Pompeo Reportedly Warned Russia Over Bounties in Call With Foreign Minister

A new report reveals that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Russia’s foreign minister over bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. soldiers.

Recent reports on those bounties sent shockwaves through Washington. In his recent interview with Axios, President Donald Trump said he didn’t raise the reports in his call with Vladimir Putin, bringing up some disputes within his administration over the intel and saying “many people are calling it fake news.”

Per the New York Times, Pompeo raised the issue with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on a call last month:

Pompeo’s warning is the first known rebuke from a senior American official to Russia over the bounties program, and it runs counter to President Trump’s insistence that the intelligence from U.S. government agencies over the matter is a “hoax”…

The secretary of state did not explicitly point to the covert bounties scheme organized by a Russian military intelligence unit that was first reported in late June by The New York Times, most likely because the details of what American intelligence has learned and how it gathered the information remain classified, one of the officials said. In public, Mr. Pompeo has carefully avoided answering direct questions about American intelligence on the Russian bounties. But late last month in congressional testimony, he said broadly that he had raised with Mr. Lavrov “all of the issues” that put American interests at risk.

In the call, Mr. Pompeo made it clear to Mr. Lavrov in language about payouts and red lines that the United States was strongly opposed to the program, the official said, adding that the secretary of state had been livid about what the intelligence had said about the bounties.

After the preview from the Axios interview aired, Trump said it was “never brought to my attention” and added he thinks it’s another “Russia hoax.”