Secret company zoom calls show just how ignorant George Santos was about the Ponzi scheme he was selling

Newly elected Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has a history of scandalous information that continues to drip out like a relentless stalactite, adding more and more substance to the piercing point hanging over his political career.

In the latest reports about Santos' short-lived career with Harbor City Capitol, the Washington Post revealed that they obtained the Zoom meetings that Santos had with the company's founder and others that are now part of the ongoing investigation into what's being characterized as a Ponzi scheme.

"In December 2019, Maroney contacted Santos about Harbor City, Santos recounted in one of the Zoom recordings obtained by The Post. He said Maroney had been a 'client' of his whom he came to know in meetings over breakfast and lunch," the Post said, citing the court documents. "Santos said Maroney 'came to me at 4 o’clock in the morning,' emailing him with details about the company’s bond offering."

“I jokingly said, ‘Are you hiring?’ He said, ‘Are you looking?’” Santos said. “I still have those emails, by the way.”

Santos had his Harbor City email set up by Jan. 2020 a court-appointed lawyer revealed. Santos' employment wasn't announced until about six months later.

Santos was after millionaire investors who could write checks for a minimum of $5 million, but not even he could understand exactly how the company worked. It's likely the best piece of information for Santos' legal defense.

In a conversation with J.P. Maroney, the company's founder and the person who hired Santos, the new staffer was asking questions about how exactly the "obscure form of credit Harbor City claimed to be using guaranteed the safety of investor money."

“I still don’t understand it completely,” Santos said.

Still, Santos painted himself as someone who knew what was going on and defended the company as "100 percent legitimate." Therein lies his legal liability.

Publicly, however, Santos was an expert in charge.

“I’m actually Harbor City Capital’s head guy for New York City,” Santos told the Metropolitan Republican Club in an interview when he first ran for office in the fall of 2020. Santos claimed he was managing “$1.5 billion,” and the average investor, he said, was putting in “about $50,000 to $175,000.”

The Post did the math on that. If there were an average of $175,000 investment, they would need 8,500 clients to reach $1.5 billion.

He said over Zoom that he felt a real pressure to bring in cash, which is standard for a hedge fund.

“Right now, I’m fighting the battle of my life at Harbor City,” he said in a Zoom. “I need to close a big deal. I need to show J.P. he didn’t make a mistake … I admire him a lot.”

"Resilient people make it happen,” Santos said in another Zoom recording from 2020, as he was desperately trying to sell investments. “It doesn’t matter how. They just make it happen. And that’s what I’m gonna do."

The Post noted that Santos went by another name at the time he was working for the company: George Devolder. He explains the name change by creating a kind of split personality.

“From a very early age, I became George Devolder the businessman and George Santos the politician. I’ve managed to keep that very separate,” he explained in another of the Zoom recordings.

Business Insider focused on the use of the name change as another way that Santos has managed to use a kind of pseudonym or independent identity. The reality is that Hispanic families often incorporate their mother's maiden name into their own names. It's unclear, however, why Santos would go back and forth between the two names.

In one case, Santos named himself Anthony Devolder, the founder of "United for Trump," during an LGBTQ event in which he encouraged other like-minded people to leave the Democratic Party.

It wasn't the first time that Santos was asked about his name issue.

Read the full report on the Zoom videos from the Washington Post.