Folks, we’ve covered a lot of insane government scandals in this space. We’ve watched agencies lie, cheat, shred documents, and gaslight the American public with the confidence of a teenager who just discovered hair gel. But what dropped this week might be the single most perfectly absurd piece of government corruption we’ve ever seen — because the Biden-era Small Business Administration was hiding $90 million in loans to Planned Parenthood, and the codeword they used in internal emails to keep it secret was… “Benghazi.”
Yes. Benghazi. The same word they spent a decade telling us was a “debunked right-wing conspiracy theory” and a “Republican obsession.” The same word that got you flagged as a tinfoil-hat lunatic at Thanksgiving dinner if you brought it up after 2015. They took that word — *their* scandal, *their* failure, *their* dead Americans — and turned it into an inside joke so they could move your tax dollars to abortion clinics without anyone noticing. If irony were a fuel source, this revelation could power the Eastern Seaboard through winter.
Here’s what we know. A new report that broke on April 28th reveals that officials at the Small Business Administration under Biden deliberately funneled approximately $90 million in loans to Planned Parenthood affiliates. Now, the SBA’s entire stated purpose is to help small businesses — your local diner, your neighbor’s landscaping company, the guy who fixes lawnmowers out of his garage. Planned Parenthood, which rakes in over $1.5 billion in annual revenue and receives north of $600 million in government funding every single year, is not a small business. It’s a corporate behemoth with a lobbying arm that could bench-press most Fortune 500 companies.
But here’s where it gets truly special. The officials involved knew — *knew* — that these loans were politically radioactive. They knew that if the words “Planned Parenthood” showed up in internal communications, somebody with a functioning brain might flag it. So they needed a code. A secret word. Something nobody would question or search for in a FOIA request. And the word they chose? Benghazi.
Think about that for a second. Somewhere in the bowels of a federal agency, a group of bureaucrats sat around a table — or more likely a Zoom call, because these people can’t even conspire in person — and somebody said, “What if we call the Planned Parenthood money ‘Benghazi’?” And instead of anyone in the room saying, “That’s deranged,” they all nodded. Maybe somebody laughed. Maybe they high-fived. These are the people who had access to your checking account.
We spent years being told that Benghazi was nothing. A nothingburger. Move along, nothing to see here, why are Republicans so obsessed with four dead Americans in Libya? Hillary Clinton sat in front of Congress and said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The entire media-political complex treated anyone who cared about Benghazi like they were chasing Bigfoot through the woods with a butterfly net. And now we find out that inside the government, “Benghazi” became slang for “the thing we’re hiding from taxpayers.” They weren’t embarrassed by the scandal. They were *entertained* by it.
Let’s talk numbers, because $90 million isn’t Monopoly money — even though the Biden administration treated it that way. That’s $90 million in SBA loans that were supposed to go to actual small businesses. That’s money that could have gone to a family restaurant trying to survive post-COVID, or a veteran opening a machine shop, or a single mom launching a cleaning service. Instead, it went to an organization that already gets more federal money than most agencies and has the political connections to make the Corleone family jealous.
And the loan structure itself was designed to be untraceable. By running the money through the SBA’s lending programs rather than direct congressional appropriations, the Biden team bypassed the normal oversight mechanisms. Congress didn’t vote on it. The public didn’t know about it. The only reason we know now is because investigators started pulling on threads that the previous administration thought they’d tied into neat little bows.
Here’s what really burns, though. This wasn’t some rogue employee going off-script. The use of a codeword — a deliberate, agreed-upon codeword — tells you this was coordinated. Multiple people were in on it. Multiple people sent and received emails using “Benghazi” as shorthand for “the $90 million we’re shoveling to Planned Parenthood.” This was a system. A process. A conspiracy, if we’re being honest, and we are, because somebody has to be.
Now, we’ll hear the usual defenses. “Planned Parenthood provides vital healthcare services.” Sure. And the Pentagon provides vital defense services, but if they started hiding $90 million in off-the-books payments using the codeword “Watergate,” someone might have a question or two. The issue isn’t what Planned Parenthood does or doesn’t do. The issue is that federal officials deliberately concealed the transfer of $90 million in public funds and thought it was so funny they named it after a scandal where Americans died.
Remember: these are the same people who lectured us about “norms” and “institutions” and “the rule of law” for four straight years. These are the same people who impeached a president for a phone call. These are the same people who told us that democracy itself was at stake if we didn’t trust the bureaucracy. And behind closed doors, they were running a shadow funding operation with the comedic sensibility of a college fraternity and the ethics of a pawn shop.
The real question now is accountability. Who authorized these loans? Who came up with the codeword? Who sent those emails? And most importantly — will anyone face consequences, or will this get the usual Washington treatment where everybody acts shocked for a week and then a celebrity does something stupid and we all move on?
We’re not moving on. We’re going to keep saying “Benghazi” — not as a punchline, like they did, but as a reminder. A reminder that the people who told us to trust them were laughing at us the entire time. A reminder that $90 million of our money was stolen in broad daylight and hidden behind a word they spent years telling us didn’t matter.
Benghazi mattered then. It matters now. And so does every single dollar they tried to bury.