Reliable Liars

In some ways, George Santos is having a pretty good year. The congressman-elect's new salary is $174,000 a year, which is a lot more than he was making at the Dish Network call center. Of course, there are some other things that aren’t going so great for him. He is a big lying liar who lies, and while lying about whether you ever worked at Goldman Sachs isn’t a crime, some of the lies Santos told could have legal consequences. We talk this week about problems that could arise from statements he made to the government about his finances, or from the manner in which he funded his campaign, and about how prosecutors will go about figuring out whether any of his lies were crimes. Plus: Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s out of Bahamian prison and confined to his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, is fortunate to be out on bail. Two of his top lieutenants (Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang) have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in his prosecution. In theory, his trial is scheduled for October, and we also talked about whether — if he doesn’t eventually change his plea to guilty himself — it will be in his interest to hurry to trial or seek to delay and delay.

Finally, a spat between cartoonists. Dilbert creator Scott Adams has threatened to sue right-wing political cartoonist Ben Garrison for drawing a cartoon that suggested Anthony Fauci had hypnotized him into getting vaccinated for COVID. Can a cartoon be defamatory? Maybe. But this one isn’t.

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