General Discussion

lostnfound

(16,177 posts) Thu Feb 17, 2022, 10:16 AM Feb 2022

Biden admin PROSECUTES fraud that Trump IGNORED. WP uses passive sentences to obscure blame.

(This is my critique of a WP article on an important topic. I suspect an editor was at fault, and not the reporter, because the writing gets crystal clear, 37 paragraphs down.)

This Washington Post article begins with a description of THREE sets of crimes but does not identify WHEN they occurred.
->The “Who” and “what” is there, but not the “When”.
->The article does NOT begin with “Biden DOJ prosecutes fraud that began under Trump watch”.
->The next paragraph does NOT tell us much about prosecutions.

The 4th paragraph — the framing paragraph for the whole story — that the WP editors chose;

The cases and charges, each announced over the past month, count among hundreds involving a slew of programs enacted by Congress in the darkest days of the coronavirus pandemic — money dispatched with an urgency at the time that it is now putting Washington’s watchdogs to the test.

Whew. What convoluted quasi-passive framing. ”The cases and charges count among hundreds involving a slew…”. I’m asleep now. And the money? Well, it was “dispatched with an urgency”. Picture the money being pushed out of the airplanes, raining down from the skies…who’s flying those airplanes? I can’t quite see… i read on hoping to learn, but instead I’m supppsed to picture something called “urgency” putting Washington watchdogs to the test…What kind of test?

I am a CITIZEN (not just consumer) of the United States of Amnesia (trademark Gore Vidal) so I barely remember some distant battle where the GOP wanted no oversight and no controls over a giant slush fund and the Democrats were insisting on oversight and controls, and the Dems extracted one big concession that there would be records kept of all the money handed out under that program. WHICH IS THE ONLY REASON THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION CAN NOW FIND AND PROSECUTE THIS FRAUD.

And we have the vague troubles…

9th paragraph: The troubles are laid bare in stinging federal oversight reports issued over the past year.

11th paragraph: The troubles may represent just the tip of the iceberg, according to federal officials and outside experts, who together warn the U.S. government could face years of expensive and intricate sleuthing work.

24th paragraph: The trouble dates to the earliest days of the pandemic…

At paragraph 14 we see the first subhead: “There are huge voids”. Uhoh, present tense! they are there now. What voids? I squint to find the voids they are talking about. I won’t find out until paragraph 26. “There are huge voids, and more comprehensive data is step one for our ability to watchdog,” said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, an ethics-in-government nonprofit organization.

At 25 paragraphs in: ‘

’By 2021, Biden’s top aides intensified the work to improve the oversight process, particularly after the passage of the American Rescue Plan last March.”

=> By 2021, Biden got inaugurated (amid an attempted insurrection-oopsie!) …and WITHIN 2 MONTHS began tightening oversight. Is that the headline? Within 2 months of taking office Biden ACTED. What actions? I don’t know, but I guess they left voids.

NO REAL CLARITY ON AGENCIES, HOW THEY FIT IN. AND VERY LITTLE POLITICAL CONTEXT

One of the newer federal watchdogs, a collection of inspectors general known as the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), immediately set about after spring 2020 to create a public-facing hub for tracking stimulus spending. It stood up in a matter of weeks a transparency portal that mimicked the tools created to document spending authorized in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Michael Horowitz, the chairman of the PRAC who also serves as the inspector general for the Justice Department, said the organization had worked diligently to stand up its public portal and retain an entire analytics team to monitor the data.

Elsewhere, federal oversight bodies have been neglected or are newly at risk of becoming defunct — even before their mission is complete. A congressional panel chartered in 2020 to oversee the Federal Reserve’s lending programs, for example, never even reached full strength after Democrats and Republicans could not agree on a chairperson. The commission now consists solely of two GOP lawmakers.

In the 37th paragraph, the writing finally gets crystal clear and factual. Doesn’t this suggest that it was probably originally well-written, then butchered by one of the editors? I’d love to see what the reporter’s original version were.

Under the Trump administration, the SBA mounted in a matter of weeks two primary initiatives — the Paycheck Protection Program, which helped companies maintain their payrolls, and a souped-up version of the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, which expanded existing federal offerings to help businesses weather hardship. Facing a hemorrhaging economy, the SBA moved at lightning speed to implement the efforts: In just one 14-day period early in the pandemic, it dispatched 1.7 million loans through PPP totaling more than $343 billion, federal officials said in a review published in January.

 That burst amounted to 14 years’ worth of lending activity for the agency. But the SBA doled out the money without properly verifying applicants and checking them in some cases against long-standing federal blacklists for fraud, investigators would discover in a series of blistering reports and audits soon to come. “Managing COVID 19 stimulus is the greatest overall challenge facing SBA currently,” Ware, the agency’s inspector general, warned in October 2020. 

With PPP, for example, a report last January from the SBA’s inspector general found roughly 55,000 PPP loans worth more than $7 billion had gone to “potentially ineligible businesses." That ultimately “placed taxpayer funds at risk of financial loss and delayed the amount of critical program capital available for eligible businesses” at the time. 

About two months later, Ware and other watchdogs estimated the fuller range of potential fraud across PPP and the SBA’s economic stimulus programs came closer to $80 billion, telling lawmakers in written testimony at the time that he had grown concerned that agency remains “susceptible to significant fraud risks.”

I looked up the three fraud cases on the internet and find that each fraud crime began in April and May 2020. One was arrested on May 7, 2021 — just 4 months into the Biden administration.

The truth hurts too much, maybe. The first 30-35 paragraphs were blurred into a gross disservice. Nice job to whoever wrote what starts around paragraph 37.