Ms. Marks did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joseph Murray, said that “in light of the complaints filed with the F.E.C., it would be inappropriate” to respond.
Hours before Ms. Marks’s letters were made public, Mr. Santos had already acknowledged the pressure he faced over his campaign finances, saying he would temporarily step aside from his positions on congressional committees in light of “both my personal and campaign financial investigations.”
Even as Mr. Santos has received headlines over revelations that he invented family ties to the Holocaust and 9/11, Ms. Marks has drawn attention of her own. An experienced political operative who served as treasurer on former Representative Lee Zeldin’s unsuccessful campaign for governor, Ms. Marks has been with from Mr. Santos since his first run for office, assisting with accounting and raising money.
Her involvement extended beyond Mr. Santos’s campaign, records show. Florida corporate records from May 2021 show that a company called R.I.A. Concepts Holding, which uses Ms. Marks’s home address, was one of the stakeholders in Mr. Santos’s new venture, Red Strategies USA.
Mr. Santos formed the company, which has been described as a political consulting group, along with his colleagues from his former firm, Harbor City Capital, after its assets were frozen as part of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that accused it of operating a Ponzi scheme. Neither Mr….
