Rep. Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s pick for CIA director, heads into his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday, taking questions at a time when the President-elect has expressed skepticism of the intelligence community and Russia’s meddling in last year’s election.
Russia’s hacking efforts are an issue of top concern on both sides of the aisle and one likely to take center stage when Pompeo, a Kansas Republican, sits down before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Prepared excerpts of his opening statement released by the transition team don’t mention the hacks but address global threats at large.
“This is the most complicated threat environment the United States has faced in recent memory,” he will say.
“It will be the CIA’s mission, and my own, if confirmed, to ensure the Agency remains the best in the world at its core mission: collecting what our enemies do not want us to know. In short, the CIA must be the world’s premier espionage service.”
Trump agreed Wednesday for the first time with the intelligence community’s assessment that Kremlin was behind the hacking.
“I think it was Russia,” he said, after weeks of criticizing the intelligence community’s findings, including a series of tweets this week accusing them of leaking allegations that tie Trump to Russia.
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he tweeted Wednesday.
Asked in his first news conference after his election if he trusts intelligence agencies, Trump said they are “vital and very, very important” but didn’t explicitly say he had faith in their information.
Instead, he pointed to his own nominees like Pompeo, and former Sen. Dan Coats for director of national intelligence, as forward-looking examples of how his administration will address the hacking scandal.
“Within 90 days, they’re going to be coming back to me with a major report on hacking,” Trump said. “I want them to cover this situation.”
Still, Democrats on the committee are expected to press Pompeo on Trump’s comments questioning the reliability of the intelligence community, according to an aide with Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, who serves as vice chairman of the committee.
Pompeo’s hearing also comes just two days after the same committee grilled the nation’s top intelligence officials, including current CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers.
The officials said that the highest levels of the Russian government ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other state-level organizations in an attempt to sow doubt about the country’s electoral process and to discredit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Old domains of the Republican National Committee were also hacked, Comey said, but there was no evidence that the current RNC or the Trump campaign were successfully penetrated.
Hearing prep
The congressman has been getting briefings by current members of the intelligence community as well as past directors, a source familiar with Pompeo’s preparation said. He has also reviewed confirmation hearings for past nominees and held extensive practice sessions answering “hundreds” of questions that could potentially be posed at the hearing.
“Congressman Pompeo has been preparing for this moment since he was nominated and has taken that preparation seriously,” the source said.
His team feels that his experience serving on the House Intelligence committee and experience in the military and business are also major assets.
Background
Pompeo graduated first in his class from the US Military Academy at West Point and served in the US Army from 1986-1991. He was stationed in Germany for a time as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain, according to the bio on his congressional website.
He then graduated from Harvard Law School where he was an editor at the Harvard Law Review. Returning to Kansas, he began a career in business, heading up companies that manufactured and provided materials for aircraft and oilfields.
In Congress, he built a reputation as a conservative stalwart on national security issues. In particular, he was known as a hardliner on the Select Committee on Benghazi, a panel that he felt was not hard enough on Hillary Clinton.
He co-authored a lengthy addendum to the committee’s findings in which he blasted Clinton for “a tragic failure of leadership” and accused the Obama administration of trying to cover up the true nature of the Benghazi attack.
When Trump publicly announced Pompeo as his choice, the congressman received some praise from Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, who said Pompeo is “someone who is willing to listen and engage, both key qualities in a CIA director.”
Torture
Along with the hot-button issue of Russian hacking, Pompeo is likely to be asked about a number of other topics. A Senate Democratic aide said Pompeo’s public comments on torture will be a big focus among Democratic questioners. The congressman appears to agree with Trump on the topic, the latter of whom said he would “absolutely” bring back waterboarding, as well as methods “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
In response to the 2014 Senate report that found the CIA tortured suspected terrorists, Pompeo released a statement saying the methods used were constitutional.
“These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots. The programs being used were within the law, within the Constitution, and conducted with the full knowledge of Sen. Feinstein,” he said. “If any individual did operate outside of the program’s legal framework, I would expect them to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
It will be interesting to hear what Pompeo says Thursday on waterboarding, given that two of Trump’s other nominees — Jeff Sessions for attorney general and John Kelley for the Department of Homeland Security — appeared to disagree with Trump on the issue.
And retired Gen. David Petraeus, also a former CIA director, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he thinks Trump has given up the notion that torture will be reintroduced under his administration.
Also likely to come up from Democrats on the committee are comments that Pompeo made in 2013, in which he said Muslim leaders who don’t condemn radical-Islamic inspired terror attacks are “potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow.”
On the Republican side, multiple senators, according to their aides, are interested in hearing more about Trump’s reported interest in changing up in the intelligence community, as well as the CIA’s role in cyber espionage and defense.