George Santos Says He’s Running in a Different District Because He’s “Dying to Have a Chicken Coop and Stuff Like That”

Last month, as Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union address, George Santos took to X to make an announcement: that he will run for Congress again. Claiming that he “left office arbitrarily” in December—in fact, he was expelled by his colleagues following a damning ethics report—Santos wrote that “New York hasn’t had a real conservative represent them since,” and revealed that he planned to take on Representative Nick LaLota for the First Congressional District. Given that LaLota was one of Santos’s biggest GOP critics, most people assumed the decision to try to unseat a former colleague had to do with revenge. But according to Santos, that assumption could not be further from the truth. The real reason he’s running for the First? Because it would put him in the suburbs, where he could realize an apparently longtime wish to own chickens.

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Santos insisted his LaLota challenge is not a “revenge run,” but purely about being a poultryman. “My husband and I both enjoy that kind of life,” he said. “We’re dying to have a chicken coop and stuff like that, and in Suffolk County it’s much easier to get that” than in the Queens-adjacent, Nassau County district he previously represented. “In Nassau County, it’s full of restrictions on where and how much, and can you get chickens and can you get roosters, because of neighbors and noise and that stuff.”

Of course, not everyone is buying what Santos—who is slated to stand trial for a whole bunch of federal crimes in September*—is selling. For one thing, the day before his expulsion, he told reporters how much his fellow New York Republicans loved him, and that the feeling was mutual, “with the exception of LaLota,” according to The Daily Beast. Santos then went on to add: “He’s not well-liked. He’s an arrogant person. He’s not a nice guy. He’s cocky. He’s a traditional meathead, somebody who’s not nice to you for no reason.” Months later, while speaking to The Daily Beast about his love for chickens, he also claimed that during his 2020 run for Congress, LaLota allegedly asked, of Santos, “Why are we running homosexuals as Republicans? What the fuck are we doing?” (LaLota denied this, and pointed to Santos’s documented history of lie-telling.) Santos also suggested to The Daily Beast that LaLota was responsible for him losing during his first House run:

As Santos tells it, the true roots of his distaste for LaLota stretch back to the period immediately after election night in 2020, when Santos had an advantage in the in-person vote count but faced a tsunami of absentee ballots for his opponent, then and current representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY). The district at that time contained a slice of Suffolk County, and LaLota was then the county’s Republican Board of Elections commissioner, meaning he headed the body in charge of tallying those mail-in ballots.

In his conversation with The Daily Beast, Santos accused LaLota of accepting rules from his Democratic counterpart at the board that made challenging absentee votes “a nightmare.” “That is why I did not like Nick LaLota: because he was weak and he literally didn’t do his job the way it was supposed to be done,” Santos said, also complaining about COVID-19 protocols at the counting process.

The board itself told The Daily Beast that the rules it followed for counting and disputing absentee votes are all laid out in state law. An independent source with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity on the grounds that he did not believe it was in his career interest to be named in an article about George Santos, went so far as to call the fallen congressman’s allegations “bullshit.”

As for his chances of defeating LaLota, Santos—who, again, could be in prison by next year—Santos told The Daily Beast: “This is a long-term project. I might lose this time, I’ll win next time,” Santos said. “The reality is I want back in the game and I don’t care who’s in the way.”

*He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, though is in talks for a plea deal.

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