Tuesday on MSNBC, former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s pre-recorded Republican National Convention address from Jerusalem “absolutely outrageous.”
Rice said, “Secretaries of state are supposed to honor the principle that politics end at the water’s edge. When you go overseas, as secretary or a junior foreign service officer, you’re representing the country, not a political party. What Mike Pompeo is doing from Jerusalem is absolutely outrageous. It’s an abuse of his office. It undermines the integrity of the State Department. It violates his own rules that he promulgated and is holding every other official in the State Department to, but himself. I wish I could say it was surprising. It’s a little bit outlandish. But it’s all of a piece, Rachel, when you consider that under President Trump, the Justice Department has been politicized, the intelligence community has been politicized. Every institution of the executive branch has been politicized. Mike Pompeo is carrying that flag very sadly tonight coming out of Jerusalem.”
She added, “Mike Pompeo has been an overtly religious secretary of state, which in itself is problematic, because, again, he’s supposed to represent all of America, all of our religions, all of our threads but he takes this to Jerusalem. And the real import of that is that it places Israel yet again under President Trump squarely in our domestic politics, which is not good for the United States, and it is not good for Israel.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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