It’s often forgotten that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended West Point, where he took a pledge to hold honesty above all. And the person who seems to forget it most often is Mike Pompeo.
The Washington Post reports that Pompeo appeared on Fox News Wednesday evening not only to profess his support for an entire series of definitively debunked, never-made-any-sense-to-begin-with conspiracy theories—such as American company CrowdStrike ferrying a secret “missing” DNC server to Ukraine, and the Steele dossier actually being written by a Ukrainian hired by Hillary Clinton. Pompeo refused to condemn any of the things that Trump was asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate, even though they aren’t just false—they are genuinely bizarre.
Then Pompeo made his own contribution to the Hall of Ludicrous by adding a new conspiracy theory, one that involves President Barack Obama: “I couldn’t tell you why, I couldn’t answer if it’s because of Hunter Biden, that Barack Obama and Vice President Biden didn’t give weapons to Ukraine. They’ll have to answer for that. Maybe -- maybe I just don’t have the full story.”
Here’s Pompeo—Secretary of State Pompeo—suggesting that Ukraine didn’t receive military aid from the Obama administration. Except it received $1 billion in aid. And, unlike Trump, Obama did not delay that aid for a personal political favor or send his personal attorney to Kyiv to badger officials into repeating conspiracy theories. Pompeo is blaming a failure to provide assistance that never happened on a scandal that never was. And he knows that he does have the full story—he just doesn’t like it.
But maybe Pompeo is talking about the bipartisan decision to restrict offensive weapons sales to Ukraine over concerns that the struggle in Ukraine could become a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia. A bipartisan concern that was written into the language authorizing military assistance. If that’s the case, maybe he should consider something that was not a conspiracy theory—that Donald Trump stepped in to remove that idea from the Republican platform.
Pompeo was also asked about testimony that the “transcript” provided concerning the Trump phone call with Zelensky was incomplete. He replied by calling that story “leaks from Democrats” and said, “What I know is I was on the call, I listened to the call.”
He was on the call, so he could explain anything that’s missing from the document provided by the White House. If he was concerned about telling the truth.