Trump Let Corporations Defraud PPP Loan Program Before Leaving Office

During the lame duck period after the 2020 election, officials in the Trump administration removed 2.7 million "fraud flags" that had been found during audits of the money handed out from the Paycheck Protection Program. Many of these flags were for major corporations that took advantage of the free government handouts, and the Republicans weren't about to let some of their favorite donors get in trouble for defrauding the program. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to a new report from Sharon Jang, writing for Truth Out the Trump Administration in their final weeks in office, right before President Biden was sworn in and Trump got the hell outta Dodge, they removed 2.7 million fraud flags from companies that had been flagged for fraud, potential fraud as part of the paycheck protection program, the PPP loans that were given out in the early days of the pandemic. Now, as you'll recall, those PPP loans were given out to businesses so that they can continue to pay employees so that they could meet expenses even as the economy, you know, was in the toilet, were on lockdowns. People couldn't go to work. PPP was meant so that you didn't have to fire people, and the money in order to be forgiven, had to be spent on legitimate purposes, which included, by the way, paying those people even though they couldn't work.

We have seen rampant fraud from this. In fact, according to this report, 66 to 77% of those loans given out did not make it to the workers at all. Three quarters of it went back into the pockets of those business owners and of course, their shareholders. But this new report with the 2.7 million fraud flags, right, that were removed by Trump people so that these corporations didn't get flagged. These were all for loans in excess of 2 million. So we're not talking about fraud flags removed for actual small businesses, right? It's not your little locally owned pizzeria. It's not the little t-shirt shop down the street. These were major corporations, including by the way, companies like Kanye West's clothing company, lots of flags for all these places. They got millions in PPP loans, free government money investigators, auditors looked at 'em and said, Yeah, we see some fraud here.

And Trump's officials perhaps on his direction, perhaps not, we don't know, But they looked at all this and they said, Nope. Taking it off, taking it off, taking it off. They did that 2.7 million times so that these major, in some cases, multi billion dollar businesses, didn't face any legal action, and they still got their loans forgiven. And the worst part about all this, again, not just that, these were going to millionaires and billionaires and they lined their own pockets and they got away with it. The worst part is, even though we know this now, we can't do anything right? The fraud flags were removed, their forgiveness was approved, it's over. You think the government's gonna go back and say, Okay, well, we'll look at it again. We'll do it one more time. They're not gonna do that. They don't wanna do that because they're fine with the way it is in the

Public being in the dark about it, because most people aren't gonna see this. Most people aren't gonna read the report. Most people will never know that this happened. You will, thank God I know it. You know Sharon Jang, again, writing for truth out that a phenomenal job telling people exactly what happened, but only a tiny fraction of people in this country are gonna know that that happened. The rest of them will continue going on in blissful ignorance, not knowing how badly these corporations screwed over the federal government, and as usual got away with it.