Photo: Juliegrace Brufke

Desaki hibachi grill and sushi restaurant in the Poconos is bumping for a Sunday night. A large group of 30-something women celebrating a birthday fill one table. Surrounding the grill at the other table are several beaming couples and George Santos.

Between sips from a piña colada, Santos catches flying zucchini tossed his way and joins in a singalong of “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. An onion volcano erupts in flames. One couple seated next to Santos and his husband, Matt Gerard, seem to recognize the infamous Republican, but they don’t bring it up. Santos points out the chef’s name, Rio, sounds more Brazilian than Japanese. He admits hibachi is “so tacky,” but that’s what makes it great. Plus, he’s barely eaten in the 48 hours since President Donald Trump commuted his sentence and he was let out of a federal prison in New Jersey. “I can’t wait for bottled water. I never want to drink tap again,” he says.

Santos entered prison in April to serve a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and identity theft related to his campaign. On Friday, he was busy answering emails in the prison’s computer room when his fellow inmates in the cafeteria started making noise. He was on television. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever,’” he says. “I’m always on TV. They’re probably shit talking me.” Then he heard screaming and wandered over. That’s when he saw the chyrons announcing Trump had cut short his sentence, effective immediately. “I was like, ‘What? Uh, nobody told me anything.’”

Gerard picked him up, blasting music for the four-hour drive there from the Poconos, where they have a second home in addition to the one in Queens, which Santos represented in Congress before he was expelled two years ago. When Santos got home, he thought, “This is the first time in three months that I’m actually going to sit on a toilet.”

He took a long shower. No prison flip-flops. Then came an elaborate skin-care routine: exfoliator, mask, toner, La Mer. “The best thing you have there for skin care is the Neutrogena glycerin soap bars. That’s as good as it gets,” he says. “And you pay six, seven dollars for that.”

Santos and Gerard toasted his freedom with Champagne beside his sister, Tiffany; his attorney; and — squawking around them — two pet macaws named Chico and Regina. Santos has been trying to teach them to say “I’m the baby,” the catchphrase from the ’90s show Dinosaurs. It hasn’t worked yet. Gerard bought the pair while Santos was in prison, and they’re arguing about whether to clip Regina’s wings because she’s been chewing the molding around the doors. Santos is pro-clipping.

They met on Grindr in 2021 when Gerard was a pharmacist and Santos was an aspiring politician. Gerard, smaller in stature and quieter than his husband, has stayed through everything that followed. “When he was in Congress, I was not happy, but he was happy,” he says. In Washington, D.C., he couldn’t go to Whole Foods or walk their dogs without being photographed or harassed, but he supported his husband because Santos loved being in Congress. At home in the Poconos, they show each other quiet affection, like when Gerard brings Santos a latte made with raw milk, which he says helps with lactose intolerance. Gerard says they plan to renew their vows ahead of their fifth anniversary. “I’m so happy,” Gerard says. “I can’t even explain how grateful I am.”

When Santos received his sentence earlier this year, Gerard was in shock. “I was very positive all the time, saying, ‘Oh, he’s not going to jail because President Trump is going to help him,’” he says. At worst, he figured Santos would serve half the time.

After being turned away from the prison once, Gerard finally saw Santos for the first time wearing handcuffs and chains. The two spoke through a glass partition. “I never thought to see him like that,” he says. “It was a nightmare.”

Photo: Matt Santos

Santos was also visibly thinner, losing more than 30 pounds behind bars. Working in the prison kitchen made him lose his appetite. “I felt like I was in a Mexican prison because it’s beef taco, beef-taco salad, chicken taco, chicken-taco salad, chicken fajitas, beef fajitas,” he says. “I’m like, How many Mexican dishes are we gonna serve in an American prison?” Cooking huge meals with subpar ingredients — canned tomatoes passed for salsa — didn’t help. The milk cartons smelled like onions, and he quit eating breakfast entirely.

Inside, Santos reconnected with Samuel Miele, his former campaign fundraiser who pleaded guilty to wire fraud when he impersonated a congressional aide to get donations for Santos and was sentenced to one year and a day in prison. Santos says he made friends with both white-collar criminals, such as Alok Saksena, a former United Airlines executive serving time for agreeing to accept bribes and kickbacks, and tattooed former gang members. He cracked jokes about gold bars with Fred Daibes and Wael Hana, who were convicted of bribery and corruption charges in connection with the case of disgraced New Jersey senator Robert Menendez.

About a month into his sentence, the prison put Santos into protective custody, limiting him to one 15-minute phone call every 30 days and no emails. He says his thoughts turned to suicide and he was denied medicine used to treat ADHD and prescribed antidepressants instead. Gerard worked relentlessly to free his husband, calling Republicans who could influence Trump, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Marjorie Taylor Greene was their closest ally.

“She was always texting me, ‘Look, Matt, I’m doing everything I can. I’m not gonna get tired of fighting for George,’” he told me. Her chief of staff stayed in touch with their attorney. When Santos was released, his first call wasn’t to family or friends. “Call Marjorie now,” Gerard told him.

The second call came from Trump, who told Santos to go enjoy his life. “I’m the first person in my family to ever sit and receive a phone call from the president of the United States,” he says.

Santos served 84 days of the seven-year sentence.

He says if he has kids, the first will be named Donald, then Marjorie. There’s also Lauren (Boebert) and Tim (Burchett), other Republican members of Congress who pushed for his release. “So I’m going to have to probably do like Neil Tim or something like that and double up names because I don’t want to have 12, 15 kids,” he jokes.

Still wearing his Fox News makeup from an appearance earlier in the day, Santos is making his way through more than a thousand unread messages when he turns reflective. “The largest lesson I’ve learned in my life is to always keep it above board. Don’t play loose and fast, and keep it 100 percent honest,” he says. “Prison is not somewhere anybody wants to go.”

The day before he was released, Santos says went to confession and took communion for the first time in two years. The next morning he woke up having received a congressional subpoena to testify about prison conditions. “If you allow God to command your life, I know now he will do great things for you,” he says. He says he wants to form a nonprofit dedicated to prison reform and help troubled youth stay out of prison.

It’s easy to question such a mea culpa. This is George Santos, the man who lied about working at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, who claimed that he was Jewish and had grandparents who fled the Holocaust, that his mother survived 9/11, even that he had a college volleyball career at Baruch College. He defrauded donors, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Botox and Ferragamo instead of his campaign. After all, when I ask about paying $374,000 in restitution to his victims, he dodges. “Look, I’m going to do what’s required of me in the law, right? And that’s where I’m going to leave it at,” he says.

Still, he does sound calmer than the man who spent the weeks before prison ripping into his former colleagues on X and vowing to reveal damaging details about them once he got out. Now he says he’s embarrassed by some of the way he conducted himself. “I was a product of my own chaos. I was consumed with hate,” Santos says. “I didn’t want to accept that I was my own worst enemy for the longest time, and accepting I was my own worst enemy has been so sobering.” There will be no revenge tour, he insists. No retribution.

“I want nothing more for Nicole Malliotakis, Andrew Garbarino. I want these guys to thrive,” he says of the New York Republicans who led the push to kick him out of Congress. “You think I want Democrats to take the seats of conservatives, even though we might disagree? Like, yo, I want them to thrive. But I also would really appreciate it if they gave me a little bit of grace.”He also would appreciate some money. Santos lost his House salary more than a year ago and has huge legal bills to pay. One of the first things he did when he got out was to get on Cameo, selling clips of himself for $300 a pop. Next, he says he will try to sell a memoir based on the hundreds of pages of notes he took in prison to turn into a book about his experience. He also floats Dancing With the Stars. “Sean Spicer had a good time, and Anna Delvey did it in an ankle monitor,” he says. “Why can’t I do it?”

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