Former Santos Treasurer Nancy Marks Pleads Guilty to Campaign Finance Schemes – Mother Jones

On Thursday afternoon, Nancy Marks, the former campaign treasurer for Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to defraud the United States. As part of her plea, Marks admitted to helping to craft a fake campaign donor scheme—an operation first reported by Mother Jones in February. Prosecutors allege that Santos played an essential role in that plan.

As Mother Jones reported, Santos’ campaign appeared to have listed more than a dozen major fake donations during his first run for office. A follow-up story showed that Santos’ campaign had falsely claimed that one of his relatives made a $5,800 contribution—the legal maximum at that time—to his 2022 campaign. 

Marks admitted on Thursday to listing fake donations to the 2022 campaign. The goal of the scheme was to attract more support from national Republicans by making it seem that Santos had raised more money than he had.

Prosecutors allege that the congressman helped execute the plan and referred to Santos as “Co-Conspirator #1” in the criminal information they filed in the Marks case. “Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS agreed to falsely report to the FEC that family members of Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS had made significant financial contributions to the Campaign Committee,” the document says, “when Co-Conspirator #1 and MARKS both knew that these individuals had not made the reported contributions.”

Marks stopped serving as Santos’ treasurer in January. Since then, Santos has tried to blame Marks for the false statements within his campaign finance reports, saying that his “former fiduciary went rogue.”

In May, Santos pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges. But that indictment largely side-stepped Santos’ highly suspicious campaign finance practices. With Marks’ plea agreement, Santos could face additional charges in a superseding indictment. The information filed in her case maintains that Marks was not working alone.

Until Thursday it remained a mystery how Santos could have obtained the more than $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his most recent campaign. Prosecutors allege that both Santos and Marks knew that a $500,000 loan the campaign reported receiving from Santos in March 2022 never actually occurred. “I knew that the loan had not been made,” Marks said in court.

Santos allegedly kept members of his own campaign in the dark about the fake $500,000 loan. In March 2022, a person affiliated with the campaign texted Santos, “Did you get the wire done for the [first quarter] loan?” Santos replied, “That’s getting done tomorrow and it’s not a wire, banker check.” The criminal information makes clear that Santos did not have enough money to make the loan.

Marks’s attorney, Raymond Perini, said that Marks does not currently have a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. But CNN reports that he stated, “If we get a subpoena, we’ll do the right thing.”

Santos’ decision to throw Marks under the bus is particularly callous. A New York Republican strategist who knows Marks told us earlier this year that Marks considered Santos “her favorite client” and that she went on multiple business trips to Florida with him.

Marks, who lives on Long Island, was a veteran GOP operative. She has been the treasurer for dozens of GOP campaigns, including Lee Zeldin’s congressional campaigns and his failed gubernatorial bid last year in New York. During the 2022 election cycle, her company, Campaigns Unlimited, worked for more than 30 PACs and candidate committees.

Marks’ consulting company was paid more than $100,000 by the Santos campaign for accounting and fundraising services. She was never particularly careful in hiding her tracks. As Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, told Mother Jones earlier this year, “It is awfully hard to believe that whoever compiled and formally submitted Santos’ FEC reports believed that they were true…They are just, on their face, obviously false.” Marks has now admitted that. 

Santos could have corrected his campaign finance reports at any time this year and come clean about the fake $500,000 loan. Instead, he insinuated that he was able to loan his campaign more than $700,000 due to secretive business deals. 

The fake loan and contributions from donors who didn’t appear to exist weren’t the only obvious irregularities in Santos’ campaign finance reports. As Mother Jones reported in January:

[Marks] and several relatives contributed more than $30,000 to the Santos campaign. (The relatives each gave the legal maximum of $5,800.) These donors did not give to any other federal candidates this election cycle. The group includes Marks’ two children who were, respectively, 19 and 22 years old when they started donating to Santos, according to public records. 

The scheme to list fake donations from relatives was designed to meet a $250,000 quarterly fundraising goal set by a national Republican committee for candidates who wished to receive additional support from the party. After failing to meet that goal legitimately, Santos and Marks allegedly conspired to make up donations from relatives. In December 2021, Santos texted Marks a list of his family members along with the amounts they should be listed as having donated, according to the criminal information. None of those family members, including the relative Mother Jones interviewed in January, had donated.

Marks’ plea agreement comes with a recommendation that she serve between three-and-a-half and four years in prison. She was released from custody with a $100,000 unsecured bond.