Authored by Cameron Cawthorne, originally posted at The Washington Free Beacon,
The Republican National Committee revealed Thursday in a 21-page memo that Hillary Clinton’s State Department spent millions of dollars on lavish goods and initiatives on the taxpayers’ dime.
The State Department spent $5.4 million on a “no-bid contract for crystal stemware” and $630,000 to “increase Facebook likes on four State Department pages.”
The memo also highlighted that the State Department spent more than $600 million on failed projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington Examiner reported.
The projects included a $3.6 million fleet of “unused broadcast TV trucks” in Afghanistan and $167.5 million on “preventable cost overruns while expanding embassy Kabul.”
The State Department spent an additional $9.8 million on purchases the GOP characterized as “frivolous,” such as the $79,000 in taxpayer funds Clinton’s agency used to buy up copies of President Obama’s book or the $53,004 her agency spent on “marble polishing services” at the U.S. embassy in Brasilia “during the summer of 2010.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has previously seized on the State Department’s questionable bookkeeping methods under Clinton when she was secretary of state. In the third presidential debate, Trump said that $6 billion went missing during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, the Examiner noted.
His comments were likely based on a March 2014 memo from the State Department inspector general in which the watchdog noted contract files for projects worth up to $6 billion had disappeared since 2008. With no paper trail to document the progress of those projects, there was no way for the inspector general to verify that the money ended up in the proper place, the watchdog argued.
This memo plays into Trump’s latest push to “Drain the Swamp” as his campaign seeks to shed light on waste, fraud, and abuse among federal agencies.
via http://ift.tt/2eQfs19 Tyler Durden