“I have every expectation” that the Russians will try to interfere in the midterm elections, C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo warned during an interview this week at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Russian intelligence agencies continue to spread misinformation in the U.S. and Europe in a larger effort to subvert politics in the West. But, he promised, “we will push back in a way that is sufficiently robust, that the impact they have on our election won’t be great.”

The White House, it seems, didn’t get the memo. On Monday, around the same time that Pompeo’s interview aired, the Trump administration announced that it would not be imposing any new sanctions against foreign companies doing business with blacklisted Russian defense and intelligence bodies as part of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which Congress passed over Donald Trump’s objection last year. Lawmakers had expected that the law would be used to apply additional pressure to the Kremlin after Moscow’s targeted campaign to help defeat Hillary Clinton. Trump, however, only signed the bill under a veto threat, and dismissed it as “deeply flawed.”

Still, the Trump administration eventually complied with a CAATSA requirement that it publish a list of Russian businessmen and politicians with ties to the Kremlin. Ten minutes before a midnight deadline, the government released the names of 114 politicians and 196 oligarchs, each of whom have a net worth of $1 billion or more. But the dilatory timing of the list (which, officials have stressed, is “not a sanctions list”) only underscored Trump’s antipathy towards the law. The administration declined to punish anybody on the list, angering critics. “I’m fed up waiting for this administration to protect our country and our elections,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “They chose instead to let Russia off the hook yet again.”

CAATSA required that sanctions be imposed against large purchasers of Russian arms, but it granted exceptions for a variety of reasons. The exception cited Monday was that the mere existence of the legislation was deterring such dealings, anyway. “We estimate that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. As The New York Times notes, CAATSA presents the Trump administration with a thorny problem: a number of American allies, including India and Turkey, still buy military equipment from Russia.

Republican Senator Bob Corker, who helped write the CAATSA, said he was unconcerned that the administration had not announced new sanctions, and suggested that additional sanctions may yet be in the works. “This is when sanctions season begins, and so they’ll be rolling them out,” he assured reporters Monday. “We feel pretty good about the process.”