What We Need to Know About Mike Pompeo
On Tuesday 13 March, President Trump announced via Twitter that he was nominating current CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. With Pompeo’s hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to come sometime in mid-April, Truman Project will be shining light on a new subject area each day where there are outstanding critical questions he must answer and issues he needs to speak to concerning areas of his records that suggest he may not be an appropriate representative of America’s interests and values on the world stage.
Diplomacy with North Korea
President Trump says he wants to negotiate with North Korea now, but at other points in his administration, tensions have flared dramatically between him and Kim Jong Un, and he has even undermined his own former Secretary of State’s efforts to conduct diplomacy.
Does Mike Pompeo support the current plan for a Trump-Kim summit? What conditions would lead him to conclude that diplomatic options between the United States and North Korea were ‘exhausted?’ And would he ever support National Security Advisor John Bolton’s calls for a preemptive or preventive war against Pyongyang?
Islamophobia
President Trump’s disdain for Islam, Muslims, and American Muslims has been exhaustively documented. Less discussed, however, is Mike Pompeo’s own track record of Islamophobia. Pompeo has appeared on the radio show of anti-Muslim whackadoodle Frank Gaffney multiple times (where he agreed former President Obama had “an affinity” for ISIS), attacked American Muslim leaders for failing to denounce terror attacks (which they have done time and again), and received an award from leading Islamophobic group ACT for America (after purportedly advocating for them to brief members of Congress). Does Pompeo still stand by the views of anti-Islam conspiracy theorists like Gaffney and fear-mongers like ACT? And how will Pompeo set his own prejudice aside when he is expected to work with diplomats representing the approximately 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world, among them key security and economic partners of the United States?
Politicization of Intelligence
Reports emerged fairly early in the Trump Administration that the president was searching for intelligence that would allow him to undermine or withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Because of these reports, it is worth discussing that under Director Mike Pompeo in November 2017, the CIA re-released files taken from the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Rather than an exercise in additional transparency, this appeared to be a deliberate effort to highlight any connection between Iran and Al Qaeda, no matter how tenuous. The CIA even gave the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies an advance copy of the files to research just this question, and Director Pompeo had been promoting the idea of this connection recently. This approach to policy — determine an outcome and work backwards to find the justification — is extraordinarily dangerous in matters of national security, as the run-up to the Iraq War demonstrated (particularly with regard to one of its chief architects, now-National Security Advisor John Bolton). What was the process and reasoning behind Pompeo’s handling of the bin Laden files? How does he understand the roles of different government agencies in handling intelligence? And what are his views on using declassification to push for political outcomes, as well as the threshold of intelligence at which he would conclude that the U.S. government should pursue military action?
Conspiracy Theories
In October 2017 and in his capacity as CIA Director, Mike Pompeo reportedly met with a conspiracy theorist at the direction of President Trump.
William Binney, a former NSA employee, believes that the DNC hack was an “inside job” rather than a result of foreign interference — which is, again, a contradiction of the entire U.S. intelligence community’s assessment and obvious, available public record. During the 2016 election, he pushed similar theories while boosting Wikileaks reports (a source he now calls a “hostile foreign intelligence service”). As a member of Congress, Pompeo was a leading advocate for Benghazi conspiracy theories, and he has associated with a number of fringe, Islamophobic voices (to be documented in a further post). Does Pompeo still endorse the views of these conspiracy theorists and hostile interests (including, specifically, Binney, Gaffney, and Wikileaks)? What is his current assessment of the 2012 tragedy at Benghazi? And what would he do to manage the flow of credible information to the president in a White House that has struggled with that process?
Climate Change
The Trump Administration is openly hostile to any notion of fighting climate change, from insisting on backwards energy policies to pushing the United States to be the only country in the world not participating in the historic Paris Climate Agreement. Mike Pompeo is a climate change denier who has long opposed most actions to fight climate change. How will Pompeo view international efforts to fight climate change, and will he be willing to listen to our national security and military leaders who identify climate change as one of many threats we must be prepared to combat?
Russian Influence in the 2016 Election
It is the unanimous and public assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the benefit of then-candidate Trump. Nonetheless, Pompeo made a public statement disagreeing with this assessment and then had to walk it back; he also met with Russian intelligence figures who were under sanction. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has struggled to punish Russia (with overwhelmingly bipartisan sanctions implemented months late with little to no teeth), and the president himself can criticize anyone and anything but Vladimir Putin, whom he prefers to congratulate on obviously fraudulent election results. Only the recent expulsion of diplomats has been a meaningful stand by this administration against Russia, and the president hasn’t said a peep about it — will Pompeo abet his continued deference to Putin, or stand for American interests and values instead?
Torture
In response to a December 2014 Senate torture report, then-Congressman Pompeo released a statement defending the torture methods used by the CIA, calling those who employed the heinous methods it described “patriots, not torturers.”
He has also specifically defended the use of waterboarding, arguing that the particular method did not constitute torture and was therefore legal. During his confirmation hearing, Pompeo reversed course; in response to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s question about whether he would restart the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation tactics, Pompeo responded, “Absolutely not. Moreover, I can’t imagine I would be asked that by the President-elect” (despite the fact that then-candidate Trump talked extensively about reinstating torture). In a written response to the Senate Intelligence Committee a week later, however, Pompeo contradicted himself, saying that although methods such as waterboarding are illegal, “If experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country, I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.” What specific practices does Pompeo believe are versus are not torture, and which of those practices prohibited by “current law” does view as immutable versus flexible?
The P5+1 Nuclear Agreement with Iran
As a member of Congress, Mike Pompeo was a vociferous opponent of the Iran Deal. During his confirmation hearing to be CIA Director, he pledged that he would “objectively monitor” Iran’s compliance with the agreement; since then, however, he has been a consistent advocate for U.S. withdrawal despite Iran’s continued verified compliance. If the United States withdraws from the Iran agreement in May, what is Pompeo’s alternative plan to constrain and monitor Iran’s nuclear program? Does he support, as National Security Advisor John Bolton does, military conflict with Iran to constrain Iran’s nuclear program? What is his plan should a limited military strike drive Iran’s nuclear program further underground, or lead to a ‘rush’ to the bomb by hardliners in Tehran?
