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Ten Things You Did Not Know About Rep. Mike Pompeo
18 Nov 2016
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as CIA director merits exploring some interesting facts about the congressman.
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Pompeo, 52, graduated first in his class at West Point in 1986, with a major in mechanical engineering. His Army service included patrolling the Berlin Wall before it came down.
“My generation was the tail end of the Cold War,” Pompeo said during a 2014 visit to Kansas State, where he discussed the battle against the Islamic State. He added:
Before that, you had Nazism. This will ultimately be this generation’s fight, this battle where radical Islam continues to want to take on the West in fundamental ways, in the same way these other ideologies wanted to do before. I think we’re going to be at this for a while. We ought to be vigorous and thoughtful and effective in the way we respond.
In a 2011 profile of soldiers in Congress published by the Association of the United States Army, Pompeo is quoted as saying, “I still remember the first acronym I learned, BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. I still try to communicate that way. No reason to dance around getting to the point.”
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He continued his education at Harvard Law School after completing his active-duty Army service in 1991, and was an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a lawyer in Washington for several years, at the powerful law firm Williams & Connolly.
“When he arrived here after graduating first in his class at West Point and serving with distinction as an Army officer, he was bent on going into politics,” law professor Mary Ann Glendon recalled in a 2011 interview, continuing:
When he went into business instead, I felt real regret to see yet another young person of great integrity and ability swerve from his original path. But in fact he didn’t. Mike waited until he and his wife, Susan, had raised their son and assured a sound financial footing for the family. This past November, he was elected to the U.S. Congress from the 4th District of Kansas.
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As Professor Glendon said in her interview, Pompeo did not go into politics immediately after his time as a D.C. lawyer. Instead, he returned to his hometown in Orange County, California, and founded a company called Thayer Aerospace with some friends from his West Point days. After serving as Thayer CEO for more than a decade, he sold Thayer and became president of Sentry International, a Wichita-based company that sells oil field equipment.
One of the minor investors in Thayer was Koch Venture Capital. Given the Left’s deranged obsession with the Koch brothers as the focus of big-money evil in modern politics, we can expect to hear a great deal about this, even though Pompeo has said their investment was less than 2 percent of Thayer’s total funding. There will also be some caterwauling about Koch support for Rep. Pompeo’s congressional campaign.
Pompeo wrote an op-ed in 2012 chastising Democrats for “harassing the Koch brothers,” specifically on the Keystone XL pipeline issue. “The Democrats’ obsession with the Kochs as a political target is, indeed, additional evidence of a truly Nixonian approach to politics,” he said.
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Given this background, it is no surprise that Pomepo serves on both the House Intelligence and House Energy and Commerce committees. He was also appointed to the House Select Benghazi Committee.
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Perhaps surprisingly, given his business background, Pompeo’s net worth is rated below average by various public interest sites – 69 percent below the average member of Congress, according to InsideGov, which pegs his net worth at $345,011.
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Pompeo was elected to Congress in 2010 on the Tea Party wave and is now serving his third term. He was, at one point, seen as a dark-horse challenger to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for Speaker of the House. There were also rumors he was considering a Senate run.
“While we have had our share of strong differences – principally on the politicization of the tragedy in Benghazi – I know that he is someone who is willing to listen and engage, both key qualities in a C.I.A. director,”Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking Democrat on House Intelligence Committee, said in praise of Pompeo on Friday morning.