WASHINGTON -- Democratic leaders in Congress announced Friday that three committees were calling top State Department officials to be formally interviewed in an expanding investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his role in the firing by President Donald Trump this month of the department's inspector general.
At the urging of Pompeo, Trump notified Congress the night of May 15 that he was dismissing the inspector general, Steve A. Linick, starting the clock on a 30-day review period by lawmakers.
The next day, two lawmakers -- Rep. Eliot L. Engel of New York, a Democrat who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- opened an inquiry into the firing. Congressional aides said they had learned that Linick had been conducting investigations tied directly to Pompeo and his wife, Susan Pompeo, a State Department volunteer.
On Friday, those two lawmakers, and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y. and chairwoman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, confirmed that Linick, whose hundreds of employees investigate fraud and waste at the agency, was overseeing at least two inquiries into Mike Pompeo.
"If Secretary Pompeo pushed for Mr. Linick's dismissal to cover up his own misconduct, that would constitute an egregious abuse of power and a clear attempt to avoid accountability," they said in a joint statement.
Pompeo has said he did not ask Trump to fire Linick as retaliation for the inquiries and has mocked accusations of potential wrongdoing as "crazy stuff."
The committees plan to interview officials with knowledge of Linick's investigations and how those might have influenced Pompeo's recommendation that Trump fire him, they said.
"As these interviews take place, we plan to make public the transcripts of those proceedings as quickly as possible," they said. "The truth about Mr. Linick's firing will come out."
The State Department issued a statement Friday that said, "As we communicated directly to Chairman Engel yesterday, the department is carefully reviewing various requests for information, records and interviews with State Department personnel, and is committed to engaging in good-faith discussions with the chairman concerning these requests."
The committee leaders did not identify the officials being called, but a congressional aide provided a list of seven names. Three are close aides of Pompeo at the State Department: Brian Bulatao, Lisa Kenna and Toni Porter. Bulatao, the undersecretary for management, was a West Point classmate of Pompeo before going into business with him in Kansas and, in 2017, following him to the CIA, where Pompeo worked as director. Bulatao became the CIA's chief operating officer.
Pompeo has come under scrutiny for political and personal activities carried out using taxpayer funds because one of Linick's investigations focused on whether Pompeo had asked State Department employees to carry out personal tasks for him and his wife.
That investigation centered on Porter, a friend of the Pompeos from Kansas who worked as a district director for Pompeo when he was a congressman and who also followed him to the CIA, where she was chief of protocol. At the State Department, she has the title of senior adviser, and she works with the Pompeos on planning their domestic trips, among other things.
After Linick's firing, news organizations reported on two dozen dinners that the couple had hosted at the State Department -- and that Porter helped plan -- where guests mostly included prominent Republican donors, lawmakers and personalities in the news media. Reporters also documented secretive visits that Pompeo made with those same types of figures while on official State Department trips, including frequent ones last year to Kansas.
Kenna is a career diplomat who until recently served as the executive secretary to Pompeo. On May 1, Trump nominated Kenna as ambassador to Peru.
A second investigation by Linick examined whether Pompeo and other top administration officials acted illegally in declaring an "emergency" last year to bypass a congressional freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have carried out an air war in Yemen. Raytheon is a main exporter of the weapons. That investigation was close to completion.
The four other officials whom lawmakers plan to interview are State Department officials involved in that initiative: R. Clarke Cooper, Marik String, Mark Miller and Charles Faulkner.
A Section on 05/30/2020