Senator Joni Ernst just dropped a bombshell that reads like a rejected subplot from a political thriller because no editor would believe it was realistic. Biden administration officials at the Small Business Administration used the internal codeword “Benghazi” — yes, THAT Benghazi — to hide discussions about funneling nearly $90 million in PPP loans to Planned Parenthood.
They named their cover-up after the LAST cover-up. These people are practically begging to get caught.
Let’s rewind. The Paycheck Protection Program was created to keep small businesses alive during COVID lockdowns. Your neighborhood restaurant. The dry cleaner down the street. The family hardware store that was hanging on by a thread while governors played dictator. That’s who PPP money was for.
Planned Parenthood — a billion-dollar organization that receives over half a billion in federal taxpayer funding every single year — decided it needed some of that small business money too. So they grabbed approximately $90 million in PPP loans. Because apparently half a billion a year just wasn’t enough to keep the lights on at America’s largest abortion provider.
And when SBA officials discussed this little arrangement internally? They didn’t use Planned Parenthood’s name. That would’ve been too easy for congressional investigators to find. Instead, they used the codeword “Benghazi” in their June 2021 email exchanges.
Pause and appreciate the irony for a moment. Democrats spent YEARS telling us Benghazi was a fake scandal. A “Republican obsession.” A “nothing burger.” Hillary Clinton sat in front of Congress and said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
And then Biden’s own people picked that name — out of every word in the English language — as their code for hiding money from Congress. They literally chose the name of the scandal they spent a decade dismissing as fiction to run a brand new scandal. It’s like naming your money laundering operation “Watergate” and hoping nobody notices.
(Chef’s kiss. Truly. These are the people who think they’re smarter than us.)
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler has since confirmed what everyone with a functioning brain already knew: “Planned Parenthood Federation of America was never eligible to receive a dime in pandemic-era relief from taxpayers.” Not eligible. Not a small business. Not a struggling Main Street shop trying to make payroll. They were never supposed to get a cent.
But they got $90 million anyway.
While actual small businesses were drowning — filing paperwork, begging banks for loans, waiting weeks for approval, and in many cases getting denied or getting too little too late — Planned Parenthood waltzed up to the counter and grabbed $90 million. And Biden’s SBA made sure nobody could trace it by slapping a codeword on the whole operation.
Senator Ernst is now requesting a DOJ investigation into whether this constitutes a federal crime of record concealment. (Spoiler: when government officials create codewords specifically to hide financial transactions from congressional oversight, that’s not a filing error. That’s a cover-up.)
Remember, these are the same people who lecture us about “transparency in government” and “democratic norms.” They used a codeword. To hide money. Going to an abortion provider. From Congress. During a pandemic. While small businesses were dying.
Every word of that sentence is real. Every single one.
The PPP program was a $800 billion lifeline, and massive chunks of it were wasted, stolen, or funneled to organizations that had no business touching it. We’ve known that for years. But this one is special because they actually labeled the file “Benghazi” like a villain in a bad movie who keeps a folder on his desktop called “CRIMES.”
So the next time a Democrat tells you Benghazi was a conspiracy theory, remind them: their own administration liked the name so much, they used it for their next conspiracy.