Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on the hot seat again, this time for urging President Trump to fire the State Department inspector general, Steve Linick, which Trump did late Friday night.
Multiple news sources say Linick was investigating Pompeo, and according to CNN, he “had nearly completed an investigation into [Pompeo’s] decision to fast-track an $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia.” Those arms are certain to be used in the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have died.
Presidents can sidestep congressional review of such arms deals, if they believe a national security emergency requires it. In this case, Trump would be ignoring a bipartisan resolution Congress passed just last month, aimed at ending U.S. military support for the Saudi attacks in Yemen.
House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY) told CNN that his office is investigating “Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia. We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted … Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.”
This is a much more serious allegation than the reason first given for Linick’s interest in Pompeo, which was that he used government aides and security agents to run personal errands (including collecting Pompeo’s dog, Sherman, from the groomer) while on the federal payroll.
One agent who says he was sent to pick up Chinese food for Pompeo last month says he and other complained that they’re being treated like “UberEats with guns.”
So, Pompeo on the hot seat.
But while Donald Trump has been in the White House, the “hot seat” has been so frequently occupied by Trump officials that it seems to have cooled to a comfortable warmth — as if the president had just gotten up from it.
Linick’s dismissal won’t actually take effect for 30 days — June 15 — giving Democrats time to try to block it. And to no one’s surprise, they’ve jumped on the story.
“The president has the right to fire any federal employee,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “But the fact is, if it looks like it is in retaliation for something that the IG, the inspector general, is doing, that could be unlawful.”
Inspectors general are the official watchdogs charged with being on the lookout for corruption and misbehavior in the government.
Pelosi called Linick’s firing “unsavory” — “when you take out someone who is there to stop waste, fraud, abuse or other violations of the law that they believe to be happening,” reports the New York Times.
But some Republicans are also troubled by the allegations against Pompeo, particularly because Linick appears to be part of a purge of inspectors general by the president; he’s the fourth one ousted this year.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), no Trump fan, wrote Saturday evening on Twitter that “The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.”
Pompeo’s wife, Susan, appears likely to “get dragged into any inquiries that arise” from all this, reports Politico.
“U.S. diplomats have quietly voiced concerns for many months about Susan Pompeo’s role at the State Department. They note, for instance, that she occasionally travels with the secretary, requiring State Department staffers to assist her,” the political website says.
“Her decision to travel with her husband on an eight-day swing through the Middle East in early 2019 in particular upset some within the State Department because the trip took place during a lengthy government shutdown when many federal employees were going unpaid.”
It must be noted that other secretaries of state have also been accompanied by their wives on official trips.
The Pompeos have often traveled to their home state of Kansas, with the secretary “a frequent guest on Kansas radio and other media outlets, though he deflected numerous questions about his motivation for the trips,” Politico says.
Some observers think Pompeo plans to run for the Senate.
And both national and state Republican leaders have urged Pompeo to run, viewing an election win as a near-certainty, given his prominent name, political conservatism and evangelical Christianity.
Last Fall the Kansas City Star published an editorial, since deleted online, criticizing his frequent visits to the state, titled: “Mike Pompeo, either quit and run for U.S. Senate in Kansas or focus on your day job.”
