Senior Trump administration officials, including then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, intervened to push Treasury Department officials to approve an emergency coronavirus relief loan to a trucking company on national security grounds despite career officials’ objections, a new report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis has found.
According to the report, which was prepared by select committee staff, Trump administration political appointees “flagrantly disregarded” a Defense Department assessment that a trucking company called Yellow Trucking was not “critical to national security” and therefore ineligible for a loan under a program authorised for such companies under the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.
