After months of speculation, President Donald Trump has announced that he will nominate CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as his new secretary of state.
Trump praised Pompeo on Tuesday saying he was “always on the same wavelength” — something that he could not say for his now former chief diplomat Tillerson.
“I have worked with Mike Pompeo for quite some time, tremendous energy, tremendous intellect,” Trump told reporters. “We are always on the same wavelength. The relationship has always been good and that is what I need as secretary of state.”
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, has grown increasingly close to the President — a bond largely formed during the President’s free-wheeling daily intelligence briefings, which one White House official previously told CNN that Pompeo delivers in person three to four times a week.
After the briefings, Trump frequently asks Pompeo — who graduated first in his class at the US Military Academy at West Point and went on to Harvard Law School — to stick around to continue chatting one-on-one, the official said in November as initial rumors that Tillerson could be on the way out began to swirl.
In Congress, Pompeo 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 in their investigation into the actions of the State Department she then headed in response to attacks that resulted in the death of four Americans in Libya in 2012.
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 for CIA director, 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.”