Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reveals in his new book that he has always thought that many government inspector generals spend too much time grabbing the low-hanging fruit instead of hunting down crimes and fraud.
They “major in minors,” he wrote in the just-released Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.
POMPEO LISTS TOP 10 ‘LAZY’ AND ‘NASTY’ WASHINGTON REPORTERS
And none of the dozens of IG offices throughout the government, he added, was worse than the Department of State’s.
To prove his point, the former top Trump administration official wrote that he once asked the office to determine if a clearly unethical financial scheme by him and his wife would be allowed:
“I told them that my wife flies to foreign countries to give speeches for a fee of $500,000 each, all of it paid for by foreign governments, with the proceeds going to the ‘Pompeo Foundation.’ Some of the people working for the ‘Pompeo Foundation’ might well be current department employees. I needed to know if this whole setup caused any ethical problems for me or the department. In deadpan style, I told them I needed a memorandum from them confirming that this activity was lawful.”
He didn’t need an answer, knowing that the ethics department would crush the plan. But their reaction reinforced his view that his IG played politics.
“The ethics team didn’t get it. What I had described was exactly what Secretary Clinton and her husband had done when she sat on the seventh floor. It’s hard to imagine a more significant conflict of interest or ethical risk than a secretary of state’s spouse sticking a tin cup in front of world leaders while his wife was still in office,” Pompeo wrote in his scorched-earth autobiography, a top 10 Amazon best seller.
“When I let them in on my jest, they didn’t think it was funny. I told them I didn’t think it was funny either. I asked them to produce for me the document that allowed Bill Clinton to take that money for the Clinton Foundation, with which the Clintons paid (or paid off) certain persons to do their bidding,” he added, though there was no further discussion about any approving memo.
But, added Pompeo, there was one reaction from the IG’s office. “From that moment forward, the ‘ethics’ team and the inspector general declared war on me,” he wrote.
Pompeo described leaks from the office that meant to undermine his control of the department, and eventually he fired the inspector general.
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The liberal media attacked the move, claiming that it must have been because the IG was on the trail of a career-ending scandal involving Pompeo.
But he said, “This was nonsense, and it’s worth noting for the record that neither [the fired IG] nor anyone else informed me about his investigations, which, by the way, never found evidence of ethical violations.”
