Representative George Santos has spent his campaign money in plenty of conspicuous ways, from lavish hotel stays in Las Vegas and Palm Beach, Fla., to an unusual slew of payments for exactly $199.99 — two cents below the threshold where receipts would be required.
But deep within Mr. Santos’s campaign filings, The New York Times found another eye-catching number: $365,399.08 in unexplained spending, with no record of where it went or for what purpose.
The mysterious expenditures, which list no recipient and offer no receipts, account for nearly 12 percent of the Santos campaign’s total reported expenses — many times exceeding what is typical for congressional candidates. Fellow New York House members, for example, failed to itemize between zero and 2 percent of their expenses this past cycle.
Without explanations for each expenditure in the reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, it’s impossible to determine if Mr. Santos spent campaign funds on legitimate election-related purposes.
Election law experts said that the $365,000 in unexplained expenses was not necessarily illegal but suggested a pattern of remarkable sloppiness, if not an attempt to cover up improper spending that violated campaign finance laws.
The unexplained spending is among a litany of irregularities found in nearly every aspect of how the Santos campaign handled its finances, The Times found.