President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Tuesday morning and said he will replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who will be supposedly succeeded at the agency by the deputy director Gina Haspel, the first woman to hold the position.
The decision comes after just 14 months of Tillerson’s tenure, though rumors that policy disagreements between the former Exxon CEO and the president could lead to his termination have circulated since November. This is the latest in a series of high profile departures from the administration, which has the highest turnover rate of any White House in the last 40 years.
Pompeo’s background and career
Pompeo is a former Army tank officer. He graduated first in his class from West Point.
He attended law school at Harvard and worked in Washington, D.C. practicing law before founding an aerospace company called Thayer Aerospace. He then worked as the president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment manufacturing, distribution, and service company.
In 2010, Pompeo unseated the Democratic nominee and became Kansas’s Fourth District Representative with the help of the Tea Party and the Koch brothers.
He served three terms in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. As a representative, he sat on the House Intelligence Committee and played an aggressive role in questioning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as part of the House Select Benghazi Committee.
He was particularly outspoken in condemning Clinton over the 2012 Benghazi attacks and also pushed emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign to attack Clinton.
These activities raised concerns, especially among Democrats, about his appointment to head the CIA, as he was known as fiercely partisan during his time in Congress.
Pompeo’s track record at the CIA and views on foreign policy
President Trump nominated Pompeo to lead the agency in January 2017. The appointment was seen as a delicate situation for Pompeo as he took over in the midst of discord between the incoming administration and the intelligence community.
Seen as an ardent ally of the president, there was some concern within the agency that Pompeo ordered the Counterintelligence Mission Center, the unit closely tied to the investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, to report to him directly, the Washington Post reported in August.
While the Russia investigation loomed as a possible disagreement, Pompeo’s views on issues like torture align with the president, who has said that “torture works.”
Pompeo has said that waterboarding does not constitute torture and has pushed for more leeway for domestic surveillance programs.
As the top U.S. diplomat, his view on the Iran nuclear deal will match up with the president’s more closely than his predecessor’s. He is expected to take a harder line on Iran and North Korea. Administration officials said that the decision to fire Tillerson now was motivated in part by installing Pompeo ahead of the proposed meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and President Trump.
“Rest assured, when the president enters that room with Kim Jong Un, if Kim Jong Un lives up to the four commitments that he has made, those four major concessions, the president will be fully prepared for his conversation with Kim Jong Un,” Pompeo told CBS.