After the nation learned that the presidential election was infiltrated by Russian hackers who wanted nothing more than to put Vladimir TrumPutin in office, the State Department was allocated $120 million to prevent it from happening again.
Want to know how much the State Department has spent in TrumPutin’s first year in office?
Zero. Nada. Nothing. Zip.
That’s right—not only do we know that the election was tampered with, but turns out that the State Department was allotted a large amount of money to try to prevent it from happening again but has not spent one dime. It hasn’t even fake-spent the money to act as if it’s trying to look legit.
According to the New York Times, the whole mess sounds a lot like what the kids call fumbling:
At the end of the Obama administration, Congress directed the Pentagon to send $60 million to the State Department so it could coordinate governmentwide efforts, including those by the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to counter anti-democratic propaganda by Russia and China. This messaging effort is separate from other potential government actions like cyberattacks.
Mr. Tillerson spent seven months trying to decide whether to spend any of the money. The State Department finally sent a request to the Defense Department on Sept. 18 to transfer the funds, but with just days left in the fiscal year, Pentagon officials decided that the State Department had lost its shot at the money.
With another $60 million available for the next fiscal year, the two departments dickered for another five months over how much the State Department could have.
In the end, nothing has been done, and all of this comes on the heels of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s warning that Russia was already looking to interfere in the 2018 midterms.
“If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Tillerson told Fox News last month. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”
Oh, Mr. Tillerson, I have an idea of how we can attempt to pre-empt Russian interference. In fact, I have 120 million ideas. Also, Tillerson looks like every evil oil baron in every soap opera on ABC.