Of Course they Did

In the final day of his administration, Trump and his Evil Minions™ halted investigations of dozens of cases of PPP fraud from the largest recipients of this aid.

Well, corrupt big business is the Republican base:

An explosive new investigation of data from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) finds that, in Donald Trump’s final days in office, his administration rushed to eliminate oversight for loans which were flagged for potential fraud or further investigation — and wiped flags from nearly every one of the largest PPP loans.

As the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) revealed in a report published Wednesday, over the course of several weeks before President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the Trump administration went on a spree of eliminating flags on PPP loans, the majority of which went directly to personally enriching the richest Americans. Officials in the Small Business Administration (SBA) eliminated 2.7 million flags between December 2020 and January 2021, as the administration was in its lame duck period.

Special preference was given to the largest loans, which often also went to the largest corporations. On January 16, 2021, four days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s SBA wiped 99 percent of special review flags, which were given out to every loan above $2 million for separate investigatory purposes.

These actions are, of course, nakedly corrupt.  These are also, of course, are a manifestation of a core Republican value, "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."*

This is SOP for an outgoing Republican administration: Sabotage investigations of your friends.

^*This is often incorrectly attributed to political scientist Francis M. Wilhoit, but was in fact made by composer also named Frank Wilkoit.