PA federal judge in New York sentenced former Rep. George Santos to over seven years in prison Friday.
“Where is the remorse?” U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert asked Santos before sentencing him to 87 months behind bars and ordering him to almost $374,000 in restitution.
He was ordered to surrender by July 25.
Seybert handed down the sentence after Santos made a tearful plea for mercy and acknowledged he’d “betrayed the confidence” of his constituents.
The judge did not appear moved by Santos’ sobs. She said doesn’t like sending people to jail, but Santos was “fully deserving” of the lengthy sentence.
John J. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called the sentence “justice” after the hearing, and said Santos was “finally held accountable for the mountain of lies, theft, and fraud he perpetrated.”
Santos, 36, had pleaded guilty in August of last year to charges of committing wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Prosecutors had urged Seybert to throw the book at Santos, the disgraced former Republican congressman, to “reflect the seriousness of Santos’s unparalleled crimes.”
“From his creation of a wholly fictitious biography to his callous theft of money from elderly and impaired donors, Santos’s unrestrained greed and voracious appetite for fame enabled him to exploit the very system by which we select our representatives,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum, in which they asked Seybert to sentence him to 87 months in prison.
Read the full report on NBC News.
