“In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt. A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don’t know where the money has gone.”
At almost the same time, I caught up with this non-fictional story:
(last week:) “An official close to the NRCC said preliminary reviews of its bank statements and reports to the Federal Election Commission demonstrate clear discrepancies between ‘what [money] we have and what we should have.’ ‘We don’t know if it’s a big number or a small number,’ the official said. ‘It looks like something was stolen. But we don’t have an accurate number. We don’t know.’ .... [T]he committee discovered that no independent audits of the organization’s books had been performed since 2003.”
(today:) “The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars—and possibly as much as $1 million—of the organization’s funds into his personal accounts, GOP officials said yesterday ...”