(TargetDailyNews.com) – When the government started printing so much money during the pandemic, a lot of it went toward a program intended to help businesses keep staff on the payroll and not go under. Of course, this would not have been necessary if the government had not overridden Constitutional rights with forced lockdowns.
One of those schemes was the Paycheck Protection Program, a series of grants (the government called them “forgivable loans”) to businesses to keep paying staff. But the fraud was rife. Open a news search engine and you’ll find stories from around the country of businesses and local governments being caught in a grab for cash they were not entitled to.
One of these was Shelitha Robertson, the 62-year-old former assistant city attorney for Atlanta. She has been convicted of taking $15 million in PPP money, earning herself a seven-year jail sentence.
The former Atlanta official spent some of the money on luxury goods and bling, including a 10-carat diamond, a motorcycle, and a Rolls Royce. At the same time, she donated $1,000 to the campaign of Fani Willis, the Georgia district attorney who is suing Donald Trump for allegedly interfering in the 2020 election. Willis is caught up in a scandal of her own for having an affair with the prosecutor she hired to carry out the Trump case.
Robertson had a podcast, and her recent words make her sound like a very different person from the one who just got convicted. On “Mommy and Me,” she emphasized the importance of bringing “integrity” to one’s work, and said she chose not to sell her “soul to the devil.”
So she chose an alternate income stream, filing false applications repeatedly through the PPP program to support what she claimed were her four personal businesses. Robertson also gave some of the money to family and friends.
Ryan K. Buchanan, U.S. Attorney, said Robertson was “motivated by greed” and got the money through fraud. The PPP money was meant for “struggling small businesses,” he said.
Copyright 2024, TargetDailyNews.com
