Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is not ruling out a political future in his home state of Kansas.
“I try to just avoid ruling things out when there’s others who are in control,” Pompeo said in a interview with the Wichita Eagle published Sunday. “The Lord will get me to the right place.”
Pompeo, a conservative, represented Kansas’ 4th Congressional District from 2011 to 2017 before joining the Trump administration as CIA director.
He ruled out a Senate run in 2020, but Kansas’ Republicans speculate that Pompeo could be eyeing other options. Those include a bid for the Senate in 2022, a run for Kansas governor that year, or even a presidential campaign in 2024.
In the interview, Pompeo noted his unexpected rise to Congress, when he was elected as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010.
“I was running a small business, living my life. It would have seemed unlikely,” he said. “I try now to avoid predicting what I might do a year, two years, six years from now.”
Pompeo’s comments on his political future comes before his first official visit to Kansas on Monday as secretary of state for a State Department-hosted summit on entrepreneurship.
