The Associated Press reports:
George Santos is defending his recent social media tirade to a federal judge who will be sentencing the disgraced former New York congressman later this week on fraud charges. In a lengthy letter ahead of the Friday court date, Santos, 36, said he remains “profoundly sorry” for his crimes but protests that the seven-year prison sentence sought by prosecutors as “ridiculous” and overly harsh.
Prosecutors, in a filing last week, argued Santos “remains unrepentant” and has not shown genuine remorse, as his lawyers have claimed in their own filing seeking a lighter, two-year prison stint. They cited a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, in which he disparaged the U.S. Department of Justice as a “cabal of pedophiles” and cast himself as a victim of prosecutorial overreach.
ABC News reports:
“But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head. True remorse isn’t mute; it is aware of itself, and it speaks up when the penalty scale jumps into the absurd,” Santos’ letter said.
“Ironically, the same political ambition that underpinned my own wrongdoing now seems to fuel the government’s overreach in this case,” he wrote. “You’d think they might have learned something from the very person they chose to prosecute so vehemently!”
Santos included a selective chart to suggest the government’s sentencing recommendation is out of step with other political prosecutions.
It’s likely that Santos will be sentenced to a low-security prison typically used for white-collar and nonviolent criminals.