Remember the 2015 story of the free “Obamaphones,” that voters in low income areas thought they were getting when Obama won the election?

It’s illegal to give anyone anything of value in exchange for a vote or the promise of a vote. Nevertheless, the watchdogs in the elite press let the story lie there or found ways to explain it as something other than vote-buying.

Was there ever anything to these rumors? The Washington Times Stephen Dinan reported Tuesday that a company the federal government paid to distribute those phones as part of an authorized federal government program “has agreed to pay $13.4 million to settle a case alleging that it doled out devices to tens of thousands of people who didn’t deserve them.”

It’s not clear who got the phones, but according to the U.S. Department of Justice the company’s agent in Florida – a critical state in the 2016 election that Obama ended up winning – “allowed ineligible people to be enrolled” in the program.