The Pilip-Santos connection

Daily Point

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If someone goes looking for Mazi Melesa Pilip’s congressional campaign website, they might first keep it simple — and type in her name.

But anyone who does that might stumble on a very different link, as two websites using Pilip’s name reroute to a different candidate’s website — and donate button.

Type in mazipilip.com and you are directed to Georgeforny.com — George Santos’ campaign website, complete with a large George Santos For Congress icon — and a working Donate button that directs individuals to Santos’ WinRed page.

Type in mazimelesapilip.com — and the same thing happens.

Pilip’s actual congressional candidacy website appears to be located at maziforny.com, which includes a bare-bones biography and the all-important “donate” link to Pilip’s WinRed site. A Facebook page also emerged Friday morning, with the same Mazi for NY title.

Thanks to privacy laws, it’s now relatively easy to disguise website ownership — so it’s unclear who owns the two domains, or created the websites, that link to Santos’ page.

According to Santos, it wasn’t him.

“This is news to me,” he said when reached by The Point. “But I’m going to have my campaign people suspend the website. It’s not like I need it right now, so I’ll take it down for now.”

Whether Santos is telling the truth or not is unclear. Others, too, denied connection to the two websites.

“It wasn’t us,” Nassau Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs told The Point. “We’re going to run a campaign. We’re not playing games.”

Nassau Republican Party committee spokesman Mike Deery told The Point in a text that the Santos links were “shameful” and “beneath the dignity of a Congressional Campaign.”

“Obviously there are more dirty tricks from Tom Suozzi and his cronies,” Deery said.

Said a Suozzi campaign official: “We had nothing to do with it.”

The two sites that connect to Santos’ page were created on Nov. 28. That was just two days after maziforcongress.com was purchased, leading some observers to speculate about a Pilip candidacy even before Santos’ Dec. 1 expulsion from the House. The maziforcongress.com site now features a notice saying “Website Expired” with a field for the website owner to log in.

The site Pilip seems to be using — maziforny.com — was purchased and registered on Thursday. Within the last week, other incarnations of the name — including mazi4congress.com, pilip4congress.com and pilipforcongress — were bought. It’s unclear whether they were bought to prevent any other unusual or negative links, or connections to Santos.

Suozzi, meanwhile, uses suozziforcongress.com, a site created in January 2016, before his first campaign for Congress. It links to suozziforcongress2024.com — which was created in October.

— Randi F. Marshall randi.marshall@newsday.com

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