Tag: Secretary of State Pompeo

Pompeo Turns Presidential Transition to His Advantage

Many suspect that the secretary of state is already eyeing a 2024 presidential bid. And he appears to be using his last days in office to promote it.

DURING SECRETARY OF State Mike Pompeo’s tour through Europe and the Middle East last month, officials managing the trip mistakenly released a document to journalists traveling with him that contained an unusual phrase to describe U.S. policy toward Israel: the “Pompeo Doctrine.”

Recent administrations going back to Harry Truman have been associated with foreign policy doctrines, but traditional protocol in naming them defers to the president – not the chief diplomat. And Pompeo’s staff quickly seemed to sense the presumptuousness, redacting the document and instructing reporters not to share it. State Department officials have repeatedly declined to answer questions about the term on the record and privately discourage its use in the public sphere.

The reference could have been employed as a joke or a private aside among the chief diplomat, his staff and friendly officials at the newly located U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem during his stop to tout Israeli businesses in the contested West Bank. Or it could have been an unguarded look at the scope of his ambitions. Continue reading.

Ex-Pompeo staffers asked to sign letter against ‘smear campaign’

The Hill logoFormer House staffers to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are being asked to sign a letter offering him support after a “smear campaign” that he and his wife asked staffers to carry out trivial tasks such as bringing him lunch or getting his dry cleaning.

The letter obtained by The Hill says Pompeo, while serving as a House member from Kansas, picked up his own dry cleaning and that if there was a deviation, it was to maximize his time with constituents.

The effort comes after Pompeo asked for the firing of Steve Linick, the inspector general (IG) to the State Department. President Trump then ordered that Linick be removed. Continue reading.

Pompeo’s business deals with foreign-government companies

Washington Post logo“I ran a small business that made machine parts for the aerospace industry. And I spent a fair amount of time in Bangalore and in Chennai working with HAL — with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited — to sell products we — a small joint venture.”

— Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, remarks at the India Ideas Summit, June 12, 2019

“Question: Do you stand by the statement you made in your SSCI questionnaire that for the previous ten years you had not been involved in any financial or business transactions with any entity controlled by a foreign government? Answer: Yes.”

— Question for the Record (QFR), Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of Pompeo to be secretary of state, April 12, 2018

A line in a recent lengthy profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the New Yorker caught our attention: “[David] Murfin named Pompeo president of Sentry International, an oil-services firm that manufactured parts in China and elsewhere and sold them in the U.S. One Sentry joint venture was with a subsidiary of the Chinese national oil firm Sinopec, although Pompeo later told the Senate that he had no business ties to foreign government-owned entities.”

View the complete August 29 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

U.S. reduces refugee ceiling to 30,000 for 2019

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday that the U.S. will limit refugee admission to 30,000 in 2019, down from 45,000 in 2018. When Trump took office, the refugee cap stood at 110,000.

The big picture: It’s the smallest cap placed on the refugee program since it was created in 1980.

View the complete September 17 post on the Axios.com website here.

North Korea calls U.S. attitude toward talks ‘gangster-like’ and ‘cancerous,’ rejecting Pompeo’s assessment

The following article by John Hudson and Carol Morello was posted on the Washington Post website July 7, 2018:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met North Korean officials in Pyongyang on July 6, hoping to “fill in” details on denuclearization. (Reuters)

TOKYO — In a sharp signal that denuclearization negotiations with North Korea will be drawn out and difficult, Pyongyang on Saturday lambasted the U.S. stance as regrettable, gangster-like and cancerous, directly contradicting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s rosy assessment that his two days of talks had been “productive.”

A harsh statement from an unnamed spokesman for the Foreign Ministry was carried on the state-run Korea Central News Agency just hours after Pompeo left Pyongyang on Saturday and told reporters that significant progress had been made “in every element” of what he characterized as “good-faith negotiations.” Pyongyang crushed that appraisal, saying the United States had betrayed the spirit of the June 12 Singapore summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The U.S. side came up only with its unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization,” the statement said.

View the complete article on the Washington Post website here.