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Former U.S. Rep. George Santos, a convicted felon, threw an exclusive Christmas party in Washington, D.C.
In a Washington holiday tableau where politics blurred seamlessly into spectacle, the former congressman once again proved he understands the value of infamy.
It was fitting, in a perverse way, that a Christmas party hosted by disgraced former Congressman George Santos, the first out gay man elected to the U.S. House of Representatives by Republicans and newly freed after President Donald Trump commuted his seven-year fraud sentence, would become a stage for the very chaos that propelled him into the national imagination. Santos, who was expelled from Congress in December 2023 after the House overwhelmingly voted to remove him following a blistering ethics investigation, returned to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, with a holiday bash he dubbed “Santos Claus.”
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The guest list, as Santos teased online, would be particularly strict, a standard enforced by a bouncer who happened to be a former aide, Vish Burra, known for his own online bravado.
Related: Donald Trump commutes fraudster George Santos's prison sentence
Santos posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) earlier in the day in which he said, “If I don’t see you, that means you didn’t work hard enough.”
When Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert arrived with several staffers, only she and, eventually, one aide were allowed past the rope line. A TMZ video circulating online shows Boebert trying to persuade the doorman that her team belongs inside. “I know you’re on the list, Lauren,” he replied.
Later, he wrote, “THE QUEEN SANTOS GETS WHAT SHE WANTS, AND SHE ONLY WANTED HANDPICKED PEOPLE ON THE LIST!”
But the real symbolism of the night came not from who was kept out, but who was welcomed in. Among the gilded cookies, caviar, and chocolate fountain meant to broadcast excess, Santos hosted a constellation of figures who, like him, inhabit a cultural space shaped as much by notoriety as by influence. Recently ousted from MAGA, Santos’s friend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, mingled with influencers and right-wing personalities. And then there was Anna Delvey, born Anna Sorokin, the German-born fraudster whose elaborate con of New York City’s elite inspired a Netflix hit and cemented her status as America’s most glamorous grifter.
Delvey’s attendance alone was almost too on the nose. A convicted felon, who, between 2013 and her arrest in July 2017, engineered an entire persona out of invented wealth, stood inside a party thrown by a former lawmaker whose own rise was built on serial fabrication. Both defrauded institutions that trusted them. Both emerged from scandal with larger-than-life celebrity. And both have transformed deception into a brand — one that, astonishingly, still commands access.
Related: Goodbye, George Santos: The gay fabulist former GOP congressman surrenders to prison authorities
And, as TMZ reported, Martin Shkreli was there too. The disgraced pharmaceutical executive, once nicknamed “the most hated man in America,” became infamous after hiking the price of a lifesaving drug by more than 5,000 percent. Later convicted of securities fraud, Shkreli emerged from prison with a public persona sharpened, not softened, by scandal.
Scott Pressler, a gay far-right activist best known for promoting voter registration drives for Republican candidates and for amplifying election-related misinformation after the 2020 presidential election, was there too.
According to Mediaite, the room also included former The View co-host Meghan McCain, ex-Real Housewives of New York cast member Leah McSweeney, and perennial GOP hopeful Kari Lake, whose repeated losses in Arizona politics have only fueled her prominence in election-denialist circles.
Related: George Santos's latest money-making plot? Reviving his drag persona, Kitara Ravache
Trump’s intervention on Santos’s behalf made the party possible in the first place. As The Advocate has reported, Trump granted him clemency on October 18, describing him as “horribly mistreated” and arguing that the punishment was excessive.
Santos had pleaded guilty in August 2024 to federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, admitting that he used fabricated fundraising figures and false donor identities to enrich and sustain his congressional campaign. He was sentenced in April to 87 months in federal prison and reported to the Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, New Jersey, on July 25, to begin serving that term.
But Santos’s incarceration lasted only about three months before Trump commuted the remainder of his sentence and ordered his immediate release, even though the felony convictions remain intact.
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