Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to provide President-elect Joe Biden’s secretary of state-designate, Antony Blinken, with a full briefing on State Department operations and diplomatic matters, tacitly acknowledging President Trump’s defeat in the Nov. 3 election.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner Monday as the Electoral College reaffirmed Biden’s victory, Pompeo said he planned to meet with Blinken “at the right time” for a conversation that is considered a regular and wholly noncontroversial part of the presidential transition process. However, some Trump administration officials have been hesitant to discuss transition activities because the outgoing commander in chief claims the election was stolen and is refusing to concede.
“I’ll share with him the things that I’ve come to see here at the State Department, the institutional, organizational, leadership things,” Pompeo said in an interview. “And then, I’ll share with him — but I know he’ll have his own views — but I owe it to him to describe the things that we’ve done, why we’ve done them, where we’ve been successful, and the places we’ve fallen short.”
Pompeo, 56, spent six years as a House member from Kansas before Trump tapped him for director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the beginning of his administration. The secretary focused on national security and foreign policy during his tenure in Congress — which coincided with Blinken’s service as Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state. But the two met just once, Pompeo recalled.
“I’m not sure he’d remember,” the secretary said. “I don’t know him well.”
After Trump fired his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in March 2018, Pompeo moved from Langley to Foggy Bottom. He is among the few prominent members of the president’s Cabinet to survive four years bruised but otherwise unscathed. Trump trusts Pompeo and relies on his counsel, and the secretary enjoys a popular following among grassroots conservatives. Yet Republican insiders who hail from the traditional wing of the party still view Pompeo as an ally.
That, combined with Pompeo’s domestic travel and effort to cultivate relationships among political and business leaders, has prompted speculation that the secretary is eyeing a 2024 presidential bid. Some Republicans are floating Pompeo’s name for Kansas governor; the Democratic incumbent in his home state is up for reelection in 2022. Pompeo declined to rule either opportunity in or out but emphasized he had not decided on a political future.
“When I hear people talk about these opportunities, I always thank them for being kind, for thinking that I might be qualified to pursue one of those things,” Pompeo said. “But I haven’t given it serious thought.”
“I’ve been serving the country now for 10 years, six as a member of Congress, four years in the administration; I was a soldier for five years,” said Pompeo, who was first in his class at the U.S. Military Academy before active-duty service and then moving on to Harvard Law School.
“That service has been an important part of my life and my wife’s life,” he said. “We’ll leave that now for a bit, and then, the Lord will tell us what’s next.”
Pompeo could have run for an open Kansas Senate seat this year. He was heavily recruited by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and would have been a shoo-in. After hearing McConnell’s pitch and mulling a campaign over the holidays last year, the secretary demurred.
Meanwhile, Pompeo would not comment on reports that Russia hacked United States government computer systems at the Commerce, Homeland Security, and Treasury departments. But he conceded that Moscow continues to threaten American interests, even though Vladimir Putin’s government is cooperative with Washington on some issues.
“It is clear that the Russians continue to engage in malign cyberactivity around the world. We saw it in [the] 2016 election; less so in the 2020 election. But we’d seen it in the 2012 and the 2008 election as well,” Pompeo said.
“You continue to see them engaging in [malign] activities in Syria, in Ukraine, in places like that that are just inconsistent with how we expect every country to behave,” he added. “And we can’t reward them for that bad behavior as well. It’s a complicated relationship. They have a big military and a big nuclear capability and one that we have to continue to take seriously.”
