wp-login.php redirects to itself

HI – and thanks in advance.
I have read many posts on this topic and tried many different things.
Here is the issue.

I moved a copy of my client’s site to my servers so that I can revamp it and move it back. I’ve done this many times before but this time – I don’t know what is happening.

I moved the theme and DB manually the first time and changed the home and site URLs via PHPMyAdmin. But every time I tried to login at wp-login.php the option values would change back to the original values and I would get redirected back to wp-login.php on the live site.

I added

define('WP_HOME','https://174.122.37.130/~whalecom');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://174.122.37.130/~whalecom');

to my wp-config.

Still redirecting but now to https://174.122.37.130/~whalecom/wp-login.php

I deleted htaccess

Still redirecting.
I deleted the whole site and started again and used WP clone this time on a fresh new install.

Still redirecting.

I suspected maybe it was plugin settings in the db as there was a plugin called “Redirection” so I dropped those tables.

Still redirecting.

Added siteurl settings to wp-config and deleted htaccess from new.

Still redirecting.

This is the query string:
https://174.122.37.130/~whalecom/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2F174.122.37.130%2F~whalecom%2Fwp-admin%2Fprofile.php&reauth=1

ANy hints, clues help – super appreciated!