Months after President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of convicted Republican former Rep. George Santos, Santos is angling to become the president’s next press secretary, The Hill reports.

Santos publicly pitched himself on Friday to fill the vacancy abruptly abandoned by White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, despite having pleaded guilty in 2024 to two felony counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The press secretary serves as the administration’s chief spokesperson, tasked with fielding reporters’ questions at White House briefings. Whether the White House will respond to Santos’s pitch — and whom Trump will ultimately tap as Zacharia’s successor — remains to be seen.

“Hey I’m not technically open for a job because I have one already…. butttttttt… I’d jump to serve POTUS as press secretary in a heartbeat. Just saying,” the former Republican lawmaker wrote on X.

His pitch drew a wave of responses on the platform. Many critics warned that Santos would probably break Zacharia’s record for the shortest employment stint in the Trump administration since former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, whose 2017 tenure in the role lasted roughly 10 days. Others, including a number of Democratic operatives and liberal commentators, encouraged him to formally pursue the job and said they hoped he would get it.

Trump commuted Santos’ prison term in 2025, continuing a pattern of granting clemency to political allies. At the time, Santos was less than three months into a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The commutation also spared Santos from paying $370,000 in court-ordered restitution to the victims of his fraud.

The move followed a series of high-profile acts of clemency by Trump, the most notorious of which was his blanket pardon of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — an episode over which “the president — himself a 34-count convicted fraudster — was impeached for a historic second time,” as Common Dreams writer Brett Wilkins put it.

“… [A]t least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Trump argued at the time of the commutation, prompting criticism from lawmakers including Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who called the move “naked corruption.”

“Trump says it plainly: Crimes don’t count if you ‘vote Republican.’ Just like his pardons of those who violently attacked police,” Beyer wrote on social media at the time.

Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and former adviser with ties to Truth Social, departed after a disastrous and widely mocked first press briefing — her only one — in which she took few questions and struggled with basic public speaking. She had also falsely claimed to be a lawyer.

According to The Hill, Santos slammed Fox News host Sean Hannity after the anchor pressed Zacharia about her legal background during a Thursday interview, accusing Hannity of thinking “you are untouchable and like to sit high on your horse and judged people.” Santos also urged viewers of Hannity’s show to “unfollow” his X account.