After being elected to Congress years later, he acknowledged that he never worked for the financial firm.īut Trelha tells a different story in his declaration, saying Santos 'stole' money that Trelha's family had sent for bail, and he portrayed Santos as the brains of the operation. Santos described himself as a family friend, and claimed to the judge that he was an aspiring politician who worked for the investment firm Goldman Sachs. An attorney for Santos did not reply when asked about Trelha's declaration.Īt a bail hearing for Trelha in May 2017, Santos traveled to Washington State and appeared on Trelha's behalf. Santos was neither charged nor named a suspect in the investigation. Santos was questioned by phone by a Seattle detective, according to a law enforcement source, and later tracked down in New York City by Secret Service agents, turning over two cellphones during an interview there according to the two sources familiar with the federal investigation. The Secret Service is the federal agency charged with investigating credit and bank card fraud. The night of his arrest, investigators recovered an empty FedEx package bearing the address of Santos' Florida apartment from Trelha's rental car, leading investigators separately from two agencies, the Seattle Police Department and the Secret Service, to Santos. Trelha was arrested at Seattle's Pike Place Market in 2017 and later that year entered a guilty plea to one federal count of felony access device fraud and was deported to his native Brazil.

The declaration was sent by an attorney for Trelha to the Secret Service, a U.S. 'I am coming forward today to declare that the person in charge of the crime of credit card fraud when I was arrested was George Santos / Anthony Devolder,' Trelha wrote in the declaration, referring to a name Santos used in the past.

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