Mike Pompeo and His Wife Used State Department Resources to Arrange Political Events While Mulling Senate Run, Emails Show

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State department employees were asked to organize political events in 2019 for then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a whistleblower and emails newly obtained by McClatchy. Some of the emails show Susan Pompeo, the secretary’s wife, asking State department employees to arrange gatherings in Kansas, where her husband had served as a congressman from 2011 to 2017.

In early 2019, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) announced he would not seek reelection in 2020, prompting a scramble for the Republican nomination. As Secretary of State, Pompeo made four official visits to Kansas in 2019. Until then, he had made just one since joining the Trump administration in 2017, according to the Wichita Eagle. During one visit in 2019, Pompeo was accompanied by Ivanka Trump and he met with billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch. The two discussed the senate race.

Separately, a whistleblower who worked in Pompeo’s State department said employees were given assignments that had little to do with department business. In October 2019, employees were asked to prep the secretary for an event with a Wichita auto parts company. Staff were instructed to produce talking points on Kansas’s fossil fuel industry.

Las year, Pompeo recommended to then President Donald Trump that he fire State’s inspector general, Steve Linick. Trump obliged and Linick was removed effective June 2020. That month, Linick testified to Congress his office had been conducting five investigations. One of them centered on the Pompeos’ possible misuse of a political appointee as a personal assistant charged with tasks such as walking the secretary’s dog and picking up his dry cleaning.

“The questions in the tasker seemed strange to me,” said the whistleblower. “They did not seem like questions a State Department official would write.”

In one exchange before Pompeo was to give a lecture at Kansas State University, Susan Pompeo emailed an aide to her husband about meet and greet opportunities: “Just talking with Mike — any feel for numbers at the private meet & greet at KSU? Once you see the audience during Mike’s speech, I wonder how you might grab anyone who definitely needs to know about it?”

Ultimately, Pompeo did not run for senate in 2020. But he and his wife continued using department resources for personal purposes. In April, the State department’s new inspector general concluded that the Pompeos had misused department resources and violated ethics standards. The report cited more than 100 instances that “had no apparent connection to the official business of the Department.”