I have a soft spot for my golden retrievers-
I love meatballs.
That’s Mike Pompeo,
major Koch beneficiary, former defense and oil executive,
former clandestine intelligence chief,
and current head of all diplomatic relations of the United States.
Pompeo was born in 1963 in Orange, California.
In 1982, he graduated from Los Amigos High,
where he played power forward on the varsity basketball team.
A classmate recalls Pompeo’s Larry Bird-like athleticism:
In 1986, Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point,
majoring in engineering management.
I’ve also heard I was first in my class at the Wharton School of Finance.
Pompeo was in the Army from 1986 to 1991, and many profiles claim he served in the Gulf War.
BUT...he actually definitely did not.
According to a little agency known as the CIA
he did serve in the Army, but didn’t see any action in the Middle East.
Pompeo’s supposed Gulf service has appeared in numerous publications,
and 51 members of Congress would mention it in his CIA and Secretary of State confirmation hearings,
but Pompeo has never bothered to correct them.
There’s no one- like someone who served in uniform
who understands the value of this diplomacy and the terror and tragedy that is war.
In 1994, Pompeo received a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law school
and went on to work for the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly,
where in a case about pyramid schemes,
he’d be on the pyramid scheme’s side.
In 1996, Pompeo packed up and left for Wichita with a few of his West Point buddies
to start a business.
They bought up four smaller aircraft part makers and named their operation
Thayer Aerospace,
after the founder of West Point.
This is when Pompeo would meet the world's most powerful Whichitians:
The Koch Brothers.
David and Charles would help bankroll Pompeo’s new venture
into the defense and aerospace industry.
At the company, Pompeo outsourced dozens of jobs to Mexico,
and failed to pay vendors on time, if at all.
In 2006, Pompeo was rumored to have been forced out after the company’s financial problems.
Between 2006 and 2010, Pompeo was president of Sentry International,
a business that imported oilfield equipment from a company owned by the Chinese government.
However, in his questionnaire provided to the Senate intelligence committee,
Pompeo said he had not been involved in any business transactions controlled by a foreign government.
It is unclear if Pompeo realizes China is a foreign government.
In 2010, Pompeo ran for congress in Kansas.
During the campaign, a Pompeo staffer tweeted a link to an article
he thought would make for a “good read”.
The writer calls Pompeo’s Indian-American opponent a “turban-topper”
who “could be a muslim, a hindu, a buddhist etc who knows”.
The article also accused Obama of being an “Evil Muslim USURPER”.
The campaign released a full apology calling it an “honest mistake”.
But soon after, Pompeo’s campaign once again dipped its toes in racial waters
and installed billboard ads encouraging people to “Vote American”.
His Muslim-American opponent was born in Wichita, Kansas,
the district of the congressional seat. Pompeo was not.
But after securing $80,000 in campaign donations from Koch and its employees,
an endorsement from the NRA
and a guy who told children to lie in front of moving vehicles outside of abortion clinics,
Pompeo won the seat.
In 2012, Pompeo was successful in his reelection bid with help once again from the Kochs,
who coughed up $110,000 to Pompeo’s campaign.
That year, he called the historic Supreme Court case
confirming the right to same-sex marriage “a shocking abuse of power”
and called same-sex marriage
“counter to the most profound tradition of our nation.”
And that homosexuality is a “perversion”.
BOOKER: Is being gay a perversion?”
Senator-I-when I was a politician,
I had a very clear view on whether it was appropriate for two same sex persons to marry—
I stand by that—
He won reelection in 2014 and again in 2016.
As a lawmaker, Pompeo was an ardent supporter of restoring the NSA’s attempts to collect Americans’ data.
And in a 2016 op-ed, he doubled down:
He said.
While in Congress, he went after the Muslim community once again.
After the 2013 Boston Marathon attack,
Pompeo suggested that American Muslim leaders were
“potentially complicit”
in these violent acts for failing to speak out.
When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years
come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith,
and are performed in the name of that faith,
a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith.
Instead of responding,
silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts.
Pompeo has said that he doesn’t support any reasoning for abortion,
even in cases where the mother has been raped.
He also believes Guantanamo Bay should stay open.
He opposed its closing and during a visit to the detention camp in 2013,
when many prisoners were on a hunger strike,
Pompeo said,
The same year when asked by a caller on C-SPAN if Pompeo believes that global warming is a problem,
he responded:
There are scientists that think lots of different things about climate change.
There’s some who think we’re warming,
there’s some who think we’re cooling,
there’s some who think the last 16 years have been pretty stable.
Although 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that the earth is warming,
Pompeo could be right about the remaining 3%.
A year later, in a 2014 statement,
Pompeo defended the CIA’s use of torture during the George W. Bush administration,
Most of Pompeo’s foreign policy “experience” comes from his position on the Benghazi Committee.
Pompeo was an outspoken critic of Hillary Clinton
and her handling of the terrorist attack on the American diplomatic facility in Benghazi.
After two years, 800 pages, 75,000 documents, and interviews with over 100 witnesses,
no new evidence of wrongdoing by Hillary was found.
So having lost, Pompeo authored 50 more pages of “additional views”
because he believed there was more to be uncovered,
you know, aside from the 75,000 documents released.
Most of Pompeo’s 50 pages were recycled conspiracies.
His brilliant work on the committee
caught the attention of Teen Choice Award Nominee and president-elect Donald Trump.
A big fan of conspiracies himself,
Trump had no other choice but to tap Pompeo as the Director of the CIA on November 18th, 2016.
As CIA director, Pompeo acknowledged attempts by the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election
despite Trump calling this “fake news” and a “witch hunt”.
The threat of our adversaries trying to muck with our elections is very real.
The Russians clearly did it in the 2016 election.
He also gave a medal to a Saudi Crown Prince,
claimed leakers were using the first amendment to “shield them from justice,”
and prevented essential testimony in an anti-torture lawsuit.
But Pompeo didn’t last long as CIA director.
Because of his business ties to foreign governments,
connections to the defense and oil industries,
hatred of entire cultures,
and nonchalance towards torture,
there was only one thing Trump could do with him:
make him the Secretary of State.
To take Pompeo’s place as head of the CIA,
Trump nominated Gina Haspel,
a woman who allegedly oversaw the black site torture of a pregnant woman.
Both Haspel and Pompeo were confirmed.
Pompeo said.
Mike is a true American patriot.