George Santos, the disgraced Republican congressman, had been sentenced to prison after his web of deceit unraveled. His lawyer said Mr. Santos expected to be released Friday.
President Trump on Friday commuted the sentence of former Representative George Santos of New York, the disgraced Republican fabulist whose lies made him an object of national scorn and whose fraud landed him a punishment of more than seven years in prison.
In a social media post, 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 sentence was excessive given the nature of his financial crimes.
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 local Long Island newspaper.
“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!”
Mr. Santos, 37, reported to prison in July after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. His lawyer, Joseph Murray, said Mr. Santos expected to be released from prison Friday evening.
When he is out of custody, Mr. Santos will have served fewer than three months of an 87-month sentence.
He will also no longer be required to pay more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to his victims, according to a copy of the commutation posted online by Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney.
Mr. Santos’s commutation — which cuts his 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of that was true.
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.
