The moment is etched in 21st century memory. The shrill voice of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, agitated and stretched, still rings in the ears.
“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?” Clinton, with dreams of the White House dancing in her head, scolded Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., during an early 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
The Wisconsin Republican had gotten under Clinton’s skin, asking her about the secretary’s slow response to a preventable attack in September 2012 on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Benghazi became a political lightning rod, the leading symbol of the Obama administration’s anemic, incompetent, and deceptive foreign policy, particularly Clinton’s ineffectual “Smart Power” strategy. More so, the committee investigating Benghazi opened the lock to Clinton’s emails, the secret server, and more Clinton lies and obfuscation that contributed to her stunning loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
So what on earth does Benghazi have to do with abortion factory Planned Parenthood? It appears to be the codename for cover-up involving some $90 million in taxpayer-funded Covid-era forgivable loans to a nonprofit organization ineligible to receive the government handout.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, is asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into why President Joe Biden’s Small Business Administration used “Benghazi” in the subject lines of internal communications regarding the funding. Ernst, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, asserts “Benghazi” is code for “the possible unlawful concealment and attempted concealment of federal records by President Biden’s Small Business Administration officials, and potentially their White House colleagues — a violation of the Federal Records Act.”
‘Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions’
In a letter this week to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Ernst details the emails her office has obtained to date revealing that Biden officials, apparently led by the SBA’s top lawyer, developed strategies to explain how Planned Parenthood qualified for Paycheck Protection Program Loans.
An email from SBA General Council Peggy Hamilton, dated April 30, 2021, appears to be the first with the subject line, “Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions” in the subject line. Note that the reference to the small business loan program and the abortion provider are in parentheses, making requests for communications about the Covid relief program nonresponsive, or not relevant to key records search terms. The agency arguably would not have to turn over the requested information because, understandably, “Benghazi” would not be in the Freedom of Information Act request.
Source: Senate Small Business Committee
Hamilton’s email was part of a months-long thread about Planned Parenthood’s SBA loans, as well as the abortion giant’s loan forgiveness requests.
“The context of Hamilton’s email, as subsequent SBA emails elucidate, is whether or not the Biden administration would require the repayment of COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans made to potentially ineligible Planned Parenthood affiliates and how the SBA would respond to Congressional inquiries over its decisions,” Ernst’s letter states.
The loans were meant for employers with less than 500 employees, designed to help cover the paychecks for employees of small businesses hit hard by the pandemic and the destructive government-ordered lockdowns that accompanied it. Republican lawmakers, upon learning of PPP loans going to to the abortion industrial complex, demanded President Donald Trump’s DOJ at the time investigate which Planned Parenthood facilities received forgivable loans.
“These Planned Parenthood entities self-certified eligibility for these loans despite the clear ineligibility under the statutory text of the CARES Act,” Republican senators wrote in a letter to then-Attorney General Bill Barr. The CARES Act was the first massive infusion of panic cash thrown about to deal with Covid and the fear attached to it.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America denied any wrongdoing, asserting that some independent operations were awarded loans under the “eligibility rules established by the CARES Act and the Small Business Administration (SBA).”
‘Yes, Let’s Talk Benghazi’
Over the next year, Republicans sought answers to what they described as the “unlawful participation of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)”.
At the end of April 2021, Biden SBA officials began their “Benghazi” conversations.
“Can I schedule a meeting so we can decision Benghazi (Planned Parenthood)?” Hamilton, the SBA’s general counsel, wrote in an email to SBA Chief of Staff Antwaun Griffin,” according to documents obtained by Ernst.
“Yes, let’s talk Benghazi,” Griffin replies. The bureaucrat’s top qualification seems to have been his service to President Barack Obama’s Georgia campaign. It’s clear from the emails that they are not talking about the Libyan port city.
Source: Senate Small Business Committee
In early May of that year, Hamilton sent out an eight-point plan, including “reviewing loans to non-profit PPP applicants to decision whether affiliation bars eligibility.” (Apparently decision used as a verb was part of the leftist lexicon in the Biden administration.) As Ernst notes in her letter, prior “SBA decisions were that Planned Parenthood itself and many of its affiliates applying for small business loans, were too large for the program due to their corporate relationship structure and affiliation.”
All under the subject line “Benghazi,” the SBA officials discussed how to explain it all to increasingly frustrated Republicans in Congress.
The emails show that the “WH” — presumably the White House — “has been engaged.”
“Need to inform WH as decisions are made. No further action required,” Hamilton wrote in an email. Ernst said it is possible that White House officials “may have helped conceal official federal records.”
The original damage in taxpayer-funded loans to the abortion giant was tagged at more than $90 million. But the Biden administration, according to Ernst, allowed other Planned Parenthood operations to draw down a second round of PPP small business loans, with the adjusted total of all issued loans at north of $120 million.
“We now know that after the SBA Biden officials met, planned, and strategized (over “Benghazi”), keeping the White House involved, approximately $90 million in Planned Parenthood SBA PPP loans and interest on the loans were forgiven by the Biden administration,” Ernst wrote in her letter to the acting AG.
“With the records detailed here, and many more I’ve obtained, perhaps now we know why the Biden administration did not want to share its Planned Parenthood records with Congress,” the letter concludes.
Source: Senate Small Business Committee
The New ‘Benghazi’ Scandal
As Ernst calls for an investigation into the SBA’s actions, a one-year ban on Medicaid funds for abortion facilities is set to expire — on the Fourth of July. Planned Parenthood lost about a half-billion dollars in federal Medicaid payments, money that pro-life advocates say must remain out of the abortion factory’s hands.
The new “Benghazi” scandal should light a fire under pro-life Republicans to find a way to extend the ban.
“This is now a basic pro-life policy expectation and the GOP base overwhelmingly supports it,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “We urge Congress to stand strong and do everything in its power to pass a reconciliation bill that keeps Big Abortion defunded. Taxpayers should never be forced to fund the brutality of abortion.”
Ernst said Biden administration officials need to be held accountable for, at the least, obfuscating important records that congress and the public have a right to see. Under U.S. Code, anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to,” conceal federal records face fines and imprisonment of up to three years.
“I’ve already exposed the Biden administration’s blatant disregard for transparency, but this potential cover-up demands answers,” the Iowa senator said in a press release.
