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Who is Mike Pompeo, Trump's new pick for Secretary of State?
In mid-March Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director, was named by Trump as the replacement Secretary of State for the fired Rex Tillerson. Besides hearing his name a few times, most people don't know anything about Pompeo. That needs to change.
Trump’s new State Department pick is known for his hawkish foreign policy — and for defending Trump at every turn.
The former three-term tea-party Republican Congress member from Kansas [is] known for his hawkish stance on Iran and his aggressive grilling of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi.
Pompeo has Trump's ear and has been influential for more than a year with that being greatly enhanced in the new role.
In his 14 months as CIA director, Pompeo... quickly developed a close relationship with the president. He gave Trump daily intelligence briefings as well as his thoughts on whatever political or national security issue might be prominent that week.
There’s reason to worry about Pompeo’s credibility and honesty. He repeatedly misrepresented the Russia assessment, stating that the intelligence community concluded Moscow had no effect on the vote’s final result when in reality it made no judgments on that. Not only was Pompeo’s statement a lie, but it also mirrored Trump’s public position. It suggests Pompeo has no issues parroting Trump’s own views.
While he's tight with Trump now, he's been funded by the Koch Brothers for many years and is firmly in their pocket.
Pompeo’s top funder during his years in Congress was Koch Industries... took $375,000 from Koch Industries between 2009 and 2017 and almost $1.2 million from oil and gas companies over all... making him one of the top recipients of oil money in the House of Representatives.
In the 1990s, the Kochs’ venture capital arm also invested in an aeronautics company that Mr. Pompeo started, and later sold, in Wichita, Kansas, which is also home to Koch Industries.
In Congress, Mr. Pompeo backed changes that would benefit the Kochs’ business interests, including eliminating funding for a nationwide registry of greenhouse gas polluters. He also frequently accused the Obama administration of having a “radical climate agenda.”
As alluded to above, Pompeo does not believe climate change is a concern and is a vocal denier.
As a Kansas member of the House of Representatives, Mr. Pompeo called the Paris Agreement a “costly burden” to America. He has also questioned the scientific consensus that human activity is causing the planet to warm to dangerous levels.
Pompeo has questioned the scientific consensus that human activity is changing the climate, and he has strongly opposed the Paris Agreement... He told Congress last year during his Senate confirmation hearing for the C.I.A. post that the notion of climate change as a top national security threat was “ignorant, dangerous and absolutely unbelievable.”
The change in leadership at the State Department... cements an increasingly hard-line opposition to the idea of climate change at the highest levels of the United States government.
Pompeo... won praise Tuesday from those who deny the human influence on the climate. “He’s a great climate skeptic and he’s not going to be in favor of the Paris treaty as Tillerson was. I think it’s awesome,” said Steven J. Milloy, who runs a website, JunkScience.com, aimed at undermining climate science and who worked on the Environmental Protection Agency transition team for the Trump administration. “The administration seems to be shedding its Paris climate supporters.”
Now with Bolton and Pompeo in a position to tell the completely ignorant Trump what to do, keep a close eye on Iran.
Pompeo’s ideological bent as a conservative hawk... could be especially relevant when it comes to Iran, where Trump is threatening to exit the nuclear deal negotiated under President Obama... Pompeo is considered more hostile to the deal than Tillerson, which Trump singled out as a major reason for the cabinet change.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson told reporters, “The secretary of state ought to be someone who has the interests of the United States first.”
Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy expressed concern that Pompeo would encourage Trump's more confrontational impulses in foreign affairs. "I know Mike...he was not known on Capitol Hill as someone who was willing to champion American diplomacy over American military power."
There's more...
He’s also advocated for keeping the US prison at Guantanamo Bay open, describing the prison as “critical to national security”...
He has defended the CIA’s use of torture during the George W. Bush administration, declaring in November 2016, “These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots,” and, “the programs being used were within the law, within the Constitution.”
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/climate/pompeo-state-department-climate-change.html