Biden administration officials used a codeword in internal emails when discussing small business loans to Planned Parenthood affiliates, according to emails revealed Monday by the Senate’s Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee Chairwoman Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). In a letter, Ernst referred the documents to the U.S. Department of Justice so that they can investigate whether Small Business Administration (SBA) officials “violated federal law by concealing or attempting to conceal federal records and by seeking to evade Congressional and public record inquiries.”

The embarrassing episode dates back to the folly-filled chapters of the COVID panic, when Congress primed the pump for future inflation by indiscriminately dispensing piles of cash, while able workers were ordered to stay home on their couches.

The easily predictable result was untold numbers of fraudulent cash-grabs. In one high-profile case, the DOJ in November 2025 indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) for stealing $5 million in COVID-related FEMA funds, which she then laundered to her 2021 congressional campaign.

More recently, the SBA has sought to claw back remaining money improperly dispensed under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was intended to protect the ability of small businesses to meet payroll while their employees were not allowed to go to work. On Friday, SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler announced that “the SBA referred 562,000 borrowers to @USTreasury for collection on $22.2 BILLION in potentially fraudulent pandemic-era loans, marking the LARGEST debt referral in SBA history.”

Among the improper PPP payments were loans to 38 Planned Parenthood affiliates totaling $88 million. By May 2020 — still under the first Trump administration — Republican Congressmen had already identified these improper loans. They eventually cornered the SBA into agreeing that local affiliates of national organizations did not meet the requirements for the small business loan program. However, the Planned Parenthood affiliates never returned the money, and 34 of the loans were eventually forgiven under the Biden administration.

In early 2021, Republican senators hounded the Biden administration for information on the status of these loans. As the Ernst letter records, Republicans asked for updates on February 3, 2021, then February 12, March 24, March 25, April 15, and April 16.

The Biden SBA realized they would have to provide some sort of answer eventually. On April 30, 2021, then-SBA General Counsel Peggy Hamilton sent an email titled “Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions,” which listed “Respond to Hill” among the decisions to be reached.

“While ‘PPP’ in Hamilton’s email records is likely a reference to the SBA loan program, ‘PPH’ is a citation without any traceable origin,” Ernst argued. “The abortion providers are often referred to as PPFA, for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or PP, but not PPH. By adding an H to PP, there may be an additional attempt by Hamilton to intentionally conceal federal records from searches by avoiding Planned Parenthood’s common abbreviation.”

Hours after the first email was sent, Hamilton sent a direct message to then-SBA Chief of Staff Antwaun Griffin, asking, “Can I schedule a meeting so we can decision Benghazi (Planned Parenthood)?” This message provides further confirmation that “Benghazi” was code for “Planned Parenthood.” Griffin responded one minute later, “Yes, let’s talk Benghazi.”

The email chain titled, “Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions,” ran on for months. In a May 4 email attached to the chain, Hamilton ordered “work on reviewing loans to non-profit PPP applicants to decide whether affiliation bars eligibility,” the exact question at issue on the Planned Parenthood loans.

On May 10, a letter from 10 Republican senators requested “unredacted copies of any and all agency decisions, determinations, guidance, policies, and/or documents related to PPP loans to PPFA affiliates.” In the ensuing two weeks, SBA officials sent at least four emails under the “Re: Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions” email chain discussing their response to this inquiry.

“The context of these emails — official federal records sent by staff at the highest echelons of SBA — leaves no doubt that the draft, the discussion, the ‘Benghazi’ decisions were about Planned Parenthood and their SBA loans, and how SBA was responding to congressional inquiries about their multi-million-dollar decisions,” the Ernst letter argued.

In a May 26 hearing, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) challenged then-SBA administrator Isabella Guzman directly, “You believe you are above the law. … It looks like you are specifically hiding this information from us.”

On May 28, then-SBA Deputy Associate Administrator for the Office of Capital Access John A. Miller set up a Microsoft Teams meeting “to discuss forgiveness” with the title, “Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions.”

“With his chosen event title and subject line,” Ernst noted, “if someone tried to search for government records related to Planned Parenthood’s loans and loan forgiveness — to fulfill the Congressional records requests — this meeting would not have appeared, as again it was concealed as ‘Benghazi.’”

On June 29, Administrator Guzman herself organized a Microsoft Teams meeting titled “Benghazi (PPP/PPH) Decisions.”

“Recipients and respondents in the SBA email chains knew Planned Parenthood was not in or even remotely related to Benghazi,” Ernst noted. “Yet by continuing the email chain and scheduling meetings, it appears several Biden political appointees, and some SBA employees, were knowingly concealing or attempting to conceal their records relating to Planned Parenthood.”

Ernst observed that the Biden White House may also be implicated. A May 4 email in the chain recorded that “WH has been engaged.” Said Ernst, “If the Biden White House was informed through emails that also referred to Planned Parenthood’s SBA loan decisions as ‘Benghazi,’ White House officials may also have helped conceal official federal records.”

The letter cites 18 U.S.C. §2071 as the basis for a DOJ referral, “an individual who ‘willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to,’ conceal any federal record can be fined and imprisoned for up to three years.”

“Why the codewords?” Ernst asked Monday.

“What does Benghazi have to do with Planned Parenthood? It appears the Biden SBA used it as a codename to hide the $90 million in taxpayer funds they gifted to the abortion provider,” Senator Ernst said in a statement provided to TWS. “This potential cover-up demands answers. I’m calling for a DOJ investigation to determine if Biden officials were illegally concealing federal records over their egregious handout to Planned Parenthood.”

If the DOJ opens an investigation, it will complement efforts already undertaken by the second Trump administration’s SBA. On March 7, 2025, Ernst and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) asked the SBA to explain how Planned Parenthood had wrongly received tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and why the Biden administration forgave 34 of those loans.

On January 22, 2026, the SBA issued letters to the 38 Planned Parenthood affiliates, “requiring them to produce documentation proving they were eligible to receive more than $88 million in COVID-era relief.”

By publishing time, the SBA had not responded to a TWS request for comment.

How Planned Parenthood affiliates improperly received COVID-era small business loans is a question pro-lifers have wanted answers to for nearly six years now. Why Biden administration officials appeared to hide their discussion of the matter behind unrelated code language is a new question, also of great importance.

“It strains credulity to think SBA’s General Counsel Peggy Hamilton was doing anything other than hiding her Planned Parenthood records from Congressional and public scrutiny and oversight,” Ernst wrote. “That’s not something she is allowed to do under federal law, and, as a lawyer for almost three decades, she knew that.”