"The money didn’t come from China, Ukraine, or Burisma" huh weird what does that leave out https://t.co/ZbKebQgcjM — lulag tankie (@revhowardarson) January 13, 2023 No doubt intended as a dig against Hunter Biden. Then again, per the Washington Post, May 2017: A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies …
Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Where *Did* George Santos Get His Funding?Post + Comments (54)
The Producers:
Maybe Zeldin’s campaign was using Santos to launder money to help Zeldin. They could have put money in Santos’ campaign & has his campaign fund field/GOTV operations in that Congressional district, assuming nobody would notice bc they assumed Santos would lose
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 12, 2023
I went to the Queens Italian restaurant where George Santos has somehow spent almost $50k in campaign funds since 2020, often in installments of exactly $199.99, one cent below what you have send the FEC receipts for. I tried to recreate his favorite meal. https://t.co/WgAH8ZpARt
— Alex Sammon (@alex_sammon) January 13, 2023
… According to documents filed to the Federal Election Committee, Santos has spent $25,640.26 in campaign money at Il Bacco since he first ran for the Long Island/Queens congressional seat in 2020, a number made even more astonishing by the fact that the coronavirus hobbled indoor dining for most of 2020 in New York City, and the restaurant was shut down for part of 2021. Santos’ campaign also reported owing Il Bacco $18,773.54 for its election night party in November this year. A political action committee called Rise NY, run by Santos’ sister, Tiffany, spent another $4,722 there, according to the New York Times.
All in all, the Santos siblings have dropped nearly $50,000 at the luxury Italian joint over the past two congressional campaigns, which seems like a lot of money for a guy who, according to campaign disclosure forms, declared earnings of only $55,000 total in 2020. “I don’t know why we were at Il Bacco all the time,” an anonymous Santos staffer told Talking Points Memo…
[Okay, lotsa good Trump-loving Repubs enjoy the homey comfort of a nice Italian place… ]
Santos is not alone in his love of Il Bacco. Plenty of New York Republicans, winners and losers alike, have visited the restaurant in recent years. The restaurant’s Instagram page features photos of Rudy Giuliani alongside the restaurant’s owner, Oppedisano, and his daughter Tina. Andrew Giuliani, Rudy’s son, who lost the most recent Republican primary for governor, is featured as well. The Republican city councilwoman Vicki Paladino has visited. I scrolled and scrolled on the restaurant’s Instagram but found no picture of Santos…
Joe Oppedisano, the restaurant’s owner, is an aviation enthusiast, something chronicled somewhat horrifically in the New York Post. In October of 2020, Oppedisano crashed his private Cessna into the East River near the Throgs Neck bridge, an accident that left him with 16 broken ribs and required 10 separate surgeries during a 30-day hospital stay. The crash also killed one of Oppedisano’s passengers, Maggie O’Neil. In a truly strange editorial decision, the Post piece ends on a chipper note: Oppedisano was discharged from the hospital on Election Day that fall and said he was heading straight to the polls. “I really love this country and I really wanted to vote for Donald Trump,” he told the paper.
Oppedisano is a Santos campaign supporter; he donated $6,500 to Santos’ campaign and related PACs. So, too, is Oppedisano’s brother Rocco, who kicked in $500 to Santos, a donation the Daily Beast called “almost certainly illegal.”
According to Daily Beast reporting, in 2009, Rocco “was stripped of his permanent resident status following a firearms and drug bust at homes belonging to Joseph Oppedisano.” A decade later, the Coast Guard intercepted a yacht that Rocco was sailing from the Bahamas to Florida. Customs and Border Patrol found 14 undocumented Chinese immigrants aboard the boat, a Bahamian national, and $200,000 in cash socked away in the vessel’s walls. Rocco pleaded guilty to smuggling and was expelled from the U.S., which still wasn’t enough to deter him from doing his part for the 3rd District’s newest congressman…
People smuggling is a well-known problem in the restaurant trade — there’s always a market for kitchen workers desperate enough to put in 18-hour days at the beck of petty culinary tyrants for low wages, and if they don’t speak English, all the better (for the owners). The Oppedisanos probably don’t have more than the usual quotient of sketchily documented scut workers in the back room, these days. But it could be that they know people who know people who aren’t unsympathetic to the human pipeline, which is after all very free-market!
But Santos has become a MAGAt icon now — the QAnon Quacus are going to defend him to the death:
A rare pro-Caligula take https://t.co/7lwwuAq5cE
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) January 12, 2023
(Obvious joke about frugal Repubs using only half a horse for their performative protest… )