Rep. George Santos (R-NY) received ten additional indictments from a Federal Court in Central Islip, New York, Tuesday for several violations, including wire fraud, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission, and charging donors' credit cards without permission. 

The charges add new criminal exposure for the embattled lawmaker, who began his first term in January after admitting to embellishing parts of his background while campaigning. Santos is due to appear in court Oct. 27. 

The additional indictment comes days after Santos’s former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, reached a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to conspiring with the then-candidate to carry out a scheme prosecutors are dubbing the “Party Program,” in which the duo committed fraud on Santos’s campaign finance reports.

The scheme was meant to ensure that Santos and his campaign qualified for a “national party committee” program that would provide financial and logistical support to Santos’s bid for Congress, prosecutors said. To qualify, the New York Republican had to show his campaign raised at least $250,000 from third-party contributors in a single quarter. 

Santos was originally indicted back in May and was taken into custody and arraigned a few days later. 

We reported yesterday that he had been indicted. Now there’s more detail on the charges.

The indictment says Santos induced supporters to donate to a company under the false pretense that the money would be used to support his campaign. Instead, it says, he used it for personal expenses, including luxury designer clothes and to pay off his credit cards.

Santos also is accused of lying about his finances on congressional disclosure forms and applying for and receiving unemployment benefits while he was employed as regional director of an investment firm and running for Congress.

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said the indictment “seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations.”

“Taken together, the allegations in the indictment charge Santos with relying on repeated dishonesty and deception to ascend to the halls of Congress and enrich himself,” Peace said.

Santos, whose full name is George Anthony Devolder Santos, is due back in court to face the new charges on October 27 and is expected to plead not guilty. The representative, along with Marks, is alleged to have conducted a massive operation during the 2022 election cycle that attempted to fraudulently inflate their campaign's financial numbers by submitting fake documents to the FEC in an attempt to receive additional money for the campaign. By committing that fraud, they misled the FEC, the Republican Party, and the public. 

The sole purpose of the scheme was to submit false documents in order to receive more money and benefits from a national Republican Party campaign committee that financially assists campaigns like his. In order to qualify for the program, Santos and Marks had to prove that their campaign had received or raised a minimum of $250,000 in a single quarter. To accomplish this, they both submitted false documents that showed ten family members of Santos had donated a total of $250,000 to the FEC. The indictments allege that Santos and Marks knew at the time that the documents were false yet submitted them anyway in order to receive additional financial support from the Republican party. 

In addition to the FEC violations, Santos and Marks allegedly devised a plan to steal the personal identity and financial information from his existing donors on multiple occasions, then fraudulently charge their credit cards without their knowledge in an attempt to receive even more money to the campaign. This was done over a period between December 2021 and April 2022. 

The severity of these charges will bring a possible maximum punishment of up to 22 years in federal prison. Given the fact that Marks has already accepted a plea agreement with prosecutors, Santos is on very shaky ground. He has faced growing and severe criticism from his constituents, and the calls for his resignation or to remove him from Congress have grown louder over the course of his legal woes. However, Santos has remained defiant and has continued to deny any wrongdoing.