Ten Things You Need To Know About Mike Pompeo

Donald Trump’s choice of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as CIA director merits exploring some interesting facts about the congressman.

1. Pompeo, 52, graduated first in his class at West Point in 1986, with a major in mechanical engineering. His Army service included patrolling the Berlin Wall before it came down.

2. He continued his education at Harvard Law School after completing his active-duty Army service in 1991, and was an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a lawyer in Washington for several years, at the powerful law firm Williams & Connolly.

3. As Professor Glendon said in her interview, Pompeo did not go into politics immediately after his time as a D.C. lawyer. Instead, he returned to his hometown in Orange County, California, and founded a company called Thayer Aerospace with some friends from his West Point days. After serving as Thayer CEO for more than a decade, he sold Thayer and became president of Sentry International, a Wichita-based company that sells oil field equipment.

4. Given this background, it is no surprise that Pomepo serves on both the House Intelligence and House Energy and Commerce committees. He was also appointed to the House Select Benghazi Committee.

5. Perhaps surprisingly, given his business background, Pompeo’s net worth is rated below average by various public interest sites – 69 percent below the average member of Congress, according to InsideGov, which pegs his net worth at $345,011.

6. Pompeo was elected to Congress in 2010 on the Tea Party wave and is now serving his third term. He was, at one point, seen as a dark-horse challenger to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Speaker of the House. There were also rumors he was considering a Senate run.

7. Pompeo was originally a supporter of Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) presidential bid, moving his support to Trump after it became clear he would be the GOP nominee. He is close to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, having served with him when Pence was in Congress. During a breakfast for Kansas delegates to the Republican National Convention in July, he called Pence a “friend and mentor” whose “values … are very much like those of us in Kansas.”

8. He is a strong critic of the Iran nuclear deal, remarking just Thursday on Twitter that he is “looking forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Among other actions, he has sponsored bills to increase sanctions on Iran and to require the Obama administration to investigate Iran for violating the Geneva Convention in its treatment of ten captured American sailors last year.

9. Pompeo has supported online surveillance programs. He has said former NSA contractor Edward Snowden should be “brought back from Russia and given due process.” He stated, “I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence” because he “put friends of mine, friends of yours who serve in the military today at enormous risk because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers.”

10. Pompeo has been accused of “Islamophobia” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, for statements such as this one, made after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013: “When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith, and are performed in the name of that faith, a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith.”

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