Transcript: Former Congressman George Santos on Tucker Carlson Show

That was day one. Oh, yeah. The kitchen. The kitchen is officially closed after I wrote several observations of its risks on my column for the South Shore Press, because I was still writing from in there.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you were their prison columnist.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, no, I’m my own. I write for the column for the South Shore Press, which is a New York paper. I’ve been writing for them for over a year, and I was still retained that column. And I was writing from prison, criticizing the prison I was in and documenting my journey.

Look, unfortunately, I’m known to not be scared of anything. Well, apparently to my detriment, but so I criticized and critiqued all of these things to a massive audience that I have as a platform. And it subsequently led to the kitchen closure.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was it like before it closed?

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean, broken equipment, absolute filth, nothing functioning. Drains that backed up and brought back the most gunk you can think of. Machinery that you were literally, you know, I always thought that eating the food at FCI Fairton was either I get some really, really bad food poisoning and I’m going to lose a lot of weight, or I might just not die. You know, it’s like, it’s either or you can’t. You really can. It’s inexplicable.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the hand washing regimen like?

Hygiene Horrors

GEORGE SANTOS: There’s no hand washing regimen. You wear gloves. Who’s washing hands? They give you gloves. They don’t even give you soap to wash your hands in the kitchen because you’re wearing gloves.

TUCKER CARLSON: But what if the gloves are dirty?

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, no, you, it’s lovely. You should see the loveliness of how, I mean, I got in trouble because I put a pair of gloves on, right? And if I’m stirring a spoon and I’m doing my things and then I proceed to go open a box to get something, once I’m done with that box, I would switch out gloves and toss them.

But I guess I was going through gloves so fast, and I got yelled at. “You change gloves too many times.” “No, you take it easy. Once you’re gloved up, you’re gloved up for the day.” I’m like, “What? What is going on here?”

You would see these guys, some of the inmates follow that regimen. I don’t care. I’m like, I’m not doing that. I eat this food. They would put on gloves and the loveliest thing was they get a piece of paper, blow their nose wearing the gloves. They’d open a box, they touch dirty dusty cans, and then the next thing you see, they’re in there mushing up spices into the ground beef.

And I’m like, it’s like, I’m telling you, it’s your own personal hell for a germaphobe. It’s like, that’s prison. The conditions of the kitchen were just atrocious. It’s just, it’s hard to explain when you have a walk-in freezer that’s constantly over freezing and breaking and you have to thaw it and then everything in it thaws and then they refreeze it and then it’s like, but the chicken has expired a year, but it keeps. Well, you got to pretend this is all normal. You know, it’s just remarkable. Guantanamo has better treatment for their prisoners, I assume.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there’s nothing like ending the day by the fire. Book in your hand, dogs at your feet, cup of coffee at your side. I can tell you it works. And what makes it better is Cozy Earth. We’re not even sure you’ve heard of the bubble cuddle blanket we have. It’s a big deal. It’s soft, textured, perfect for settling down after a long day. It’s like a cloud actually. It’ll make you sleepy just dreaming about it.

Speaking of which, Cozy Earth also has what you need to take your sleep to the next level. We hope you’re seated because this may blow your mind. Bamboo sheets. Bamboo, the fabric of the future. Actually they are amazing. Can’t believe they’re from bamboo. They’re temperature regulating moisture, wicking you actually sleep. Cooler, smooth, breathable, super durable.

If you don’t believe it, try them. Risk free 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty upgrade the place you spend the most time, which is your bed. One third of your life at least it begins at cozyearth.com use the code Tucker for 20% off. That’s cozyearth.com code Tucker. And if you get a post purchase survey, let them know that you heard about Cozy Earth right here on this show. Because home is not just where you live. It’s how you feel? Cozy Earth.

Prison Culinary Adventures

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you whip up anything good?

GEORGE SANTOS: I did, I did rice pudding. Actually, I was the first person, I think, in that prison’s history to have the audacity to make rice pudding.

TUCKER CARLSON: How was it?

GEORGE SANTOS: It was good. It was like diner New York style. I had rice, I had two big cartons full of milks that were going to expire in two days. So I said, instead of letting it go to waste, let’s make something with it. I said, rice pudding it is. I had cinnamon, I had allspice, I had rice, I had sugar and I had milk. Rice pudding. They loved it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s one of the great desserts. Which is kind of fading.

GEORGE SANTOS: And I love it. So, I mean, I love it. And then it’s funny that I did do a flan, but I did a test flan. It worked. I mean, I’m ridiculous. Trust me, I love cooking. I did do a flan.

TUCKER CARLSON: To do a flan from prison, you can. Takes a certain alarm.

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean, it takes a je ne sais quoi. So you had milk, you had eggs, you had sugar. Again, you have the ingredients. It’s just really the chutzpah that’s missing.

And I brought it. I mean, it was, look, I baked lemon cakes with lemon icing. I mean, I came to a place where the kitchen was delivering doom and gloom. And my first week there, inmates were raving about how the desserts were amazing, how the food was better prepared. It looked like it was prepared with care.

I’m not saying I’m perfect, okay? I mean, I still had to make the grub that’s on the menu. Right. But I actually bother to peel potatoes instead of making mashed potatoes full of dirty peel. I washed the vegetables before I worked them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Don’t wash the vegetables. No.

GEORGE SANTOS: So I actually did took precautions. I mean, they don’t wash, they barely peel. You know, it really depends on who’s in the kitchen. I can speak for myself. I did. And a lot of other inmates just, they didn’t care.

But what’s sad about that is that the mentality that they have is so self-destructive because of how they’re treated by the institution, they forget they’re going to eat that too. They completely are oblivious to the fact that they’re going to experience eating the carelessness of their own, I guess, despair. So it’s sad. It’s a very sad environment.

TUCKER CARLSON: What were meal times like? How would you rate the table manners?

Life in a White Collar Camp

GEORGE SANTOS: Let me put it this way. No table manners. Definitely wouldn’t. I don’t think we can go to dinner with, I’d say 80% of them to, I know, the French Laundry. Gavin Newsom would never. So.

But some people very remember I was in a white collar camp. The problem is President Obama changed the rules of camps and now you get other people that are not white collar. So you get some drug dealers, you get some violent former gang members that have worked themselves down throughout the years in the system and their custody points have lowered. They’re on their way home, so they get put in a camp now.

So I joked and I said it’s a really dark shade of white for white collar. Not on a racial thing. Definitely not white collar.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s off white collar.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s off white for sure because it’s not all white collar. Like they like to say bankers and executive. The only real white collar guys I saw there were actually gold collars because they were Bob Menendez, his co-defendant.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: What were they like?

Meeting Bob Menendez’s Co-Defendants

GEORGE SANTOS: Interesting. Very interesting people. I mean business guys, very intelligent guys, but very interesting to interact with. I mean, we’re talking about multi, multi-millionaires. I mean, their gifts were gold bars. I mean, my joke was always the same. I’m in prison, I didn’t even get a gold bar.

TUCKER CARLSON: So are they serving long terms?

GEORGE SANTOS: I believe one is serving a seven year term and the other one’s serving a nine year term. But again, remember what those charges were, right? Foreign allegation issues. I mean, the book “Gold Bar Bob” that came out just a couple of days before I came out of prison is a wild read. I mean I had it ordered and sent to me because I just needed to read it.

The stories in there are absolutely fascinating. And I’m sitting here reading this and looking at these two characters, I’m like, that man did not do all this. There’s no way. He’s too dopey to do all of this. It’s just crazy to me.

But yeah, it was an enlightening group of people. I reconnected with a former campaign staffer of mine who ended up going to prison for something completely unrelated to me. But in the nature of what I believe the Merrick Garland DOJ did was he refused to play the narrative of bashing me and cooperating against me because he had really nothing to say.

So in lieu of that, they got him on a technicality, on some paperwork and they threw him in prison for a year and a day. And that’s Sam Mealy, who is a really remarkably intelligent young man who I would say made some poor choices, but at the same time doesn’t deserve to be in prison just because he didn’t narc on me. But that’s what the Merrick Garland DOJ was operating like, oh, you don’t help, you know, off to the ramparts with you. You’re done.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s a snitch system.

The Federal Prison Snitch System

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s totally a snitch system. So as far as other, look, I will say this. I met this very competent man who I still struggle, I looked at after I left prison. I wanted to make sure this is a guy who I think will be a friend in my life because he was a very even keeled, well spoken, respectable executive.

He was a very renowned architect worldwide. His name’s Aloke, Indian gentleman, former executive for United Airlines. He got caught in a pay to play kickback scheme in the private sector, though I never thought that that was illegal. And when I look at his thing, I’m saying, look, don’t do it if there’s a gray area. So I’m not defending the activity, but I’m also looking at saying this is protocol in the private sector.

I worked in the private sector for 10 years in private equity. I mean, if you go to my house, I’ll be glad to tour the wine cellar I’ve built out of gift baskets. Yeah. You know, four or five $600 bottles of wine to $3,000 bottles of champagne, Pappy Van Winkle, Scotch. I mean, all of it sits in my house. I never bought that stuff, but they were gifts during my private equity days. And they would be like, thank you, it was a pleasure doing business. It’s not a crime. But they put this in prison.

That’s right. So I struggle with the criminal justice system these days because I look at it and I feel like it’s an overall zealous system and just meant to put people in prison. There has to be some monetary benefit benefiting suppliers.

The Prison Industrial Complex

When you look at, do you know what I discovered in prison, Keefe? Have you ever heard of the brand Keefe?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

GEORGE SANTOS: Have you ever heard of the brand Bob Barker?

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

GEORGE SANTOS: But you know who Bob Barker is, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, Bob Barker family or him, I don’t know who started a freaking line of supplies from curtains to towels to linens to T-shirts to the jumpsuits we wear in prison, all the way to the bare basic toiletries. And it’s all the Bob Barker line. That is a multi-billion dollar federal government contract.

TUCKER CARLSON: And those products are for prisons.

GEORGE SANTOS: For prisons. Exclusively for prisons.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bob Barker’s family started a prison accessory line.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yes. And then there’s—

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve lived in this country a long time. How did I not know?

GEORGE SANTOS: I didn’t know it until I went to prison. Fair. And then there’s this brand called Keefe that by all accounts ties back to the Bushes. Now they sell all the commissary stuff from coffee to toilet paper, you name it. You can go down a prison commissary sheet. And Keefe. I’m like, what the hell is Keefe? Well, apparently there’s ties of it that tie back to the former President Bush. And they’ve got retail monopoly. Retail monopoly in contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

So when you look at this, we currently have a system that houses approximately 250,000 Americans in federal custody. I don’t even have an idea of what state custody is, but or local jails. Quarter of a million Americans sit in federal custody today. That is a business. Not for the federal government, though. Federal government loses. It’s a business for all of those with the contracts to those prisons.

So there is an incentive to putting people in prison. Somewhere along some line, judges might be compromised and I’m assuming prosecutors might be compromised. I can’t prove that. But that’s the only thing that makes sense when you’re seeing people go to prison for arbitrary reasons or for purposes and time frames that wouldn’t suit the crime or are overtly unusual and cruel, which is a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

So you have to really walk this tightrope to understand. And I don’t think that a BOP director will be able to grasp that because they work in four year terms or if they get reelected their principal gets reelected as a president. And in eight or four years, there’s so much you have to do that I don’t think you can get to the nitty gritty. That’s why I’m so focused, Tucker, to get into this in prison reform, because it’s desperately needed. There’s more voices needed for this.

The Biggest Problem with Federal Prisons

TUCKER CARLSON: Is the problem with it that it’s dirty, disorganized, violent, corrupt? All the above. If you were to isolate one problem with the federal prison system as you experienced it, what would it be?

GEORGE SANTOS: Per my experience at FCI Fairton, and I have limited experience, I know that there’s a lot of people that I met who have hopped because they hop around prisons across the country.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s in the federal system.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah. Insanity. They ship you backwards. I mean, if you’re in New Jersey here, this is, I think it’s hilarious, this story. An inmate was being transferred to New Jersey from Pennsylvania. But first they drove him to Kentucky, up to Wisconsin, and then he bought us back in New Jersey.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

GEORGE SANTOS: I don’t know why. I don’t understand it. And that’s why the BOP has a nickname for its acronym which is “backwards on purpose.” Even COs say it. Really? I learned this from a CO, from a corrections officer, not from an inmate. By the way, they say the BOP is backwards on purpose.

TUCKER CARLSON: I should have asked you.

The Guards and Administration

GEORGE SANTOS: That’s a great question. The guards, 80% of them are hardworking, amazing people. They’re doing their job. I had no quarrels with them or qualms or anything. I mean, great people. Matter of fact, I am only here today talking to you because of two very specific people that didn’t let me walk off that ledge when I was in isolation for 41 days.

I don’t obviously want to say their names because I don’t want to compromise, you know, it doesn’t help them. And they have families and I genuinely like these gentlemen. They were very compassionate men who were themselves distraught and completely flabbergasted at why I was being treated the way I was being treated while I was in solitary confinement. It didn’t compute to them. It didn’t make sense.

So I’d say 80% of them are some of the best people you’ll ever meet. They’re fun. They can dish it out with the best of them. On a good day, I’d pop some jokes. They’d pop right back. They clap. And you have this very good environment because it’s supposed to be rehabilitatory. It’s not supposed to be punitive.

So some COs want to make your life miserable just because it makes them happy and they live and relish off of your misery. But that’s not the majority. Those are very few and select. And I’m so glad that that’s the case. So I look at it as I had a positive experience with the COs.

I had a terrible experience with the administration, from the assistant warden Noble to the warden, Lynn Kelly to the camp administrator, who then turns out to be the most competent man there. And funny enough, his name is Mr. Santos.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

GEORGE SANTOS: Yes. True story. Cousins and pieces.

No, no. It turns out he was the most competent and most honest of the three on the power structure. And it’s infuriating that he’s the one with the less power. And then you have the two with the most power and they’re absolutely, Tucker, here’s where my head exploded.

COs are working with the bare minimum because there’s no budget. “We don’t have that in the budget.” The building’s falling apart. “We don’t have it in the budget.” That’s her answer to everything. The warden. The AC broke and it was broke all summer long. And then I had to fight tooth and nail, literally writing about it before they put on an actual temporary because I wasn’t about to sleep in 90 degree weather. No, it’s just not going to happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: You have standards, even while incarcerated.

Corruption and Mismanagement

GEORGE SANTOS: Even in prison, I think there should be standards. But upon leaving, right before I left, it’s getting cold. The ducts hadn’t been cleaned, and when asked to clean the duct, she said, he didn’t have the budget. One of the COs was so infuriated, he’s like, “It’s four grand to have a full service. We’re just going to turn this on. It’s going to throw God only knows what onto you guys to breathe.”

But at the same time, she found it in the budget to buy herself an 85 inch QLED Samsung TV, the cost of allegedly $7,000. And she put it in her own office, not in a conference room, not in a common area. She’s a TV watcher at work, I guess. 85 inches, I don’t even have that in my living room. It’s such a massive TV. What are you doing with this in your office?

But she found a budget for that. But God forbid, the budget to clean the ducts for the heater. It’s infuriating.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you didn’t have a problem with the guards, you had a problem with a couple of the administrators. What about the other inmates?

GEORGE SANTOS: You know, inmates for me were, I call them extras in my journey. I mean, there was like maybe two or three.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you let them know?

GEORGE SANTOS: Kind of.

TUCKER CARLSON: They had non-speaking parts in the film.

GEORGE SANTOS: They had totally non-speaking parts in the film. Because look, I couldn’t find a lot of similarities with a lot of them. I think there was like a group of like five or six that I could talk to. But these are well-educated individuals, very savvy, but at the same time very liberal. So it’s very liberal. There are lots of liberals in prison. What? Oh my God. Lots of liberals in prison.

You’d be shocked at the amount of people who hate the president in prison. But then, which is funny, the moment I got commuted, everybody was like, “Oh, Trump’s the man. Yo buddy, take care of me. Here’s my call.” My wife, I’m like, I left with a stack of phone numbers of wives that I’ve never called liberals.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know a lot of people been in prison, they all get more right wing in prison.

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, maybe these were still not getting red-pilled. Yeah. And I didn’t do my part either. So what do you do for recreation? While I was in the camp for the 43 days that I was in the camp, the first 30 and then a break and then 13 days because I had that big 41 block of isolation. You know, I was in the kitchen from 7:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon. And it was a great refuge for me psychologically.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEORGE SANTOS: Because I didn’t have to deal with whatever was outside of the kitchen.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is everyone else doing?

Daily Life at the Camp

GEORGE SANTOS: I don’t know, honestly, not making license plates. I mean, no, we don’t make license plates. It’s a work camp. So there’s the maintenance crew. Some guys do facility maintenance, I mean, which is, you know, whatever they call maintenance. There is not maintenance in the real world.

And then you have the warehouse guys who are in charge of like picking up the heavy boxes of, you know, the goods that come in to operate the prison. And then you have, oh, you have the cleaning crew. So they’re the ones in charge of cleaning the entire compound from, you know, the buildings, the bathrooms, and all the other facilities for the staff.

And lastly, you have the landscapers because this is on a big old bird reserve that was converted into a prison in 1990. So it’s massive amounts of acreage and lots of green and lots of grass. And so you have a landscaping crew. So I don’t know what these people do. All I know is that I was in the kitchen from 7:30 to 4:30.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does anyone plot escape?

GEORGE SANTOS: No. If they wanted to, you can walk off. The campers are free, literally free to roam right off. But nobody’s stupid enough to do it. Why? Your custody points go higher and then you lose that privilege and you end up in a low or a medium facility security.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, but can’t you just wander off and go to Philadelphia?

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean, you technically could. When you get caught, you’re going to be charged with escape and your custody points go higher. So from my understanding, nobody has attempted to escape the camp in years because once you go to the camp, it’s the easiest form of prison.

Imagine an abandoned country club from the 1960s that nobody’s ever gone to anymore. And one day you just decide to turn on the key and say, “We’re open for business.” No maintenance, no nothing. You just want to operate it as is. That’s what they’re operating there. But in prison standards, that is club fed.

No fences, no gates, no locked doors. You can roam. And there’s an outdoor track and there’s recreation outside. There’s a weight pile, you know, really run down weight pile, but a weight pile for you to work out. They have an annex trailer with a laundry room for you to do your laundry. You have a little library with an actually decent selection of books, which I was very impressed. Some of my favorite authors were in there.

And then you have a chapel where you can do multi-denominational prayer services. So it’s a very nice environment. Yeah. As far as prison goes. So when you get there, you usually either are somebody like me who is going to hate it but not understand how good you have it. And be a big baby about it like I was. Well, it is prison.

Or you’re going to be somebody who came from the system, working yourself down throughout your very long sentence and now you’ve reached the tail end of it and you’ve been good behavior. You’ve, in the eyes of the BOP, rehabilitated yourself. Now you’re in minimum security custody, which you’re now not even considered in custody. You’re out custody because there’s no gates, handcuffs, none of that. So that’s, nobody wants to run away from that.

The Facilities

TUCKER CARLSON: What are the showers like?

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, let’s, I describe it this way so I want to stay consistent. Imagine a rundown gym with no maintenance. Same structure, showered, two sides of showers and an aisle in the middle like a locker with showers on both sides with curtains that are just falling apart. Lime. And every bacterial growth you can imagine growing in the walls and in the corners. Peeling paint inside of each stall. Same thing goes for the toilets.

And then there was something lovely that I discovered. There’s this, this is what made the bathroom really unbearable for me to a point that I started having to brush my teeth with bottled water. You’re not going to believe this, but in prison there’s this Muslim culture that has become very prolific in a sense. And I’m not trying to be Islamophobic here. I’m just being really agnostic. Have no horse in the fight of Israelis and Jews and Islam and no non-political observation.

They have a predominant presence in the prison system. The wild thing is, is that before they go to pray, they have to, I guess wash certain parts of their body.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

GEORGE SANTOS: There were inmates hanging their ass on the sink and just washing it right there where I was. Ass washing on the sink. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s a bridge too far.

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean for anybody. And when confronted, it’s like a big argument on religious freedom.

TUCKER CARLSON: Seriously?

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh yeah, it’s an attack. It’s Islamophobia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are these Middle Eastern Muslims or African American Muslims?

GEORGE SANTOS: They’re African American Muslims.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you didn’t see a lot of Egyptians.

GEORGE SANTOS: A full pause. No, I don’t think there was a single Arab in this Muslim crew that I was with. Not a single one. They were all African Americans.

TUCKER CARLSON: These are gang members from Philly?

GEORGE SANTOS: Pretty much.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: Right. These were the Muslims that I was dealing with. Now don’t get me wrong, some of them nicest guys I’ve ever met with these very uncanny habits that were just not for me. So once I walked into a situation like that and it was literally ass washing on the sink, I said I can’t do this. So I bought the 24 pack of water, yours truly from your state here, not too far from here, same brand.

TUCKER CARLSON: They sell Poland Springs.

GEORGE SANTOS: They do, yeah, totally. So you can buy the 24 pack at I think 70 cents a bottle, which is not a bad. No, no. For prison. It’s not a bad bill. We know it’s a ripoff. But it’s compared to their $1.50 for a ramen noodle. It’s not a rip off.

TUCKER CARLSON: They were charging.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s insane. They take off.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you buy cigarettes?

GEORGE SANTOS: No, you cannot. It’s federal buildings are all smoke-free areas.

TUCKER CARLSON: What about vapor?

GEORGE SANTOS: No, no nicotine. No nicotine products. I saw a man go to the shoe for 45 days because he was caught with a contraband vape in there. No way. That’s how severe they consider it of a violation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah. Why do they care? I don’t know.

Drugs in Prison

TUCKER CARLSON: What about drugs? Were there drugs in the prison?

GEORGE SANTOS: The prison, not the camp, the prison across the street in the shoe of all places, is littered in drugs. Suboxone, K2, Ecstasy, Molly, cocaine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you serious?

GEORGE SANTOS: I am dead serious.

TUCKER CARLSON: How do you get drugs into a prison?

GEORGE SANTOS: That is the question I would always pose when there was some sort of issue where the COs couldn’t walk the range of the shoe because the smoke of suboxone and K2 were so thick.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re smoking it.

GEORGE SANTOS: They’re smoking it. And then you ask, why are they being provided lighters? They’re not, but some inmates have medical prescriptions that are pumps and require a battery. They take a little piece of whatever foil they can find and they put it on each end of negative and the positive and create a little brazier. And they smoke from that. No way. Yeah. I learned a lot.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s clever.

GEORGE SANTOS: I watched. Oh, they’re MacGyver.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you get any tattoos or joining gang or anything?

GEORGE SANTOS: No, I should have joined the gang, but I mean, it was Camp Cupcake. What was I going to do? A cupcake on my shoulder.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a cupcake that. They call it Camp Cupcake.

GEORGE SANTOS: I called it Camp Cupcake. I bake cupcakes there. So, yes, it’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: People are getting high in solitary confinement.

GEORGE SANTOS: Which is insane, because these are, I mean, they strip us naked, make us spread our cheeks and cough to go into solitary to make sure we’re bringing nothing we’re not allowed to into solitary. So I went through that humiliating display. You’re always handcuffed to your back. You have no access to outside. So when all that is happening, unfortunately, there’s only one way that drugs make it in there. Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Guards.

GEORGE SANTOS: Guards. And why? They’re undercompensated. They’re undercompensated, overworked. Now they’re working without compensation for God knows how long because Democrats can’t even get that together and Republicans can’t seem to work with them to do something. Although I agree with the principle of standing up to Chuck Schumer. But the problem is you’re just going to create a far worse. This is a pressure cooker situation.

But Ferritin is littered in drugs in the medium camp. I never saw drugs. I was there. I was pretty all over the place as far as integration goes. I’ve never seen drugs. The worst that I saw there was one guy got caught with a vape and that was like, “Oh, my God, you know.” Oh, sorry. That was the worst. That wasn’t the worst. The phone. One inmate got caught with a phone while I was in solitary.

Another inmate, who actually, funny enough, the first day I walk in there he looks at me and says, “You were my congressman. I voted for you.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you find a lot of constituents?

GEORGE SANTOS: Two. There were two. Two people from New York’s third district serving there, which was. I didn’t like that similarity.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a big district.

GEORGE SANTOS: It is a big district. It’s a very densely populated area. But, yeah, there were two.

Life in Prison: Food, Contraband, and Daily Routines

TUCKER CARLSON: What were they in for?

GEORGE SANTOS: Both of them for PPP fraud. You can’t make this up. Actually, millions of dollars of PPP fraud. Yes. So one of them got caught with a cell phone. That was a big transgression and it hadn’t happened in so long. I was like, oh, we haven’t had a phone incursion in this prison, in this part of the prison for years. I was like, oh, okay. Either they’re really good at hiding them or they just don’t even bother doing it because they have so much freedom. It’s not worth the risk.

But that was the worst I saw. Booze, drugs. You know, these guys, you know what’s the number one topic in the camp? Food. That’s all they talk about, really. The fantasies of, oh, I’d kill for a Big Mac. And I’m like, oh, metaphorically, be careful. That’s all that. Because food is such a big part of the day there you have these two sacred times of day. 10am is lunch, 4pm is dinner. Yes, we run on a geriatric schedule, but that is literally the…

So two meals a day. The entire… Well, they call breakfast what they give us in a bag. An apple, a honey bun, some sort of processed cake, and a little box of cornflakes. That’s breakfast. It’s all sugar. So, yeah. Lots of us don’t even touch us. I didn’t touch that stuff or else I was going to die. Diabetes and sodium issues. Just, no, thank you.

So really, it’s two meals and whatever you buy on your commissary. But I did something I’m so proud of. I was able to survive 84 days in prison. I’ve never eaten a honey bun or a ramen noodle soup. So I’m very proud of them. They’re so good. They’re not good for you. No, they’re not. No, I’ve heard that. Thousands.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve been reliably informed. Yes.

GEORGE SANTOS: 1,000 milligrams of sodium. Are you trying to kill someone by eating that? You know, the ramen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ramen’s tough.

GEORGE SANTOS: You know what? I have a trade for you. One honey bun. Four soups for me to guest host your show next week. So what would that be worth?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’d eat it too.

GEORGE SANTOS: Of course I would. I’ll eat anything that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. So what were you buying at the commissary?

GEORGE SANTOS: I stuck to… they have these really… They have some healthy alternative. Healthy-ish. Right. So lots of tuna, ate lots of tea. I felt like a cat. I could do. I think I could do a full blown Friskies commercial. I know how to. I have my meowing down to the tea.

So much tuna, but lots of cashews and almonds and trail mix. I lived off of that stuff. And you have to ration because the premium stuff like that, they give you a limit of how much you can buy of it. Oh, you can’t go buy a case. No, two bags a week of each. So I’d get two of each. Almonds, cashews, trail mix and the peanuts. So I just, you know, ration it through the week. Sometimes dinner for me was half a bag of trail mix and I’d go to sleep because the food was inedible from the kitchen.

Mental Health and Medication

TUCKER CARLSON: Was it hard to sleep?

GEORGE SANTOS: I cried every night. It was not easy. So much so that the prison there, even though other prisons do allow people to stay on their actual medications that they have been treated on for years. I was on Vyvanse for… I have been on Vyvanse, which is an Adderall because I’m ADHD for 22 years, since I’m 15, 37.

These guys took me off Vyvanse cold turkey and literally stuffed me up with an antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. So needless to say, I was kind of zombified.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was that like?

GEORGE SANTOS: No medical care, no health, no mental health care. It’s a complete decay and abandonment.

TUCKER CARLSON: But they will hand you pills.

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, no, no, no, no. They give you the pill. You can’t self medicate.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, of course, but I mean they will give you…

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh yeah, but those pills, they won’t give you what you… They won’t treat you with what you need at that prison for some reason. Although if you look historically even Sam Bankman-Fried when he’s in prison, he’s receiving his Adderall because he’s ADHD, right? He’s still receiving.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not helping him. I talked to him.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. So he’s still jumping around like a meth head.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, I mean, obviously because you take a diagnosis like that and it just exacerbates. I mean, me confinement, the solitary confinement, what it did to me, I wrote three suicide notes.

The Path to Solitary Confinement

TUCKER CARLSON: So can you back up and tell us how you’re working in the prison kitchen? I don’t think you’re starting fistfights in the showers. How do you wind up in solitary confinement for 41 days?

GEORGE SANTOS: So Joe Murray, my attorney, who I adore, good man, great champion for me, I mean, shout out to Joe because what him, Matt, my partner, and my sister Tiffany went to hell and back for me. But Joe really was a driving force. I mean, this man, he texted me. I mean, he did not rest a single day. It was remarkable.

And I have two other attorneys, Andrew and Bobby, who did fantastic work, but really, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight Joe’s efforts. Receives this text message from a journalist, an investigative journalist from Project Veritas, which is an organization I have. I’ve given. I’ve donated to their former outfit. I was very close. So Keith and all of those guys, I didn’t even know Project Veritas was still around. To me, eventually, after Matt Tiermond left, I think after the whole breakup with O’Keefe, it was gone, but apparently it’s still active.

So they get this person, this woman named Patricia. She’s Brazilian. She’s had an obsession with me to a degree that I can’t explain. It’s inexplicable almost to a degree. She has in the past made threats that were deemed uncredible. So she was a non-credible source with these elaborate threats of high power players in D.C. want to kill you because you’re outing about orgies and talking about the D.C. swamp orgies with Theta, the SEC and Congress. And I said, okay, whatever.

Capitol Police looked into it in 2023 when I was a sitting member of Congress. Not credible. She comes back out of the woodworks and I guess convinces Project Veritas on those old texts to be real and adds a new one, dated August 18, saying that we need to take care of Santos in prison. And I’m paraphrasing, you know, essentially, somebody needs to break into prison and kill George Santos, which is, on its face value, ridiculous.

I’ve heard of jailbreaks. I have not heard of in-breaks. So I’m sitting there like, wait, what? So Joe sees this. I’ve been the subject of threats, credible threats, to the point we do have people in prison for trying to kill me today. Reaches out to facility things, you know. Hey, I need you to protect George. I just received this threat. It seems concerning.

The warden’s definition of protective custody because she’s lazy and she’s completely irresponsible with her budget and doesn’t have adequate protective custody, you know, protocols. Does what’s easy and the shortcut, which is toss George Santos in the shoe. Now, I am not there for disciplinary action, but I am subject to only three showers a week. I’m subject to using recycled clothes, meaning I’m using whatever underwear Joe Schmo was using yesterday. Got into the washing machine and it was propped up and given to me. Comes with their… It even comes with complimentary skid marks on them. It’s lovely.

TUCKER CARLSON: So other people’s pubic hair are included.

GEORGE SANTOS: Under trail of uncleaned asses, too. I’m not kidding. This is real. The environment, that takes a lot to…

TUCKER CARLSON: Make me feel nauseous, but that’s repulsive.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s repulsive. That’s the word. It’s repulsive. What they do to you. They give you soap that doesn’t lather, courtesy of Bob Barker’s company called Maximum Security. They give you toothpaste that doesn’t foam when you brush your teeth. Courtesy of Maximum Security. Great government contract. I mean, it’s remarkable. It’s just remarkable.

You lose your privileges to email. You use your privileges to phone calls. I am subject now to one call every 30 days for 15 minutes, and I have to pick who I’m calling. In my family, I don’t get to call five minutes here. But, no, it’s one call period. So this is what she did and then named it in the name of protection.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does it protect you to limit you to three showers a week and make you wear someone else’s dirty boxer shorts?

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, tighty whities. Not boxer shorts. Actually, yeah. Actually, orange, but tighty whities, you know, Fruit of the Loom, old school.

TUCKER CARLSON: Someone else’s orange grape smugglers with someone else’s skid marks in them.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is cruel and unusual protection.

GEORGE SANTOS: No, no, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’d be freestyle. I couldn’t handle it.

GEORGE SANTOS: No, no, no. That is protection under Kelly. Warden Lynn Kelly at FCI Ferreton. How dare you say that’s cruel and unusual? I’m a crybaby. Or as the deputy warden said, I was a princess. “Stop being a princess,” he said to me. Right? So this is real. This is actually real behavior.

And they put you there, give you no information. They peep you so they put you… That’s six by nine. I couldn’t do this without touching the walls. You know, the six, six feet apart. Yeah, I was. If I was really measuring my spread arms distance, I was definitely further than six feet apart from you because I couldn’t do that to the wall.

So again, you drink water out of a toilet, the top of a toilet, which has a metallic taste, and when you put water in it and you let the cup sit, sediments fall, these black sediments fall to the bottom of the cup. This is what they’re putting you through. Now, my neighbor in the cell next to me, a murderer who had just killed another inmate months earlier with a pencil. Granted disciplinary custody. Waiting.

TUCKER CARLSON: A pencil.

GEORGE SANTOS: With a pencil. Stabbing another inmate through the eye with a pencil. This is on the news, by the way. Now, the lovely part about it is this inmate is a true trans inmate who killed another trans inmate who the news reported on as a leader, activist, native trans leader in their community, God knows where, but failed to disclose that he was a vicious child molester. Okay, the one that got killed anyway. Perhaps.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you talk to the pencil killer?

GEORGE SANTOS: I didn’t talk to anybody. There’s no way to talk other than to scream through your doors. And I’m sorry. No, I’m totally fine with screaming in the hall of Congress I’ve done before. People who try to accost me, but not in prison, kept to myself. They would scream at me, they’d curse. They say, “Yeah, Santos, you son of a b. I know you can hear me. Answer me.” And I’m just sitting there minding my business while reading my historical fiction book because I didn’t want it.

Daily Life in Solitary

TUCKER CARLSON: So what do you do all day in solitary?

GEORGE SANTOS: You go crazy. They give you three books a week. An arbitrary number for… I mean, I understand that the reading level of most prisoners aren’t going to be quite high and they’ll probably take a while to read a 300, 400 page book. I was crushing books, you know, 400 page books a day. Sometimes, you know, nothing to do.

I mean, I read a book by Sarah J. Maas, the final installment of her fantasy series called Kingdom of Ash. It’s, I think a thousand pages. I read that in two days. There’s nothing to do. Was it good? It was great. The sad part is there’s eight books that preceded. And I never read them, but the final book was pretty cool. So I was like, okay. I can kind of imagine what happened before because the final book was pretty decent.

TUCKER CARLSON: Lots of mysterious illusions, though. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, no. I mean, you just totally have to pretend you know what you’re reading at. Some certain things are just kind of… But the gist of the book, really good book. I thought it was a really well written book. I got into Conn Iggulden. I don’t know if you know who he is. Very, very good historical fiction writer.

So I am a pro. You can quiz me on Genghis Khan. The Mongol Khan. Yes, everything. All five books in the series. It was amaz… I mean, I almost want to go to Mongolia now to see some of these things because it’s so fascinating and it’s so immersive.

TUCKER CARLSON: Go to Russia and you can see the illegitimate children.

GEORGE SANTOS: Amazing. Oh, sure. I mean, that’s why that… Asia. You’re in Asia. Oh, yeah. Mix, yo.

The War of the Roses and Prison Reading

TUCKER CARLSON: You can see it in their faces.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s amazing. It’s like the Uzbekistanis are kind of like right there. That’s the halfway point where they’re all there. But it’s crazy because I even got into War of the Roses, but from the pretext of Margaret Dianjou, the French queen who was married to King Henry, which was depicted in history as a great manipulator. But these are the books I was reading. I was so damn bored.

TUCKER CARLSON: That sounds fun.

GEORGE SANTOS: It was fun. I will say this: 26 books in 41 days. Amazing. Decent amount. The thing is, I only read that many books because remember that CO I told you about? He’d hook me up. I’d get the three books I was entitled to, but then he’d swap me out within three days for another three. It’s like, but other COs wouldn’t do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want to limit the number of books you can read?

GEORGE SANTOS: This is going to be so funny. I don’t know to the extent of f-bombs I can drop here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Go crazy.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s so funny. So my very first book on Genghis Khan, Lords of the Bow, the first chapter was cut out of the book and somebody wrote in the beginning of the second chapter, “You figure out what happened in the beginning.” So you’re just like, these people really need help.

And then on the very last book of the series, which is Kingdom of Silver, they ripped out the last chapter. “You figure out what happened in the end.” So I was just like, who the f* is in this place? It’s like, it’s madness.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like, well, criminals are there.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, but I get it. But they’re literature criminals. The books had no cover. I mean, it’s like you’re ripped off. It’s very essential. I did do a lot of reading, but it was eccentric reading at best.

But that’s what I did with my days. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was trying to pray because I had a really big awakening, a religious awakening.

Finding God in Solitary Confinement

I’ve strayed so far from the principles and the teachings of my family and literally Jesus Christ and growing up in the Catholic Church. Baptism, communion, confirmation. I mean, all of those things. I’ve strayed so far away from it, and I saw where it landed me.

Because now I can easily tell you this: it is so much easier to walk in your life with a God in it than to ignore it. I mean, it is phenomenal. I have my peace with God. It was, and I’ll tell you the remarkable—

TUCKER CARLSON: How did that happen?

GEORGE SANTOS: I think it was like day 10, and I had already written my first suicide note, and that’s when it—

TUCKER CARLSON: What did you say in your suicide note?

GEORGE SANTOS: I never read it back, Tucker. It’s sitting in a manila envelope in my house. I sealed it, all three of them. And I wrote “shoe records” as something for me to remember how dark it got for me. I don’t think I’m ready today to read it.

I will one day, because I want to. I think I want the world to know what I wrote. Funny enough, the very first one I write it, I’m so angry. My whole preface, and if I could recall without, it’s a blur, right? But the preface was, “I’m going to kill myself just to f* with this warden and put a mess in her hand.”

Look at how desperate I was. I was willing to end my life in my own thoughts to get back at someone who was hurting me. That’s the level of insanity that you—

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I do think most suicide is an act of aggression against others. I mean, that’s pretty common. “I’ll show them” is a common motive.

GEORGE SANTOS: That’s pretty much where I was at. And it gets to a point where after the first one, I said, “What am I doing? I need help.”

And I requested, they make you fill out cop-outs, which is a formal request to staff. So I wrote to the chaplain requesting a Catholic, Roman Catholic Bible and a rosary so I can pray. The warden didn’t approve it. Declined both requests. Till this day, I didn’t get an answer.

I could get all the f*ed up books in the world, but I couldn’t get a Catholic Bible or a rosary. I requested for the visiting priest that comes to do mass at the prison to visit me in the SHU. She didn’t allow it. She denied me the—

TUCKER CARLSON: On what grounds?

GEORGE SANTOS: I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: You weren’t there because you broke the rules. You were there because you’d been threatened.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, you should explain that to her. As I tried to. I said, “This is cruel and unusual.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you going to make sure she loses her job?

Confronting Warden Kelly

GEORGE SANTOS: I told her I had an outburst by about day 35 or 30, somewhere along that range where after all the meandering bullshit of “it’s still under the investigative authorities,” blah, blah, blah.

And it was like, I go into the shoe August 28th. September 23rd, just five days short of a month in, I meet with the FBI. They come to tell me this is not credible. I think it takes five days later, around the 28th, that email is sent to the facility. “Look, we’re referring this to the AUSA. We don’t find this to be credible.”

But the AUSA has to decline to prosecute, right? At that point, the warden had the discretion, total discretion to say, “Okay, I’m sending you back to the camp.” But she chose to let the AUSA do their process, which is fine. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt here.

But she chose, knowing there was no threat, she chose to wait for the official process, even though I had screamed till I was blue in my face that it was not credible. There was a former investigation to the same person with similar allegations, and these were just new trumped up ones that took a process.

And I want to say, oh well, that was, let’s say the 28th, I believe is the day that that email went in. And then by the 7th of October, I was released. A week later or so, I was released back to the camp. And then 10 days later I was sent home.

But she chose to keep me there, in my opinion. Now, one can argue she was following protocol. I think if two federal officers are telling you that it’s not credible and they’ve done all the due diligence on this, I think it’s pretty remarkable that you’re going to wait and extend suffering for somebody for another nine days just because—

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think that was about?

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, I was very critical of her from day one, my very first article. I mean, by the second or third article, I literally, after being there and experiencing the decay in the kitchen, the food issues, the issues with hygiene, the issues with mental health, the issues with medical, the issues with the dorm and sleeping and health in the environment, drugs and not drugs, because I only experienced the drug issues across the street.

So the issue with the lack of humanity and dehumanizing nature of her facility, I wrote that all down on several different penned articles on the South Shore Press, and it got millions of views. She was mad. Now I get it. I mean, hell have no, what is it?

TUCKER CARLSON: Fury, like the warden scorned?

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, I guess. Or I was going to say something a lot—you’re nice. Let’s just say that I was going to be as nice as you are.

But she was mad and she made these choices and she mocked me in the process to a point where I was losing my mind. So they do executive rounds once a week. I won’t say the day, so I don’t compromise a facility. Again, in lieu of not compromising officers and the facility routine, they do rounds once a week in every segment of the facility. So there was the day of the week that they did rounds in the shoe.

Now in the shoe, we’re sitting in our cells and there’s this metal door which is blast proof, heavy as hell, with a little drawer so you can get your trays. And when you got to get out, put your hands backwards through that and get cuffed. And a skinny window about, I want to say 4 inches wide, about 20, 25 inches tall, give or take. They come in and they peep their eye to see if you’re alive, right?

And they’re doing their rounds. And I would always ask. It was around day 30 to 35 or somewhere in between there, I lost my shit. I said, “Why am I still here?” Because now I had already spoken to the FBI. I knew what they were doing. They said that following Monday they would send a letter, in which in fact they did.

So I was furious. And I said, and I quote, “Bitch, you are going to regret f*ing with me.” And I meant that. And I don’t mean it as threatening her, but I’m going to take her to task.

Warden Kelly, Kelly Lynn Kelly will be the face of evil, of rotten, corrupt BOP, if I have it my way. We need to make an example of somebody. Because if we’re going to rehabilitate people in this country, it cannot be in the hands of that woman or people like her.

So let that serve as a warning. If you operate like Warden Kelly does at FCI Fairton, I strongly suggest you f* off. Because I’m going to come for you. I’m going to find you, your prison, I’m going to investigate it and I’m going to work tooth and nail to make these changes.

Because we’re creating more criminals and recidivism is at an all-time high because of how we treat people. We’re not giving people a second chance at life, we’re making them better criminals at that. Or angrier criminals.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And also, you should take care of the people in your care, period. That’s your job, that’s your obligation.

GEORGE SANTOS: The medical care—

TUCKER CARLSON: Treat people with dignity.

GEORGE SANTOS: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

GEORGE SANTOS: So that was a burst which is totally out of character for me too because I’m very non-confrontational individual. So for me to get—

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re finding yourself in lockup.

GEORGE SANTOS: Are you kidding? I mean I found the courage to literally tell somebody who had all the power in the world to crush me further to f* off. So I mean honestly it’s very liberating because I’m a very “yes sir, yes ma’am” type of guy. That’s kind of like my nature.

I’m not violent, I’m not overtly aggressive. I’m kind of mellow. I’m fun fat guy. That’s really my nature. So she pushed all my buttons in general.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you get out of solitary?

Release from the SHU

GEORGE SANTOS: I don’t know. I just know that it’s a great story. That day that I got out, October 7th was the day they were doing executive rounds. So they came. I spoke to three different individuals: the captain, the camp administrator and the SIS, which is the internal investigations guy.

All three of them gave me different answers. I’m not kidding. They all gave me three different answers. And essentially I sat there thinking I’m so f*ed. I got so angry. This was at 9 o’clock in the morning.

Come later that day at around 1, another assistant warden comes by. Actually very straightforward guy. I’m not going to say he’s my favorite. But do you know that guy you don’t like but you appreciate him because he’s straightforward, he’s honest and he tells you exactly how it is?

TUCKER CARLSON: Very much. We need people like that.

The News About Charlie Kirk

GEORGE SANTOS: He’s not kind, but he is direct, doesn’t mince around, doesn’t beat around the bush. He comes and says, “Hey, so here’s the deal. Got an update for you.” I’m like, “What’s up?” He’s like, “Did you hear the news?” I’m like, “No, I heard doom today and three different kinds of doom, so I don’t even know which one to show.”

He’s like, “Ignore all of that. We got the declination to investigate. I believe we’re going to run an internal administrative process. You’re going to go back to the camp.” I said, “When?” He’s like, “Look, it’s Tuesday today. So if they’re really fast, probably by the end of the week. But worst case scenario, beginning of next week.”

I had a grin from ear to ear. Like, oh my God, I got to do at least, maybe at worst, I was like, in my head, at worst, I’ll do another 10 days in here. I can pull this off. I looked at the books I had selected. I’m like, I’ll make that work. I’ll journal some more. I had a plan, like a goal, end in sight.

And then that same day at 2pm when shift changed, the guard comes, bangs on my door and says, “Pack up. You’re getting kicked out.” I’m like, “To where?” And then she’s like, “To the camp, where else?” I’m like, “Oh, lovely.” I mean, don’t say that twice. Thirty minutes later, she was handcuffing me, putting me out of the door so I can go take off the lovely borrowed clothes and put on my actual clothes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You gave back the tighty whitey?

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, totally. They can keep it.

The Worst Part of Solitary

TUCKER CARLSON: So what was the worst part of solitary, would you say? What made it, what made you so desperate to leave?

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, desperate to kill myself.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: The loneliness, the, and the way I was being treated. Yeah. I’ll give you this. Something so bizarre. On September 10, I was sitting in my cell, minding my business, thinking, wow, tomorrow’s 9/11. What a rough day. And I’m sitting here and it’s, I’m from New York. It’s still very much a somber day for New Yorkers.

And a CEO knocks on my door, says, “Hey, do you know, did you know Charlie Kirk?” I’m like, “Yeah, I know Charlie. Charlie’s a fun guy. I’ve met Charlie throughout the years. He’s, no, I like him. I call him a friend.” “No, no, no, you knew him. He was just murdered,” and just walked away.

Now you’re talking to somebody who’s all f*ed up, fifty shades from Tuesday, mentally in a shoe by myself, no one to talk, can’t pick up the phone and make a call to understand what’s going on. And they took glee in my, I was wailing like, “What do you mean? Come back here. How do you tell me this and walk away?” I was like losing it, like losing it.

This is a guy that I’ve always found so inspirational. And I think I said this to you in private once when I was last year. I think he’s going to be a President of the United States. I really thought that. I really thought he’d be one of a future president of this country. I mean, he had a message, had a purpose and he was good. And quite frankly, you can call him a little antagonistic, but who isn’t these days?

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

GEORGE SANTOS: And I love the guy. I think he had a great message of God, freedom. I mean, what else can you expect from somebody, right? And the way it was delivered, it was so rough and that didn’t help.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did you get more information about it?

GEORGE SANTOS: I didn’t. So the nice CEO I’m telling you about, the two of them, I asked them to look into it. They’re not really tuned into politics, but they did some research and they would, on a day to day, they’d give me like play by play of what they had read.

When I say these guys were top notch, phenomenal human beings, I mean top notch phenomenal human beings. They gave me play by play. They told me about the memorial, they told me about the attendance that President Trump spoke, that he was getting awarded the medal of freedom. I knew all of that through the accounts of these two COs that I really hope that in my life I cross paths with them one day because I’d love to thank them appropriately, like a proper thank you for not treating me like a subhuman piece of trash.

Because they were the only two. Everyone else, I was nothing but another number and being treated in certain instances quite, you know, bad. Bad. I struggle to find the words because, you know, this facility declined a visit from my family. My partner and my aunt drove three and a half hours each way to go see me. Got there and said, “No, no, you can’t see him today,” even though it was visitation day.

But they created, what grounds? They created an arbitrary rule. They had not registered, although they were approved and cleared and had visited me in the camp now across the street. It’s a whole new protocol. I mean, it’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: They just kill you with bureaucracy.

GEORGE SANTOS: They just make s* up as they go. It’s infuriating. Like, literally, there’s no oversight.

TUCKER CARLSON: It sounds like there’s no oversight.

GEORGE SANTOS: The wardens create own little kingdoms, and they rule as little monarchs with no real oversight. Because here’s the oversight process. Whenever they’re going to be inspected or receive a visit, they clean everything up. They put makeup on everything. So when you come down doing that visit, it’s, you know, you got to do surprise visits on these people.

You really want to see how the house is being run. You can’t say that the cat’s coming to town. The mice are going to run away. You got to let the cat show up and be like, surprise. Because the way they do it is just, it’s, it’s.

The Vibe Shift and Getting Out

TUCKER CARLSON: So how did you get out exactly? Can I say one thing before you explain? There was a vibe shift, which you weren’t here to see, but you went from being, you know, widely reviled, all these members of Congress denouncing you, everyone making fun of you, to, once you went to prison, there was a sense that, like, wait, what’s George Santos doing in prison? And it was wild to see it.

Tim Burchett, your friend, Congressman, good man from Tennessee, kind of led the charge on your behalf, but there were a lot of sympathetic ears.

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, look, it was wild.

TUCKER CARLSON: He became more popular, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. You became more popular in prison.

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, look. Hey, never let a good crisis go to waste. Isn’t that the same D.C.? But I’ll say this from, from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s a dear friend, to Tim Burchett, who’s another dear friend. Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina, Matt Gaetz. Yeah, these guys really came like they batted.

TUCKER CARLSON: Named all the outlaws, by the way.

GEORGE SANTOS: That’s fine. I mean, I’m in the book.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean that as a compliment.

GEORGE SANTOS: No, it’s like we’re all in the Outlaws book.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s true.

GEORGE SANTOS: They all.

TUCKER CARLSON: All those people have a shot of joining you someday in the camp.

GEORGE SANTOS: I hope not. No, I hope. Oh, gosh.

TUCKER CARLSON: I shouldn’t even say that. I hope not, too, but.

GEORGE SANTOS: So how did you get out? I don’t know till this day. What was the determination? I do know this. I know that that same day I had a legal call with Joe, my attorney, after I got the three different, like, nonsensical BS and Joe literally said, “I’m working. I’m fixing this.”

I don’t know what Joe did, but I will say this. He called everyone and their mother, and he made sure that they knew that the letter is out. And the warden is still not being straightforward and forthcoming. And all I know is that within a matter of hours, it went from 1pm saying I’d get out at some point, the end of the week or next week at best, at worst case, to an hour later saying, goodbye, go back to the camp.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

Back at the Camp

GEORGE SANTOS: And it was quite an adjustment. You know, there’s this, it’s perverse, the lack of mental health care they give you. They have three psychologists in which they should have six. They have no psychiatrist, so they have no prescribing mental health provider. So psychologists give referrals to a physician, which is wild in the standards of mental health, especially when you’re dealing with people who are incarcerated, which, guess what?

But a lot of them are there because of mental health issues. I believe it, you know, like, poor judgment and mental health issues are really what lead to people being incarcerated, but there’s really no treatment for that.

And I get put back in the camp. I couldn’t sleep the first three nights. They say, totally messed up, but that’s fine. At least I’m in the camp. I get to go outside. I get to call my family. I mean, in the first day, we get allotted 510 minutes a month to make phone calls. In my very first day, when I had access my phone, I called 120 minutes to my family.

I couldn’t stop calling. I would call, wait 30 minutes, take another call to someone else. I was just like, couldn’t stop calling. I needed to talk to people. I needed to know they were okay. It’s like the anguish of not knowing. I’m a family guy through and through. And the anguish of not knowing what was going on was killing me. Like, pulling limb from limb inside of me.

And I got out, and I’m sitting in the camp now. Here’s a wild story for you. Thursday, October 16th. We had the visiting priest. I got ready. We went to Mass. I got there. He looked at me and says, “You’re back. Would you like to do confession?” Because he knew I was in solitary. So I said, “You do confession?”

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s like, “Of course.”

GEORGE SANTOS: I’m like, “I’d love to. Do you have the time?” And he’s like, “I’m sure it can’t be that bad.” So very friendly priest. And I took a liking to him. He’s a Jersey guy through and through. No nonsense kind of guy. Like he does not accept nonsense, right? Really rough, old school Catholic priest. And I said, “Oh, I like this guy.”

So we sit down. It’s still a lengthy confession. Took almost an hour.

TUCKER CARLSON: She got pretty detailed.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, I mean, mortal sin’s a mortal sin. So you got to go one by one. You can’t just, just be, you know, I’m with you. You can’t just do an over cap or a review.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet naughty doesn’t surprise you.

Confession and Resolve

GEORGE SANTOS: Oh, “Priest, I’ve been so naughty.” “You know how mortal sins work, right? You need to tell me in great detail.” I’m like, “Okay,” it’s almost like gossip at that point.

But I sat there, I go through this process that I had not done in at least two years, or if not more, it felt great. I go to mass, I take communion, and then we do a rosary at the end. And it was just so nice. I left that feeling like I had squared away a large part of my life. And it just felt good. So good.

I woke up the next day. I had this immense resolve on October 17 that everything would be okay. That even if I had to sit there for seven years, I would be okay. I would not be in pain, I would not be in anguish. I was ready for whatever the road ahead was.

So much so that we had something called coffee club that Sam Mealy started, my former employee. And we would just wake up at 7 o’clock. A lot of us woke up early, but at 7 o’clock we would all meet in the library with coffee or tea. I’m a tea guy. And you know, coffee cake or whatever it is, the cakes that, you know, Sam was hoarding for coffee club from everybody’s breakfast bags that didn’t want them.

And we’d sit there every morning, a group of like five of us, everybody was welcome to come, but only five people or so would show up. You can’t even get prisoners to show up. Trust me. They have no options to do anything else. But they still don’t show up to stuff when it’s available.

So we sat there and I said to him, “Dude, I feel so good.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I woke up feeling this resolve, like it’s all going to be okay.” And he’s like, “Well, that’s good. But, you know, it’s strange at the same time,” which it is. You’re in prison, you’re not supposed to feel that way. We had this conversation, which sounds supernatural, very like, I felt comfortable saying it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

Finding Out About the Commutation

And it felt good to say it. And I did my prayer, and then I get called in the PA and then everybody kind of stiffens, like, oh, my God. I’m like, oh, please don’t let it mean me going back to the shoe. Because that’s how initially it was. I was called in the PA and they’re like, oh, you got to be seen at the J building, which is a facility building. And I never came back, right. 41 days later.

So I stiffened and I said, well, God’s on my side. I don’t care. I confidently marched to go see what it was. Turns out it was a subpoena from Congress that Tim Burchett and Lauren Boebert had sent to the facility for me and the warden to go testify to the oversight committee under the conditions of my imprisonment. And I had to sign and agree for acceptance.

TUCKER CARLSON: Must hate you, I got to tell you. I know that’s still happening too, so.

GEORGE SANTOS: And it’s funny because as I’m reading this, the camp case manager goes to me, you sure you want to do this? I think it’s a good idea. I’m like, oh, it’s a great idea. He’s like, you might want to fly under the radar. I’m like, no, I don’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: How’s that working for you?

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean, no one. And I signed it. I consent. I did all the paperwork and I left with the grin from his office. From ear to ear, went to my friends, the coffee. I was like, what happened? I’m like, I just got subpoena to go to Congress. They’re like, what? I’m like, I’m freaking making changes from in here. Like, I was just like, I have a date with this bitch in Congress. That’s my ground. That’s my turf.

And I’m in my head. I’m like, oh, Kelly, you have no idea what you just got yourself into. And I was so happy about it because it’s about fairness for me. And I just proceeded my day, right? So walking the track. Played a little ping pong on this really, at best, makeshift ping pong table. Like, I had a normal day, read a little bit of my book called Home.

So it’s around 6 o’clock. We got our commissary sheet. So I was, you know, budgeting, figuring out what I need to do, and I’m filling it out in this computer room where we have our computers to do our core links, communications with our family. The light there is a lot brighter. I’m getting, my glasses suck. And I needed bright lights.

So I’m filling this commissary sheet out and an inmate comes in like, oh, you were just on TV. I’m like, I don’t care. I don’t really pay attention to me on TV. It’s, they’re always shitting on me or whatever. So uninterested.

In about 30 minutes later, the entire cafeteria erupted in that son of a bitch. Where the f is Santos? Santos, come over, you motherfer. You are holding out on us. You going home? I’m like, what? Like, what’s going on? So I go out, I’m like, stop. You guys are misunderstanding this. And the chiron on MSNBC says disgraced former Rep. George Santos commuted, soon to be released according to Trump.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was the first you heard?

GEORGE SANTOS: That was the first I heard.

TUCKER CARLSON: Nobody told you this was coming?

GEORGE SANTOS: No, nobody knew that day. Nobody knew.

TUCKER CARLSON: You heard the news in the commissary from MSNBC?

GEORGE SANTOS: From MSNBC.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are they playing MSNBC?

The Black TV and MSNBC

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, there’s, like I said, there’s the black TV and they particularly like watching TV.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah. If it’s either not on BET or on like a movie channel with like awful B rated movies, it’s on MSNBC, that TV.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s where the audience is. Because I wondered that who watches?

GEORGE SANTOS: So it’s prison, but only on the black TV. I guess so. Wow. The white TV remarkably stays a lot on Fox, by the way.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not surprised.

GEORGE SANTOS: I was not shocked either. There was like a debate about where I should watch TV and where’d the Spanish TV go. Spanish TV usually stayed either on Telemundo or Univision. Like very, very Hispanic. Wow. Rarely did it go anywhere else other than those two channels.

So I’m sitting there looking at this chiron for a split second. I’m like, apoplectic, like, what? But nobody told me anything. Somebody should have called me. And then I think I’m like, wait, nobody can make an inbound call. So I run to the emails. There’s nothing there because the emails take about an hour and a half to get to you of a delay because it needs to be vetted through security.

So if you sent me something an hour and a half before I get it, and then if I send your response another hour and a half before you get it, because everything is monitored. And I can understand that because of criminal conduct and activity. After all, you’re monitoring criminals, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a prison.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah, so it’s a prison. So I just, I was, I didn’t know what to do. So I called home, I called my partner, I called Matt, like, Matt, what’s going on? He’s like hysterical. Like, I just spoke to President Trump. It’s over, I’m coming to pick you up. I’m like, what do you mean you spoke to President Trump? I didn’t even think about going. I’m like, he called you? I was like, absolutely nuts about it. Like, wait, President Trump called Matt before he called me?

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you were in prison.

GEORGE SANTOS: Kind of hard to get in touch. I’m mad that he got the phone call first. So I hang up the phone and Tucker, I break down. I mean, I couldn’t stop. It was like an out. I was ugly, snotty, crying in that phone stall, head down, like, my head, and all these thoughts inundated my body, my soul. I’m going home.

And it was just, I didn’t know this was going to happen. I had really made peace with the fact that this was my predicament just that morning. Yeah. And to tell me that there is no divine intervention in this, I will never accept that. Because there was no palpable appetite to give me clemency according to every single person I had spoken to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

Divine Intervention

GEORGE SANTOS: And the day after I go to confession and I square away my quarrels and my pendencies with Jesus Christ, I get commuted by President Trump. I mean, I am forever humbled to the President. It’s a remarkable story. And I don’t believe, I don’t do coincidences anymore. No, of course, this was proof if I ever needed proof. God’s in your life. If you really make your pledge to him, this was it.

I needed this, probably. And I’m not saying because it’s so self serving. No, he purposely said, you do right by me, I’m giving you a second chance.

TUCKER CARLSON: The second you just surrendered to it.

GEORGE SANTOS: I just resolved. I just could not. There was nothing else to do. I mean, I think I cried all the tears that I had for the rest of the year. That hour, it was.

TUCKER CARLSON: So how long was it till you got out?

GEORGE SANTOS: So that was around 6, 6:30ish. Right. When I called home, it was 11:30. I was. That night.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were out that night?

GEORGE SANTOS: 11:30, I was walking out and my phone came in the car and I was already dialing, like the first call I made was Marjorie Taylor Greene, at the assistance of Matt, who was prolific on Call Marjorie. I want people to know this because it’s important to me. I used to say that if you want a friend in DC, get a dog, not realizing I actually had real friends, because it’s, you measure a friendship not on how much you see one another, because we all have busy lives.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.

GEORGE SANTOS: You measure a friend on when you’re in your worst and how they come through for you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Loyalty. Exactly.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Loyalty

GEORGE SANTOS: She was on the phone with Matt every single day, checking in to see how he was doing, giving him updates, talking to my sister, literally. She didn’t have to do that. She yielded nothing from moment. This is a woman who will go out of her way for her friends and for what she believes in. And it pains me to see that so many people want to attack her. Now I can understand politics.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why are they attacking Marjorie? I don’t understand.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s been 11 days, and I still haven’t wrapped my head around it. But I’ll say this. There’s no bigger supporter of President Trump that I served with, and I’m saying this to the detriment of getting other colleagues and friends of mine mad at me, but there was no bigger loyalist to President Trump than Marjorie Taylor Greene in my time in Congress.

I’ve known her since 2020, and I can tell you with good faith, she is a loyal soldier. She means well and she wants the best for our country no matter what. And I think that to conflate that with any other issues that you might want to find a singularity with her. It is your problem, not her problem. So I say not in it for herself. It’s a you problem, not a her problem. And I just want to the record to reflect.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you for saying that. No, it’s important to me. Just because I know so many members of Congress and she’s in the tiny, tiny, tiny handful. I respect and love as people. And she’s just a really great person. Like, I really think a lot of her.

GEORGE SANTOS: I say it. She played therapist, best friend, mother, all of those roles to my family. And for that, I’m forever indebted because you can only dream of having that level of friendship with someone in your darkest moments, when you’re absent from your family and someone steps in and takes a position of counseling and consoling your family, that’s a true friend. Everything else is garbage. And that’s wealth.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s amazing.

GEORGE SANTOS: Material wealth isn’t wealth. I learned it’s in prison. Watches, jewelry, all of that stuff. Nice cars, flashy homes. It’s not wealth, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: Doesn’t mean.

GEORGE SANTOS: Doesn’t mean crap.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep, I agree.

Real Wealth

GEORGE SANTOS: Wealth, your family, your friends, your health, that’s real wealth. And I want to measure my wealth that way moving forward because there’s no point in measuring it the way I used to measure it in prison was.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing for you, as much suffering as you went through, it sounds.

GEORGE SANTOS: Like it was transformative. It was absolutely a wake up call. It gave me everything I needed. To look into the mirror and look at the man staring back to realize you’re in trouble. You’ve done A, B, C, D, E, F, G wrong and wow, that’s the.

TUCKER CARLSON: Beginning of wisdom and freedom.

GEORGE SANTOS: That’s the point. I feel for the first time in my life free. Free of. I have no reservations to what I’ll say. I have no reservations of what I care, of what society thinks of me. And I don’t want to fit your social normative, whatever bullshit. I want to embrace the better parts of life.

And those to me are my family, my friends, my health, my pets. That’s what I don’t care. I don’t need to live in the most beautiful house at the most beautiful curb appeal. I don’t have to drive the nicest cars. I don’t have to have the fanciest shoes or none of that matters. I lost complete and total interest after being encapsulated and captured by the consumer mind virus of I must buy the whatever couture and I have to have the two $3,000 suits and the 800. The f* are we doing? I agree.

It’s like so sobering. It’s almost like as if I’ve lived drunk my entire life and I became sober for the first time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you sure you weren’t in a monastery? Are you sure it was prison?

GEORGE SANTOS: I’m telling you, so cleansing. I’m telling you it was cleansing. It was. I feel. I wake up every day. I’ve now reassumed my position of going to mass every Sunday. It’s been two Sundays. I’m out. I’m at mass. The priest is apoplectic that he sees me there. I’m singing, I’m praying as loud as the 80 little 80 year old Bible thumper next to me.

I am, I am proud to be there. I am proud to literally partake in what I believe saved my life. And I will forever do it. I will forever.

TUCKER CARLSON: Making me emotional. No, it’s beautiful.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s just absolutely bizarre. Like, all it took was you falling. That you have to hit rock bottom sometimes. Yes. In order to realize what you have.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

Finding Gratitude in Rock Bottom

GEORGE SANTOS: And I thank God, and I thank God profoundly for letting me hit rock bottom. Because if not, I would still be spiraling out of absolute control in a ball of chaos like I was prior to going to prison. I’ve been there.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is. What an amazing story. So where did you go your first night home?

GEORGE SANTOS: I went home. I slept in my bed. I took a shower. An hour long shower with no flip flops. No concerns of the soap falling on the dirty floor. Actual shampoo and all.

I put on every cosmetic product I had in the bathroom. Oh, it’s just a face scrub. Body scrub. I had the loofah going on. I was like, I need to do everything in here. It just felt so liberating.

And I cried in the shower. And it wasn’t tears of pain, it was tears of joy. The simplest thing. A shower. A shower. And then what do I want to eat? Eat sushi.

The next day I woke up, I said, I need to have sushi. I need guarantees that I’m eating something that was barely dead before I consumed it because I was so tired.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not expired, frozen.

GEORGE SANTOS: Expired. I couldn’t do it anymore, so I said, I need sushi. So we got really good sushi, had a great time, and I’ve been non stop, believe it or not.

It’s been as if I’ve never left almost because you go right into the media cycle and you’re traveling and you’re talking and you’re doing these interviews, but this is the first long format interview I do.

And I reserved it for you because I thought it was appropriate. When I spoke to your booker and your staff, I said yes right away because I said I finished all of it at Tucker. I gave you the last word and I only thought it’d be great to give you the first word.

Long format, because you can do five, six, seven minute hits. You know what they’re like. You don’t get anything out of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you can’t tell the story. And I just, I know I just, I said this at the beginning, but I just didn’t think we were going to see you for years.

The Blessing and the Curse

GEORGE SANTOS: The fact that it’s not seven years later. So I guess there’s something to be said from 84, 80, from 87 months to 84 days. But I can tell you the 84 days made such a difference.

Mainly the torturous nature of isolation and the dehumanizing nature of which I was treated really put my entire life back into perspective for me. It’s almost as if it was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but at the same time worked almost as a blessing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I believe that.

GEORGE SANTOS: And I live in the in between gray, trying to figure out if I hate it or I love it. And I don’t know yet. Maybe with throughout the years I’ll figure that out. But I still resent it very much.

And it brings me great pause when I think of the following. If they can do this to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly. That’s exactly right.

GEORGE SANTOS: If they can do this to me, no, imagine what other people are. So I thought.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve been thinking that through your entire narrative. You know, you’re a very famous person, member of Congress, know everybody, obviously highly motivated, very resistant to being bossed around. So you’re like their nightmare, and they still treated you this way. Imagine if you were just some guy.

GEORGE SANTOS: I mean, imagine the horror stories. Now it puts into perspective that I’ve always listened to two. I’m very guilty of this. Every time I’ve ever word the words, oh, we need prison reform. Like, who cares? It’s a bunch of prisoners. Exactly. It’s a bunch of criminals.

Who cares? They should be thankful they’re not dead. We should give them the chair. I would say outrageous things like that. And now I sit here and I think, wow, now I understand what they were talking about. And we can’t discount people’s pain and suffering.

A Pro-Life Stance on All Life

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally agree. And it’s not a liberal position, it’s a Christian position. And you have to treat people with dignity, even wrongdoers. And by the way, we’re all wrongdoers if we’re going to be honest about it.

GEORGE SANTOS: You know what my stance is? I’m pro life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: Not just. Not just for the unborn.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

GEORGE SANTOS: I disagree with death sentences and a lot of people get on me for that. If I disagree with ending the life of a unborn child, what makes you think I’m going to agree with taking the life of a fully developed human?

I believe in punishment. I believe in incarceration. I believe if you kill, you know, you are a danger to society. You should be put away. But I don’t think you should.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the point. We’re not allowed to kill.

GEORGE SANTOS: We’re not supposed to kill.

TUCKER CARLSON: We are not.

GEORGE SANTOS: No. And we need to end the practices of death penalty, in my opinion. And the culture needs to be revisited. It really does.

Coming Back to a Changed Country

TUCKER CARLSON: People like objects. No, I completely, vehemently agree with you. So what, so you were out of circulation for a while. You’re obviously very connected and on everything in normal life, then you’re just off grid, literally in the shoe.

What did you notice about the changes that took place in the months that you were gone? Did you notice a different country when you get back?

GEORGE SANTOS: Totally. I’m still trying to struggle with two things, really. Two very big things. I left and we were celebrating President Trump. And now I come back, there’s this weird segment of social media who are all these conservative influencers taking dunks on the president, which I’m super lost at.

And it all spans from Israel and Palestine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, it does.

GEORGE SANTOS: And I look at that. I’m pretty Zion. I’m pretty prolific Zionist. Okay. But I’ve also learned throughout the last few months that I don’t want my president to be at the mercy of a prime minister who is toxic and causing great pain to our country.

Now, because President Trump goes out there, puts his neck on the line, does an amazing, formidable peace deal. Amazing. Something extraordinary. I mean, the man deserves a Nobel Prize. I don’t care what anybody says. I don’t care what the liberal bench of the Nobel Prize association, or whatever you call them things.

The reality is Donald Trump is a peace president. He wants to broker deals of peace and end war. He does. This extraordinary measure is now working towards putting the conflict of Ukraine, Russia to an end. Hopefully, we can achieve that.

Only to see that people like Bibi Netanyahu are sabotaging that. I’m concerned. It’s shocking. It’s shocking because he should be grateful because President Trump is going out of his way, doing a formidable job.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: And this is how you repay him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Spending all this time, all this money, trying to fix other people’s problems is.

Rethinking Israel and Netanyahu

GEORGE SANTOS: A commodity that not a lot of us can afford. So I have have to come to realization. Despite being a staunch defender of Israel and the Jewish people and their right to exist and their right to be in Israel, I, at the same time now live in a place where I think it’s time Bibi move on.

He has become toxic. He has become pretty much the merchant of death, almost the face of it on both sides. Every Israeli soldier and family and every Palestinian soldier and Hamas terrorist and family. Although I’m not too sympathetic for the terrorists, quite frankly.

The only good terrorists alive. The only good terrorists in my world are the ones that are not alive, even though I have this profound opinion of death and life and that we should not kill. But there’s a special place in hell for terrorists, let’s just put it that way.

Especially after what I saw when I was in Congress after the initial October 7th attack. The video. I’m sure you saw the video, the baby. And that stayed in my nightmares for quite some time.

So every single death at this point, I think, is easily being attributed to Bibi because he is overstepped.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: And in two months and a half that I’ve been gone, it gave me so much clarity, because I was out of the rhetoric machine, I was out of the spin room. And I’m just like, my president is going to bat for a man that is not being forthcoming with him at all. At all. Humiliating.

And, you know, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I’m very protective of my country. I’m very protective of President Trump because President Trump is somebody, and everybody is saying, oh, you’re going to now simp for him.

I’m sorry. I’ve been simping, whatever that means for Trump since 2015, since he came down to Golden Escalators. Stop. You’re barking up the wrong tree. I am a big fan.

There’s very little he can do at this point, and I mean, very little he can do that would make me not like him. I mean, I don’t think there’s a lot he can’t. If he kills somebody, depending on who it is, I might be like, well, that person had it coming. I’m kidding. I’m not there yet.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. But watching someone you love and admire to whom you’re grateful, Trump mistreated by an ungrateful foreigner whose salary we pay is beyond.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s just, it’s gotten to a point where I, and then there’s also this other aspect of this, which is anybody who says what I’m saying now gets accused of being on the Qatari payroll. So I’m sure, By the way, Mr. Santos, by the way, the check has not hit my mailbox. So it’s like, at this point, I.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, well, tell me about it.

GEORGE SANTOS: The second thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The State of the Country and New York

GEORGE SANTOS: To really bring it to perspective is what are we doing in this country to really fix anything? The government shut down. Schumer won’t. Schumer wants to make this the Republican shutdown so bad it’s almost like Gretchen Wein in Mean Girls trying to make Fetch happen. It ain’t going to happen. It’s not going to happen.

So I don’t know how so much has changed in two and a half months, but I’m here. I’m literally living an existential crisis in my life right now in New York City. I’m at the precipice of having a actual dangerous man become the mayor of the largest city in the country that is responsible for 10% of the American GDP.

Become mayor of a $118 billion annual budget. We’re leaving. By all barometers. I mean, do you know how I check out? My barometers are not polls anymore. I just go to Poly Market.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

GEORGE SANTOS: When you look at Poly Market, and it’s a 93% chance that this Mandami guy is going to win. Let me tell you something, thing. Mandami is the next mayor of New York City. There’s no wishful thinking.

There’s no sensational ads or sensational headlines on the New York Post that are going to say, Cuomo eats 10% of Mandami’s lead. Narrowing the gap. Hello. Wake up. It’s over.

I’ve learned this throughout the last year. I have yet to see Polymarket get something wrong. And when I see something like that, it’s over. So, so I’m, and I don’t get paid by them to say that, by the way. I’m just making this very clear. It is over. It’s cooked.

So I look at this, and you’re leaving New York. Oh, it’s over. I had 37 years. New York City resident. Born and raised in Queens, New York City. I have lived in various parts of Queens throughout my life, but I’m originally from Jackson Heights, Queens. Proud of it.

My aunt still lives there. She’s lived there for 40 years. My dad still lives there. He’s lived there for 40 years. I have no desire whatsoever to stay in New York City or New York State at that, because it doesn’t matter if you’re fleeing the insanity of a madman in the city.

When you have, I, I, I lose the words to describe our governor. So I’ll just leave it at. You have literally two Looney Tunes running the state and the city.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

Leaving New York

GEORGE SANTOS: Where do you go? I’m not staying there. So I’m so happy we’re leaving. I mean, I’m literally actively packing. Packing. We’re packing. We already know where we’re going. We’re.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re leaving the state.

GEORGE SANTOS: We’re totally leaving the state. We’re going down south. We’re leaving the state. There’s nothing left for me there at all. It’s shocking. And I love New York. New York. Yeah. My image is largely tied to being a New Yorker. You know, tell it how it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re offended to go to prison in New Jersey.

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what a New Yorker you are. You’re like a bridge and tunnel prisoner.

New York’s Future and Corporate Exodus

GEORGE SANTOS: Yeah, I’m still offended that he sent me to Jersey. I should have gone to Otisville. But my point is, this is how serious it is to me. So this is another big change. It’s an existential one for me. I’m uprooting my life. I’m moving far away from my family because, I mean, my poor aunt, she just retired. She set up. She’s well retired, so there’s no point in her moving. My dad’s about to retire in two years. There’s no point in him getting up to move. They’re rooted there. I’m not. I’m 37. I’ll put my roots elsewhere. I’ll uproot it. I don’t care.

And it’s not a place to raise a family. We’re looking to adopt kids next year because we think it’s time to help kids who are abandoned in foster care. Let’s adopt two kids, give them a life, put them through school, give them whatever they want, education, give them a fair shake instead of letting them become a statistic. But I don’t want them to grow up in a place like New York City.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think is going to happen to New York?

GEORGE SANTOS: At first, there’s going to be the sticker shock of taxes being raised on the wealthy. But he’s categorizing the wealthy as people who make over $400,000 a year, which in New York net you’re making about $270,000. And then about 40% of that goes to housing, lodging costs, whether rent or mortgage, whatever that makeup is. You’re not really wealthy.

Now you’re going to pay an additional 1% so that we can have inefficient free buses, because they’re not going to get better because they’re free. They’re just going to get worse, in my opinion. And that’s going to be the start.

Then you have John Catsimatidis, who’s a prolific businessman in New York City, who’s made it abundantly clear he’s going to take his Red Apple Group and dip from New York, and along with it he’s going to close his historic grocery chain because he can’t compete. Gristedes can’t compete with a city-owned supermarket. There’s just no way. So what’s the point? So there goes countless jobs.

You’re going to see every single major corporation start uprooting out of New York. Pretty soon you’re going to leave the stock exchange to the dust mites and whoever dares venture into the city. Just remember, Ken Griffin picked up and left Chicago and took Citadel with him.

TUCKER CARLSON: To Florida, and they yelled at him but he went anyway.

Corporate Flight and Economic Warning Signs

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, guess what? JB Pritzker can be fat and loud and a billionaire, but he doesn’t tell what other people do with their businesses. So when you see an example of that happening in Chicago with Ken Griffin, it should raise flags.

Goldman Sachs moved GSAM, their asset management division, all but their retail-facing people out of New York to Brickell, Florida. That division, the only people who stayed in New York of their main, the heart of Goldman Sachs, which is GSAM, their asset management division, it’s mainly the frontline people who stay, the people who have the day-to-day, because the wealth is still in New York today. It’s still there, but the operations end of it is in Brickell largely.

When you see these moves being made and you still want to talk about raising the corporate tax by 2%, you’re either dumb, deaf, blind, or all of the above, because there’s just no way you think people are going to stay, and corporations are going to be beholden to stay in the state of New York if you make it even less business-friendly.

We have had a net loss of over 600,000 people in the course of the last five years in New York State. We’re a large exporter of out-migration from the state. Lee Zeldin could have been governor if it wasn’t for the 400,000 people who at that point in 2022 had fled to Florida due to the pandemic. He almost did it. He got that close.

We have Elise Stefanik, who’s a phenomenal congresswoman who has a shot. But I fear that with this out-migration that’s going to occur after this administration, it might hurt our electability, unless Democrats finally see they messed up and they actually give it.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’ll never do. No one ever apologizes for anything. It just keeps moving in that direction.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s remarkable. New York City is going to become Gotham, and I’m not willing to be the Penguin. You can go be Batman.

Transformation Through Suffering

TUCKER CARLSON: George Santos, this story ended in a way I could never have predicted, but so much better than I ever would have hoped. And just what a blessing. And you seem like a man transformed through suffering.

GEORGE SANTOS: Well, it’s not the easiest way to transform.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s the only way.

GEORGE SANTOS: It’s the only way. Yeah. And you know what, it paid off in a weird way at the end. And I’m grateful, thanks to God and thanks to President Trump and to everybody who helped and walked that long path with me. And it’s great to be here with you. Amen. Thank you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Great to see you. Good to see you.

GEORGE SANTOS: Thank you.

Related Posts

• Daniel Davis: Iran Reopens the Strait of Hormuz (Transcript)
• Tucker Carlson Show: w/ Russell Brand (Transcript)
• Transcript: Denmark and the Future of NATO: What Comes Next for Western Security? @ Today’s Battlegrounds
• Transcript: President Trump Remarks on Tax Week in Las Vegas – April 16, 2026
• Transcript: The Real Puppet Masters of America – Tulsi Gabbard @ Modern Wisdom