Ho ho ho - 'tis the season for chaos.
Finding a Santos Successor Is Proving No Simple Task for Republicans
Nicholas Fandos, NYT, Fri, December 8, 2023
If New York Republicans had hoped to quickly and cleanly turn the page on the embarrassing saga of George Santos, the week since his expulsion from Congress has not exactly gone as planned.
While party leaders hunkered down in the Long Island suburbs to game out the critical special election to replace him, it emerged that one of their top candidates for the nomination, Mazi Melesa Pilip, was not technically a Republican at all, but a registered Democrat.
Another Republican who had entered the race earlier this year was convicted of taking part in the Capitol riot Jan. 6, 2021.
Word leaked that party officials were interviewing a more serious contender: a former state assemblyman known to have potentially damaging ties to Santos through a bizarre business proposition that one person involved said resembled the classic email scheme with a Nigerian prince.
And records were unearthed in news reports showing that another front-runner, Mike Sapraicone, had not only been sued for suppressing evidence in a murder case as a New York City police officer but also later made political contributions totaling $40,000 to an unexpected recipient: the race’s Democratic nominee, Tom Suozzi.
The torrent of revelations washed away the message of order and unity that top Republicans sought to project in the wake of Santos’ hurricane. And suspicions that many of the unsavory disclosures about the candidates had been seeded in the press by rival Republican camps left some fretting that the party was playing straight into Democrats’ hands.