Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Instagram: santos4_congress
The woman Rep. George Santos called his “best friend” is a Republican fundraiser and conspiracy-theory spreader who spent years promoting an Albanian politician barred from entering the United States for corruption—work that raised concerns among legal and ethics experts who spoke with The Daily Beast.
In the space of two election cycles, Evi Kokalari—who sometimes uses her ex-husband’s surname Angelakis—went from a small-time Queens real estate broker whose dabbling in politics never extended beyond a couple gifts to local campaigns, to a jet-setting Republican operative who hosted events for Santos and GOP luminaries including former Rep. Lee Zeldin and Trump acting intelligence director Ric Grenell.
In the same period, beginning around 2019, social media showed her attending parties at Mar-a-Lago, commanding meetings with Eric Trump; ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Ilir Meta, then the president of Albania; and Yuri Kim, former U.S. ambassador to Albania. Posts showed she regularly visited her home country in the Balkans and such destinations as London, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos.