evidence: To start this story at the end: The tip didn't pan out. We never found any reason to believe the official received one of the forgivable loans in the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, meant to keep businesses afloat and preserve jobs during the pandemic. [...] That hunt has been driven by a very public — but incomplete — database of PPP loans, posted by the U.S. Small Business Administration after it was sued by news organizations. Some outlets have set up websites that make the data easily searchable by the general public. [...] Which brings us back to the tip. The tipster, digging through that public data, was intrigued by a $20,000 PPP loan for an unnamed catering business, which was taken out by someone sharing the name of the elected official in Chicago. The loan came from a Florida-based lender which processed a similar PPP loan on the same date for someone else — who happened to have a name very similar to that of someone close to the elected official.