When it comes to congressional mendacity, former Rep. George Santos is a special case, though it’d be a mistake to suggest the New York Republican has no competition.
Take Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, for example.
Last fall, WTVF, the CBS affiliate in Nashville, reported that Ogles’ finance reports showed that he’d made a $320,000 personal loan to his campaign. That was difficult to believe, since the congressman’s financial disclosures suggested he didn’t have $320,000.
As the local outlet reported this week, Ogles has now effectively conceded that his earlier claims weren’t true.
Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles filed 11 amendments to his campaign finance reports Wednesday, acknowledging that his claims for the last two years to have loaned $320,000 to his campaign were not true. … On the 11 amendments filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, revising reports dating back to April 2022, Ogles says that he actually loaned his campaign $20,000, instead of the $320,000 that he had previously claimed.
Where the rest of the money came from, at least for now, remains unclear.
Time will tell what, if anything, congressional ethics investigators have to say about this, but the larger problem for Ogles is his pattern of deceptions. For those who might benefit from a refresher, let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
It was a couple of years ago when the freshman congressman first faced allegations that he’d wildly inflated his résumé. WTVF uncovered quite a few instances in which the Tennessee Republican falsely described himself as an economist, falsely boasted about his law enforcement career, and even exaggerated his work at a nonprofit organization.
After ignoring the controversy for a brief while, Ogles’ spokesperson eventually told Fox News Digital that he’d simply “condensed” his résumé “for the sake of brevity,” which was an odd response to evidence that the GOP lawmaker had made brazenly untrue claims.
When WTVF returned to the subject, it uncovered additional details that made matters a bit worse: Ogles also failed to tell the truth about his academic background — including what his degree is in — and he falsely claimed to be a graduate of Vanderbilt’s business school.
Last year, The Washington Post made matters worse for Ogles, noting that the Republican “exaggerated or invented” his service on various boards and claimed to have run a consulting firm that “cannot be found in Tennessee corporate records.”
The same report found that Ogles said his firm represented “Fortune 500 companies,” but there wasn’t any evidence to support this, either.
In case that weren’t quite enough, Ogles used a photo of his stillborn baby to raise money for a project he referred to at the time as “Lincoln’s Place.” The Republican ended up collecting tens of thousands of dollars meant for a children’s burial garden, but by all accounts, it was never built, and as WTVF reported, “Ogles has refused to provide evidence of what he did with the money.”
It’s against this backdrop that the GOP congressman claimed he made a $320,000 personal loan to his campaign, and Ogles’ latest paperwork makes clear that this claim wasn’t true, either.
To date, congressional Republican leaders haven’t commented on or expressed any concerns about Ogles’ unfortunate record.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
