The Ultimate Disgrace of Mike Pompeo
The ouster of the State Department’s inspector general, who had been investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on at least two charges of misconduct, is yet another instance of how corruption—and the tolerance, almost the expectation, of corruption—pervades the upper tiers of the Trump administration.
Pompeo may, at first glance, seem an unlikely candidate to get tangled in this web. He was the top-ranked graduate of his class at West Point (whose code of honor commands cadets not to “lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do”) and a church deacon with a strong moralistic bent (at least rhetorically).
Yet the firing of the IG, Steven Linick, appears to be Pompeo’s personal cover-up. Yes, Trump signed the letter notifying Congress that he was dismissing Linick because he’d lost confidence in his work. But when a reporter asked for elaboration, Trump replied that he didn’t know the guy, had never heard of him—that he fired him because “I was asked by the State Department, by Mike.” Meanwhile, Pompeo said that Linick hadn’t lived up to the department’s ethos and claimed that he didn’t even know Linick was investigating him. But the New York Times revealed on Tuesday that Pompeo refused to be interviewed by Linick about one of the probes—indicating that he knew about the probe after all.
Linick was looking into two issues brought to his attention by several employees. First, Pompeo and his wife, Susan, were using State Department political appointees for personal household tasks—having them pick up dry cleaning, walk their dog, buy groceries, and so forth. The couple have apparently made these demands quite a lot. A friend of the family told me that, when Susan Pompeo visited her mother in Lafayette, Louisiana, security officials were ordered to pick her up at the airport. Last June, they were told to pack up the house in Lafayette and cart away boxes when her mother prepared to move to a retirement home in Overland Park, Kansas.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-ultimate-disgrace-of-mike-pompeo/ar-BB14n7Wv?ocid=msn360
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