For years, as a House Republican member, CIA director, and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has taken incoming flak from Washington’s media, resulting in pretty thick skin.
“If you can’t endure the criticism that comes with any leadership position, then you shouldn’t be leading,” he wrote in his autobiography appropriately named Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, out today and already the No. 4 top seller on Amazon.
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That’s why he liked working for former President Donald Trump, who’d poke the media with charges of “fake news.”
Pompeo wrote, “One of the reasons he and I worked together so well was that we were almost totally insensitive to the demands of disingenuous Democrats and the legacy media.”
Still, he conceded, some coverage got to him. “What did bother me was the extent to which our words and deeds were maligned and twisted. This type of journalism may generate hits on a webpage, but it is completely irresponsible. I almost feel bad for modern journalists. More than ever, the pressure to produce more clicks than the next reporter causes journalists to adopt the tongue-in-cheek adage, ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,’” he added.
Now, in his book, he is dishing on the journalists he feels were the most unfair to him during his Trump years, some of the anti-Trump sources they worked with, and even government agencies that turned a blind eye to Democratic scandals but picked on him.
He starts with the coverage of his nomination to State. “The media wanted to see me go down,” he wrote. In that group, he cited a Politico reporter, Nahal Toosi, who he described as “one of the reporters fueling false narratives about me and our team throughout my four years. She embodied the lazy thinking and partisanship with which many reporters approach their work.”
Pompeo said interviewers often tried to drive a wedge between him and Trump. Here, he cited Chris Wallace and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
When Wallace was with Fox, Pompeo said he appeared on a Sunday show and the newsman tried to stir up a nonexistent feud. “He spent the first half of the interview questioning the president’s mental fitness. He was trying to get me to trash President Trump,” wrote Pompeo.
In an interview with Mitchell about Iran, wrote Pompeo, she tried to “bait me” to criticize Trump. “Her question was childish and petulant,” he wrote, adding, “She was simply playing the D.C. progressive game so that she could go to cocktail parties and croak with her peers in the media elite that she had tried to embarrass the president and me. I refused to give an inch, even in the face of incoming fire.”
He even cited reporter Bob Woodward, who Trump told Pompeo to talk to despite his reluctance. He gave Woodward 15 minutes one day. “I did my best to comply with the president’s direction, but I didn’t provide anything of value to a reporter who was writing a book with the singular purpose of destroying all that I was working to achieve. Moreover, he used the risk that someone would have dished on me to try and coerce me to dish on others. Sick,” wrote Pompeo.
The former top diplomat, widely considered a possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate, also threw CNN’s Jim Acosta, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and conservative pundit Bill Kristol into the drink in a passage about false reports that he conspired with other Trump team members to use the 25th Amendment to dump the president.
Of Kristol, he wrote, “Sorry, Bill, I never seriously discussed the Twenty-Fifth Amendment with [Mike Pence] or any other official. I never even joked about it. Now that you’ve beclowned yourself within the conservative movement, maybe there’s still a place for you with your friends at the Lincoln Project. And take Jennifer Rubin with you.”
Pompeo next wrote of a dinner he was expected at to receive an award from the mother of former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who had been executed by terrorists. But two days before the event, the award was withdrawn. “I came to understand that the evening’s emcee, a famous journalist named Christiane Amanpour, whom I have still never met and now hope that I never do, said that she would refuse to participate if I was being honored. Her reasoning, in a word, was ‘Trump,’” he wrote.
Like Trump, Pompeo sometimes had fun mocking the media, such as when he was asked after the 2020 election loss if he was working on the transition to the Biden administration. He wrote, “I decided to have a bit of fun and said, ‘There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.’ I said it with a smile and more than a touch of ‘screw you’ in my voice.”
Of course the media went nuts, especially at CNN. “I didn’t think much of it until I returned to my office and saw that all the clown shows had made my words the top story. CNN’s anchor Brianna Keilar insisted that I was ‘peddling baseless claims of election fraud,’” he wrote.
Then there was a famous dust-up with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, who claimed Pompeo was mean to her. He said she promised to discuss Iran in their interview but asked about Ukraine and the issues that led to Trump’s second impeachment.
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After the interview was over, he asked her to come to his office, where he expressed his anger and said most people didn’t even know where Ukraine was. As proof, he asked her to find it on a map, and she reportedly got it wrong. “NPR decided to put her on its taxpayer-funded airwaves to say that I was a jerk who had mistreated her. It’s true that I probably should not have confronted her over the seemingly false pretenses of her hack-job interview, but I couldn’t help myself,” he wrote.
Pompeo added that he has no regrets for challenging the media and their tactics.
“We dealt all the time in the administration with nasty reporters who trampled on facts. The correct response to this kind of harassment is to grow thicker skin, step up your game, and keep winning for America,” he concluded.
