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On Friday evening, President Trump commuted the sentence of former Representative George Santos. “Good luck George, have a great life!” the president said.
Oct. 18, 2025Updated 6:52 p.m. ET
In the days before he was sentenced to federal prison last spring, George Santos said that he was ready to accept his fate.
Mr. Santos, the discredited former Republican congressman from New York whose name had become practically synonymous with shameless deceit, had pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He admitted to a host of other schemes and said that it was time to take accountability.
As has so often been the case with Mr. Santos, he quickly changed his tune.
Faced with more than seven years in prison, Mr. Santos, who begged a judge for leniency and then sobbed in court when he did not receive it, took to social media to make a plea that just days earlier he had sworn he would avoid.
“I believe that 7 years is an over the top politically influenced sentence,” Mr. Santos wrote in April, “and I implore that President Trump gives me a chance to prove I’m more than the mistakes I’ve made.”
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It took months of social media pleas, weekly dispatches in a small newspaper, handwritten letters from solitary confinement, entreaties from Republican allies and 84 days of prison time. But Mr. Santos’s request was finally granted.
