Mike Pompeo-- Far Worse Than You Probably Think

On Saturday, Wall Street Journal reporter Vivian Salama wrote that Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs "was set to tell House impeachment investigators Saturday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials stymied a show of solidarity for the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after President Trump had her removed." He's another one who knows are about the quo in Trump's Ukrainian quid pro quo and he's going to prove deadly not just for Trump but for Pompeo as well. Since Trump didn't invent Pompeo, I want to remind you about him if you have a minute. We've been writing about him since 2010, ever since the Koch brothers managed to get him into Congress as another one of their personal emissaries (like Mick Mulvaney) on Capitol Hill. In 2011 the Washington Monthly introduced the newly-elected Kansan as the The congressman from Koch Industries. At the time, Steve Benen presented him as a freshman "trying to kill a consumer-product-safety database, allowing Americans to go online and access free information about the safety records of household products. The measure was easily approved with bipartisan support, but the freshman Republican perceived it as anti-business. After all, if consumers are made aware of potentially dangerous products, Americans might not buy them. How can the manufacturers of those products make a profit under conditions like that? As it turned out, the Koch brothers were the ones who wanted the online consumer-product-safety database scuttled, and Pompeo was happy to do their bidding-- he represents the district where Koch Industries is located, and the Koch brothers and their political action committee were his most generous campaign contributors."

Back then I didn't know much about Pompeo, who most Americans never heard of 'til Trump plucked him out of Congress early in 2017 to run the CIA. Other than the well-established fact that he's a virulent racist, all I knew about him was that he was a multimillionaire Teabagger and total corporate shill who's long been in bed with the Koch Brothers-- his top campaign donors through various front groups they control and fund and who placed one of their employees, Mark Chenoweth, as his chief of staff.

When Trump decided to appoint him Secretary of State in 2018, every Democrat but conservative butt-wipes Claire McCaskill (MO), Joe Manchin (WV), Joe Donnelly (IN), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Doug Jones (AL) and Bill Nelson (FL) voted against confirmation. McCaskill, Donnelly, Heitkamp and Nelson faced the voters that year and, despite it being a Democratic wave election, all 4, unable to explain votes like that, were defeated for reelection. During his first election, Pompeo called his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Raj Goyle, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio, a "turban topper" who "could be a muslim, a hindu, a buddhist etc who knows." No doubt that kind of vicious racism went into Trump's decision to name him Secretary of State.





Garrett Graff, writing yesterday for Wired reported how the Ukraine mess has derailed Pompeo's out-sized political ambitions. He wrote that anyone watching this month's interview for a Tennessee TV station, "you could almost see Mike Pompeo’s political life flash before his eyes as he sat for seven minutes, almost unblinking, under withering cross-examination by-- of all people, he must’ve thought-- a local Nashville TV reporter."

With question after question, WSMV’s Nancy Amons grilled the increasingly uncomfortable secretary of state about the terrible week he’d been having-- the resignation of a top lieutenant, one of the few career foreign service officers who had steadied Pompeo’s ship at state; President Donald Trump’s surprise decision last week to abandon the Kurdish allies who had helped defeat ISIS in Syria and leave them to face annihilation at the hands of a Turkish invasion; the controversy over the recall of the ambassador to Ukraine, who also that day was testifying on Capitol Hill about the alleged conspiracy theory-laden smear campaign that had ended her assignment in Kyiv early; and about the mysterious role of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, and his mission this year to get Ukraine to investigate the Biden family, possibly in exchange for US military aid.

It probably wasn’t what Pompeo had expected while he was in Tennessee speaking to a Christian conference-- the type of friendly audience Pompeo has increasingly sought. As he’s traveled the country over the last year, the secretary has made a point of engaging with local media (whose questions are generally friendlier) and, not coincidentally, the encounters have the potential to be more helpful to the political future Pompeo seems to be carving out for himself as Trump’s heir apparent.

During a spring swing through Iowa, he did four local radio interviews and more recently has been courting the local press in Kansas, his adopted home state, where he’s keeping open the possibility of running for US Senate next year. Yet given this fall’s momentous events-- much of which involves a budding impeachment inquiry for Pompeo’s boss that has Pompeo himself in the middle of the scandal-- the local TV news interview was far more challenging. The secretary of state, all but visibly seething, muttered non sequiturs, repeated vacuous talking points, and at one point told Amons it sounded like she was working for the Democratic National Committee. In fact, she was doing journalism, trying to pry the truth from one of the administration’s fiercest defenders.

Last month, as news of a whistle-blower from the intelligence community began to circulate in Washington, it would have been hard to find someone in the Trump orbit whose political future seemed brighter than Mike Pompeo's. The 55-year-old former congressman from Kansas has deftly navigated the chaos atop the executive branch to position himself as the Trump administration’s unicorn-- the almost mythic figure who has lasted inside the president’s inner circle. This is, after all, a government where senior officials come and go sometimes by the week. But Pompeo actually earned a promotion along the way, moving from CIA director to secretary of state.

Nearly three years into the administration, Pompeo effectively is the last man standing, having outlasted and vanquished all rivals for Trump’s ear on foreign policy, the president’s tireless, give-no-quarter chief crusader, a political pugilist in a role normally reserved for thoughtful diplomacy, a happy warrior Trump dispatched to tongue-lash European allies over China and Huawei, to scold Iran over its nuclear ambitions, to glad-hand with North Korea, to boost Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, to reassure Saudi Arabia that its relationship with the Trump administration would remain copacetic, despite the government’s alleged killing of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and to clean up with Denmark in the wake of Trump’s aborted effort to purchase Greenland.

Pompeo learned along the way that there was only one way to survive under Trump: to be as enthusiastic about Trump as Trump himself. Or, as Pompeo summed up his daily job to me in one of our conversations, “you go execute and you do it with all the energy and heart and passion and integrity you can muster.” Anything less, after all, and one might face the ignominious end of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson-- who was reportedly sitting on the toilet when he got a call informing him he was about to be fired by presidential tweet. As one former senior intelligence leader said when I mentioned Pompeo, shaking his head: “He’s made his deal with the devil.”

The deal he’d made, after all, was clear. Pompeo was a man in a hurry, standing uniquely astride the three critical strands of the modern GOP: the Kansas Koch brothers who have funded much of the party’s next generation; evangelical Christians, a group that has remained fiercely loyal to Trump; and Trump’s red-hat-wearing, red-meat-loving MAGA “America First” nationalist base. Before the Ukraine scandal engulfed Washington, it appeared that his loyal service to Trump had left Pompeo, perhaps better than anyone, in first position for the shadow primary to succeed Donald Trump in 2024 as heir apparent.

But when the details of the whistle-blower complaint emerged-- that Trump, working with Giuliani, had been trying to pressure Ukraine to drum up dirt on the Bidens and also to chase a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Ukrainians, not Russians, hacked the 2016 election-- Pompeo’s role in the controversy has grown with nearly every passing day.

After an initially ambiguous statement, the secretary of state finally admitted that he’d listened in real time to the now infamous July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, where the US president leaned on Zelensky to help Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr smear Hunter Biden. He’d heard, in real time, Trump utter the phrase “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” the smoking-gun utterance that caused such consternation inside the White House, intelligence community, and Justice Department as word spread of Trump’s conversation and tipped House Democrats over the edge to begin a formal impeachment inquiry.

Damning text messages exchanged by two State Department officials added fuel to the controversy, as did the congressional hearing about the State Department’s rushed recall of ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Pompeo’s decision not to speak out on behalf of those caught up in the scandal and not to defend the integrity of career foreign service officers was reported to have ultimately triggered the resignation this month of Michael McKinley, a State Department lifer whose appointment to Pompeo’s inner circle last year was initially seen inside the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a hopeful sign.

Add in the fact that nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy goals that Pompeo has championed appear unfulfilled-- from Iran, North Korea, and China to the unfolding debacle in Syria that Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were dispatched last week to calm-- and the growing calls from the intelligentsia in Washington for Pompeo to resign, and it’s hard not to imagine that by the time he sat down to face Amons that Pompeo was wondering whether the implicit deal he’d made with Trump would lead him to the White House-- or, like nearly all others who have served this president, his eventual embarrassing ouster?

Quite the practiced liar, isn't he? More people should get to know what kind of a stinking pile of diarrhea Pompeo is. Lindsay Wise, also writing for the Wall Street Journal, noted that Pompeo had talked with Charles Koch on Friday about quitting as Secretary of State and running for the open Kansas Senate seat. That's him in Nancy Ohanian's drawing-- Disorganized Crime-- third from the left, between William Barr and Señor Trumpanzee himself: