NEW YORK — George Santos is defending his recent social media tirade to a federal judge who will be sentencing the disgraced former New York congressman later this week on fraud charges.

In a lengthy letter ahead of the Friday court date, Santos, 36, said he remains “profoundly sorry” for his crimes but protests that the seven-year prison sentence sought by prosecutors as “ridiculous” and overly harsh.

“Every sunrise since that plea has carried the same realization: I did this, me. I am responsible,” wrote the former Republican lawmaker, who pleaded guilty last summer. “But saying I’m sorry doesn’t require me to sit quietly while these prosecutors try to drop an anvil on my head.”

Prosecutors, in a filing last week, argued Santos “remains unrepentant” and has not shown genuine remorse, as his lawyers have claimed in their own filing seeking a lighter, two-year prison stint.

They cited a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, in which he disparaged the U.S. Department of Justice as a “cabal of pedophiles” and cast himself as a victim of prosecutorial overreach.

Santos, who admitted he deceived donors and stole the identities of nearly a dozen people to fund his congressional campaign, countered that his “colorful” posts are being wrongly “repurposed as a sword against me” by prosecutors.

“Contesting the severity of a proposed sentence is not the same as contesting guilt, and punishing protected speech because it questions punishment should trouble anyone who values fair prosecution over personal vindication,” he wrote.

Santos said calling himself the “scapegoat” in social media posts was in reference to prosecutors claiming he was the “organizer/leader” of his campaign’s financial fraud and warranted a stiffer sentence. He argued his former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, who has also pleaded guilty and faces sentencing next month, shares equal part in the blame.

“If I were the criminal mastermind they portray, I would be the clumsiest in modern memory: leaving a trail of screenshots pointing directly back to myself,” he wrote in the Saturday letter.

Santos also pushed back at prosecutors’ claims that he has not made efforts to pay the roughly $580,000 owed as part of his plea deal, saying he’s “liquidated personal assets, reduced my living expenses, and tried as hard as I could to raise some money for restitution.”

He added that he has not asked any of his friends or family to write letters to the court on his behalf, nor did he expect any supporters to attend Friday’s sentencing in Long Island federal court out of embarrassment and shame.

“I don’t want to bring anyone else in my life into this mess,” Santos wrote. “This is mine to deal with and mine alone.”

The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York’s office, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment.

Santos was elected in 2022 to represent parts of Queens and Long Island but served barely a year before being ousted by his House colleagues.

Santos fabricated much of his life story, leading to questions about how the political unknown had funded his winning campaign.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”

It’s not clear whether Biden, who leaves office Monday, will pardons people who have been criticized or threatened by President-elect Donald Trump.

Issuing preemptive pardons — for actual or imagined offenses by Trump’s critics that could be investigated or prosecuted by the incoming administration — would stretch the powers of the presidency in untested ways.

Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.

The president has announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment just as Trump, an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment, takes office. In his first term, Trump presided over an unprecedented number of executions, 13, in a protracted timeline during the coronavirus pandemic.

A pardon relieves a person of guilt and punishment. A commutation reduces or eliminates the punishment but doesn’t exonerate the wrongdoing.

Among those pardoned on Sunday were:

— Don Scott, who is the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in a chamber narrowly controlled by Democrats. He was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.

“I am deeply humbled to share that I have received a Presidential Pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 — one that changed the course of my life and taught me the true power of redemption,” Scott said in a statement.

—Immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, who was convicted of a nonviolent offence in 2001 and was sentenced to two years in prison and was facing deportation to Trinidad and Tobago.

—Kemba Smith Pradia, who was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and sentenced to 24 years behind bars. She has since become a prison reform activist. President Bill Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000.

—Darryl Chambers of Wilmington, Delaware, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a drug offense and sentenced to 17 years in prison. He studies and writes about gun violence prevention.

Biden commuted the sentences of two people:

—Michelle West, who was serving life in prison for her role in a drug conspiracy case in the early 1990s. West has a daughter who has written publicly about the struggle of growing up with a mother behind bars.

—Robin Peoples, who was convicted of robbing banks in northwest Indiana in the late 1990s and was sentenced to 111 years in prison. The White House said in a statement that Peoples would have faced significantly lower sentences today under current laws.

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Associated Press writer Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.

HARTFORD, Conn. — The Connecticut Appellate Court on Friday affirmed a $965 million verdict from 2022 against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, determining there’s “sufficient evidence” to support the damages awarded to relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims and an FBI agent.

In its unanimous opinion, the court cited the “traumatic threats and harassment” the families endured “stemming from the lies, as propagated by the defendants, that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.”

“Our review of the record reveals that there was sufficient evidence to support the $965,000,000 in compensatory damages awarded by the jury,” according to the 62-page decision. It marks the largest jury verdict in Connecticut history.

The appellate court did grant Jones a $150 million reprieve. It determined the plaintiffs “failed to assert a legally viable” claim under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act and that $150 million in punitive damages awarded by the lower court must be vacated, noting the plaintiffs alleged injury came from false language and not from speech related to advertising, marketing or the sale of goods.

“We’re relieved that the Court protected the press with its decision reversing the damages in the unfair trade practices claim, but we are otherwise disappointed,” said Norm Pattis, Jones’ attorney, in a statement. He said the jury in the case was “sold a bill of goods and led to believe” Jones made millions spreading conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook mass shooting.

“He didn’t. The jury was also encouraged to believe that all the sorrow that befell the plaintiffs was Mr. Jones’s fault. It wasn’t.,” Pattis said. “We had hoped the Appellate Court would have seen through the charade and farce that this trial became. It didn’t.”

Jones now owes a total of roughly $1.2 billion, counting the $965 million to the Connecticut families and nearly $50 million awarded by a Texas jury to the parents of a Sandy Hook child who was killed.

Jones filed for personal bankruptcy in 2022, and the sale of his Infowars platform is part of that case. A bid by The Onion satirical news outlet to buy Infowars is scheduled to return Monday to a Texas courtroom, where a judge will be deciding whether a bankruptcy auction was properly run. Jones alleges collusion and fraud.

Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families hailed the Connecticut appellate court’s ruling on Friday as an overall victory.

“Today, Alex Jones’s effort to overturn the jury’s historic verdict against him and his corrupt business, Infowars, was unanimously rejected by the Connecticut Appellate Court. The jury’s $965 million rebuke of Jones will stand, and the families who have fought valiantly for years have brought Alex Jones yet another step closer to true justice,” the lawyers said in a statement.

Pattis said he will ask the Connecticut Supreme Court to review the appellate court decision.

Jones repeatedly told his millions of followers the 2012 massacre that killed 20 first graders and six educators was staged by “crisis actors” to enact more gun control.

The appellate court also determined that a lower court “properly exercised its discretion” in finding Jones and his Infowars’ parent company Free Speech Systems LLC., liable for damages by default for failing to cooperate with court rules on sharing evidence.