mr. Santos “didn’t merely lie — he stole millions, defrauded an election, and his crimes (for which he pled guilty) warrant more than a three-month sentence.”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos remains more popular among a cadre of far-right MAGA politicians outside of New York, a few of whom publicly pushed for his release.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">“Thank you @realDonaldTrump for commuting George’s sentence. It was the right thing to do,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the brash Republican and MAGA adherent, wrote in a social media post late Friday night.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">She said in the post that she had spoken with Mr. Santos. “He is extremely grateful to be released from prison and he and his family are overjoyed,” she wrote.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-9"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-5"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Ms. Greene was one of the first to call for a commutation, sending a letter to the Justice Department in August. Around that time, Mr. Trump, who had by that point issued numerous <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trumps-pardons-redefine-crime.html" title="">pardons</a> to staunch supporters, did not rule out offering one to Mr. Santos. But in an interview with Newsmax, Mr. Trump said that he had not yet been asked.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">“He lied like hell,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “And I didn’t know him, but he was 100 percent for Trump.”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">In his post on Friday announcing Mr. Santos’s commutation, Mr. Trump once again cited their shared political views, this time as a justification for his release.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">He suggested that Mr. Santos’s transgressions — which include crimes that Mr. Santos acknowledged in court that he committed — paled in comparison to those of Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/nyregion/25blumenthal.html" title="">has admitted that he misrepresented his military service</a> during the Vietnam War era.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">“This is far worse than what George Santos did, and at least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Mr. Trump wrote.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-11"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-6"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">In a statement to The Times, Mr. Blumenthal dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments. “This rant is fabricated nonsense,” he said. “There’s no excuse for commuting George Santos’ sentence.”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">But Mr. Trump indicated that his position had not been swayed only by politics. He was moved in part by Mr. Santos’s reports that he had been held in solitary confinement.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Since entering custody in a federal prison in southern New Jersey, Mr. Santos, rarely one to shy away from the media spotlight, had been writing a regular column about his time in prison in The South Shore Press, a newspaper on Long Island.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">In September, Mr. Santos wrote that he had been moved into the “Special Housing Unit” after his lawyer reported to prison officials that he had received a death threat against him. (Ms. Greene has also said that she had received a letter from Mr. Santos saying that he was in solitary confinement.)</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">In his accounts, Mr. Santos described isolating conditions, once likening being in solitary confinement to a “slow-motion form of torture.” He said that prison officials told him that he would remain in special housing until a full investigation into the threat against him had been finished. And Mr. Santos, who campaigned as a law-and-order candidate, repeatedly renewed his calls for clemency.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div><div data-testid="Dropzone-13"></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn" data-testid="companionColumn-7"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">On Monday, the South Shore Press published a direct letter from Mr. Santos to Mr. Trump. Describing his experience as “unlike anything most Americans could ever comprehend,” he appealed to the president on a personal basis.</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">“Mr. President, I have nowhere else to turn,” Mr. Santos wrote. “You have always been a man of second chances, a leader who believes in redemption and renewal. I am asking you now, from the depths of my heart, to extend that same belief to me.”</p><p class="css-ac37hb evys1bk0">Mr. Santos spent 84 days in federal custody. According to the Bureau of Prisons website, he had been scheduled to be released in September 2031.</p></div><aside aria-label="companion column" class="css-ew4tgv"></aside></div>