As if he hasn’t done enough to establish himself as untrustworthy, George Santos has somehow managed to add yet more fuel to his ever-raging fire by lying to a New York Times reporter about his five-year-old niece being kidnapped by two Chinese men.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Times reporter Grace Ashford published the story based on several phone conversations she’d shared with the congressmen after beginning her investigation into Santos alongside Times reporter Michael Gold after the fabulist was elected last November as a member of New York's House of Representatives.

Santos, nearly a year later, is on the hook for a whopping 23 federal charges, including money laundering, wire fraud, and theft of public funds — he is still in office as of this writing.

Ashford said that Santos called her for the first time in September and complained about the media “slandering” him and causing him and his husband to receive death threats before describing an incident “nobody talks about.” He then detailed a kidnapping involving his five-year-old niece saying surveillance footage showed her in the company of two Chinese men, which he cited was “retaliation” against his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.

Santos also claimed said kidnapping was undergoing an active police investigation. You can guess what happened next. When Ashford dug a little deeper, it’s probably no surprise to anybody that the high-ranking police official she chatted with found no evidence of such a case.

“I’d lean into, ‘he made it up,’” the official told Ashford.

Santos stands firm in saying his negative media portrayal includes “factual and timeline errors” and that his team had “requested numerous corrections,” but the Times’ standards team found no such requests from anybody.

The congressman (again, he is still in office) has already pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges in less than a year in office, and he’s set to be arraigned on another 10 at the end of the month.