Did Chinese Communists Kidnap George Santos’s 5-Year-Old Niece? Probably Not!

Hide your kids, hide your wife, ’cause the Long Island congressman is (allegedly) lying about everybody out here.

Usually a sitting congressman getting indicted for committing identity theft and credit-card fraud would be a huge story, but the superseding indictment filed against George Santos earlier this month didn’t really feel like big news. I didn’t bother texting my Long Island–based friends and family members about the news that their congressman is now facing 23 federal criminal charges, as none of the new allegations were as zany as Santos allegedly lying about an Amish dog breeder, a disabled vet whose dog was dying, his “Jew-ish” background and high-school volleyball prowess, or his involvement with the TV show Hannah Montana.

Perhaps the congressman has realized that if he wants to stay in the spotlight he has to pepper his false claims with plenty of bizarre details. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for Santos telling a New York Times reporter that his 5-year-old niece was briefly kidnapped by Chinese communists — a story which appears to be untrue.

This week, Grace Ashford, one of the Times reporters who broke the story of Santos’s largely made-up background, revealed that the New York congressman recently struck up a phone relationship with her. While describing the trials his family has been through in the last year, Santos shared a story about his young niece:

“I’ll give you one, I’ll give you one story that nobody talks about,” he replied, before telling me how his 5-year-old niece disappeared from a playground in Queens, only to be located 40 minutes later on a surveillance camera with two Chinese men.

He said the incident was the subject of an active police investigation, implying heavily that it might have been in retaliation for his vocal stance against the Chinese Communist Party.

“So you think it was China?” I asked, clarifying.

“Look, I don’t want to go into like, conspiracy theory,” he said. “But you know, if the shoe fits, right?”

Maybe Santos didn’t expect Ashford to look into this wild story. But since that is literally her job, she followed up with law-enforcement officers, who said they’d found no evidence to back up Santos’s claim:

There was one other question that was bothering me as well: his story about the Chinese Communist Party kidnapping. I reached out to a colleague with connections to law enforcement officials to learn more about the investigation.

A high-ranking police official confirmed that officers had been called and had looked into the incident. But they found no evidence of Chinese Communist Party involvement, or of any kidnapping at all.

“We found nothing at all to suggest it’s true,” the official said. “I’d lean into, ‘he made it up.’”

Mother Jones shed a little more light on why the Chinese Communist Party might be featured in Santos’s latest apparent fib:

Earlier this year George Santos, the fabulist congressman facing federal fraud charges, took up the cause of exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui, a fellow fabulist who is also facing federal fraud charges. 

Guo, along with Steve Bannon, leads a group called the New Federal State of China, which claims to be dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party. But federal prosecutors say Guo defrauded members of that group through a series of fraudulent investment schemes.

As Mother Jones has reported, Santos has echoed claims by Guo’s supporters in the Chinese diaspora that their leader is being prosecuted by the US Justice Department due to his vocal criticism of the CCP. Santos has even ludicrously implied that his own prosecution results from his embrace of Guo. Still such claims have helped Santos raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from Guo supporters.

But, of course, this doesn’t really explain why foreign agents would snatch Santos’s niece, how she was rescued, or why he would casually mention this dubious claim to a Times reporter.

Much like when Santos had an altercation with a protester while running around the halls of Congress with a 2-month-old mystery baby in his arms, all we can do is send our best wishes to this little girl and shake our heads at the ongoing Santos spectacle.