The moment “they” announced COVID loans, it felt like another laundromat for fraud. And it was. Locally, we’ve had one high-profile case involving Andy Sanborn. Andy was just a Concord business owner in 2009/2010 when the Tea Party rose from nothing. He was showing up at the hearing, talking about the long list of new taxes democrats wanted for the Granite State and how it would hurt his business.
He was right then, but over time, Andy became a politician, a State Senator, and then something happened to the Sanborns. They went from system fighters to benefactors. Conflicts of interest piled up until this.
Appearing before Judge Landya McCafferty at the U.S. District Court in Concord, Sanborn admitted to diverting more than $255,000 in COVID-19 relief money from the federal government for personal use, including buying himself a sports car.
It happens. A lot. The lure of other people’s money. If you’ve been paying any attention, you’ll know that we see this more in Blue States than red (NH is technically purple). Democrats have made a habit of defending the fraudsters as if clawing back the money and prosecuting criminal activity isn’t the best way to save the systems they insist we need so much. The patina is not hard to see. No one defends criminals unless they’re in on the scam or just blithering idiots who see the theft of taxpayer dollars as a necessary evil to achieve the advertised good.
The facts are different. We could do a lot more with a lot less, little to no fraud, and all we have to do is turn to the system of private charities that survive on private giving. If there is no guarantee of funding, the industrial complexes that sprout to feed off tax dollars for drug abuse, homelessness, or anything else tend to wither.
As for the COVID loan scandals, I bet you there are a few more in New Hampshire someone ought to be chasing, because the programs were created to be abused. Just look at other states.
So far, the SBA has identified and suspended more than 150,000 borrowers across five states, including Wisconsin, linked to over $10 billion in suspected EIDL and PPP fraud, according to the agency. The largest among these involved the suspension of 112,000 California borrowers in connection with over $8.6 billion in potential fraud.
In Ohio, the SBA suspended 27,000 borrowers tied to $1.1 billion in suspected fraud. Around 6,900 Minnesota borrowers were suspended on suspicion of $400 million in potential fraud. Similar action was taken against 1,500 borrowers in Maine linked to $93 million in loans.
Add this to the growing list of fraud scandals plaguing America that appear to have been ongoing for years. Theft of your hard-earned dollars under the not-so-watchful eye of the Biden administration or Democrats like Chris Pappas, who wants to be a US Senator in exchange for his idle indifference to massive systemic theft.
It’s not entirely his fault. He’s a sock puppet who does what leadership tells him, but that doesn’t mean we should elevate this indifference to the next level. Senator Pappas would likely do very little for New Hampshire or America, given that he is a meek soul playing a bit part in a play run by the far left. Yeah, they’d likely raise some dust to pursue political enemies, something that Dems did in earnest during the Biden years while Mr. Integrity sat on his hands, except perhaps to applaud the partisan politics and political targeting.
Yes, it’s connected, because the same dems who laughed and cheerlead political attacks on Republicans since 2016 are crying that this is what Trump is doing now, but most of the criminals are Democrat adjacent, except for Sanborn. He was a Republican. A former Republican state senator. The feds charged him after the local five families appeared to have been interested in the fraud, but not enough. That’s because New Hampshire’s deep state is as likely as not to have engaged in, or aided and abetted, far more COVID-era fraud than we’ve seen. That’s both sides, by the way, which begs the question. Did Pappas’s restaurant participate in PPP loans or any other COVID-19 shutdown reimbursements?
I didn’t look. Maybe someone should. If he manages to become a US Senator, he’ll be inducted into the Five Families by default, assuming he does the deep-state thing and continues the tradition of protecting their interests. That includes not investigating the fraud that we know has run rampant for many more years than I’ve been working these pages.
It’s deep. Claire Best has exposed a fair share of it. The recent focus on the AG, NHCASDV, Courts, DCYF, and the larger law firms is all connected to it.
We need to get the Feds in here for something other than another Andy Sanborn show trial. NH is great and getting better, but until it can free itself from that ugly underbelly, it will never be as great as it can be.
