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Disgraced congressman George Santos, whose seven-year prison sentence was commuted by Trump last week, is continuing his apology tour with a series of media appearances. His interviews come amid reports that authorities in his former constituency in New York could be seeking to put him back behind bars. Santos, 37, was expelled from Congress in 2023 for lying about his past. He was later sentenced to 87 months behind bars in April after pleading guilty to wire fraud and identity theft, only to be pardoned by the president after serving just three months at FCI Fairton in New Jersey. After speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News on Monday, Santos was back in front of the cameras for CBS New York on Tuesday. He told host Marcia Kramer that he was sorry to everyone he had misled, apologizing for abusing their trust. During the interview, Kramer asked Santos whether he believed he was now out of the woods, given that New York state and local prosecutors still have the power to bring charges against people who have received commutations from the president. That’s thanks to a law that was inspired by the case of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who escaped state prosecution after being pardoned of federal offences. “It hasn’t crossed my mind,” he answered. “Like I said, I have no pendencies with them... my entire case was federal. Not that I’m aware of, I don’t even know how they would do it. I mean, you’re putting that thought in my head now, so I probably have to go look into it, but I would hope that that’s not the priority, the path that people would want to go down.” The question arose after Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, whose remit includes Santos’s former constituency on Long Island, released a statement in which she said: “Since first learning of George Santos’s actions, I have been at the forefront of bringing him to justice. “I am proud of the work my office has done, and the conviction achieved in partnership with the U.S. Attorney’s office. While the office cannot comment on ongoing investigations, suffice it to say that I remain focused on prosecuting political corruption wherever it exists regardless of political affiliation.” Santos said he had told the president since his release that he wants to “contribute” and “make a difference” and had been so horrified by his short stay behind bars that he would be interested in working on prison reform in the future. “That’s where we have to target, is working with these children so that they don’t go to prison,” Santos said. “You don’t want to go to prison, kids. That’s the message.” He told Kramer he had found his own experience of jail “mentally tortuous,” describing the environment as “really dirty” and revealing he had written three suicide notes while inside. “The first night was tough,” Santos reflected. “No one truly prepares for something like this. Imagine a dorm at a camp you really don’t want to be at and it’s been run down so bad but your parents really force you because they want to get rid of you for the summer – it’s kind of the same. “From the get-go, they did everything wrong, in my opinion, on how they dealt with bringing in a person into prison. Usually, people come in and nobody even knows there’s a new guy. But for me, they shut down the camp, they shut down the facility, they took people and put them all indoors, made them stand up for a count so I can walk in. Kicked people out of their beds and shifted people around so I can have this, I guess, privileged spot bed.” He explained he had spent 41 days in isolation after receiving death threats in a cell that he claimed was fewer than six feet wide and nine feet high, and in which he was expected to spend 23 hours a day. In a separate interview on Newsmax, Santos told anchor Rob Finnerty that he was “terribly apologetic” over the trouble he had caused his fellow Republicans. He said he had been “in a death spiral of absolute chaos and my own worst enemy.” Interestingly, he also said he had found GOP members on Capitol Hill less committed to defending Trump and his “America First” agenda than they like to appear and had been shocked when some of the same representatives who had voted to remove him had subsequently told him they “missed him” when he ran into them at a Washington Christmas party. “I’m like, ‘You voted to kick me out. What do you mean you miss me?” Santos recalled. “Right? And they were really caught off guard.” He also told Finnerty he has no plans to return to politics “in the foreseeable future,” adding: “My husband will kick me out.”
