Andrea Mitchell opened the 12:00 pm, EST hour on MSNBC Tuesday by playing footage of State Department staffers preventing her from asking Secretary of State Rex Tillerson questions.

WATCH:

“That was only moments ago on the seventh floor of the State Department,” Mitchell told her audience. “Still no answers from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.”

Mitchell added the State Department is “taking a backseat on national security and is now facing massive budget cuts.”

“This afternoon I’ll be at the first State Department briefing, the first in six weeks since the inaugural,” she continued. “An absence of public diplomacy not seen since 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was president, when this tradition started of speaking out from the platform here at the State Department to the rest of the world.”

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