Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismissed watchdog allegations that he approved controversial arms sales at the expense of civilian casualties.
“We have prevented the loss of civilian lives,” Pompeo told reporters when asked about the inspector general’s conclusions following a review of deals that the State Department approved using emergency powers last year. “So as for the statement that was in the IG report, it’s totally unfounded.”
That statement came one day after the State Department’s in-house watchdog faulted Pompeo’s team for failing to “assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties” fully when authorizing the sale of precision-guided weapons to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies. Those sales outraged lawmakers who had sought to punish Saudi authorities for killing civilians while fighting a proxy war with Iran in Yemen. But Pompeo touted the inspector general’s report while rebuking the congressional critics who saw the deals as an abuse of his emergency powers.
“We had United States senators impugn the integrity of Foreign Service officers, suggesting they had done something unlawful,” Pompeo said while traveling in Prague. “It was outrageous then. It’s outrageous for them to continue to make those claims.”
The watchdog affirmed that Pompeo’s invocation of the emergency authority to approve the deals, which many lawmakers had used their power to delay, “was executed in accordance with the requirements of” federal law. Still, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, emphasized that the inspector’s report sidestepped the question of whether an emergency actually existed to justify the unilateral approval of the deals.
“This report is deeply damning for Secretary Pompeo and the administration,” Engel said Tuesday evening, saying that redacted sections of the report show Pompeo’s team contemplating the emergency justification several weeks before proceeding with the decision. “What sort of emergency makes itself known a few months in advance and can be resolved with weapons delivered years later?”
Pompeo rebuffed such questions by reference to one of the general conclusions of the report. “We did everything by the book, we complied with the law — it’s what the State Department OIG found as well — and I’m proud of the work that my team did,” he said. “And we got to a really good outcome.”
