Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once accused the Obama administration of obstructing a House inquiry and letting politics override national interests. He now faces similar charges
WASHINGTON — As a member of Congress, Mike Pompeo drove the Republican inquiry into the killing of a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, and made clear there was no place for politics in American diplomacy. Nor, he said, would he tolerate “dithering” by an Obama administration State Department that he called “deeply obstructive of getting the American people the facts that they needed.”
During the Benghazi hearings in 2016, Pompeo bombarded Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with questions about whether the State Department had failed to put adequate security on the ground, leading to the death of a U.S. ambassador. Now Pompeo is being asked whether his State Department was part of an effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
Both will be asked whether they had evidence that Trump or his representatives were dangling U.S. support — and suspending congressionally approved military assistance — to get political dirt from the Ukrainian government to undercut Biden’s presidential campaign. In an interview Sept. 22, days before the White House released a transcript of the call, Pompeo suggested that he was unaware of the details, telling Martha Raddatz of ABC that he had not seen the whistleblower report and then describing U.S. policy toward Ukraine in traditional terms, without reference to the favors Trump sought.
But the questions are swirling about what role Pompeo may have played, if any, in Giuliani’s outreach campaign to top Ukrainian government officials. The effort bypassed career State Department diplomats, and Pompeo is nothing if not territorial — meaning he most likely would have objected to such dealings unless he was under instructions to allow them to proceed.
That led to a sharp retort from three House committee chairmen — Reps. Eliot L. Engel of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Adam B. Schiff of the Intelligence Committee and Elijah E. Cummings of the Oversight and Reform Committee — reminding Pompeo that it is a crime to obstruct a congressional inquiry “by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication.
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