National Interest: Pompeo as Secretary of State Could ‘Unite Bannon Loyalists and Neocons’

This article originally appeared in the National Interest:

If you had to create a conservative American politician in a test tube, you might come up with Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA. The fifty-three-year-old Pompeo is a valedictorian graduate of West Point, a Harvard-trained lawyer and former U.S. Congressman (where he represented the district in which Koch Industries is headquartered). In the Fox News era, he was a star of the Benghazi hearings that needled Hillary Clinton.

But mostly importantly, Pompeo clearly knows where his bread is buttered: he confirmed to a gathering in Washington last month that he makes a point of coming across the bridge from Langley, Virginia most mornings to personally deliver President Donald Trump his daily intelligence briefing.

His resume, proximity and panache have given him the inside lane to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, should the former ExxonMobil chief step down or be ousted in the new year.

It is a remarkable ascension for a politician who was not an insider in Trumpworld this time last year, until he was given the surprise nod to head up Langley.

In his remarks last to month, to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), he stated that “the intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the (2016) election.” The CIA issued a clarifying statement later that night, but many mainstream media outlets blasted the remark as “false” and “inaccurate.” Pompeo has since indicated his belief that Russia did meddle in the election at some level.

Read the full story at the National Interest.