Mike Pompeo Is Trump’s Choice as C.I.A. Director
Representative Mike Pompeo, a hawkish Republican from Kansas, rose to prominence during the investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Representative Mike Pompeo, a hawkish Republican from Kansas and a former Army officer, to lead the C.I.A., his transition team said on Friday.
Mr. Pompeo, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Pompeo would take control of a spy agency that has been remade in the years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a relentless focus on manhunts, counterterrorism and targeted killing operations. Over the past year, the C.I.A. has undergone a bureaucratic reorganization under its director, John O. Brennan, an effort Mr. Pompeo would decide whether he wants to continue.
According to his congressional website, Mr. Pompeo, 52, graduated first in his class at West Point and “served as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall.” After leaving the military, Mr. Pompeo graduated from Harvard Law School and returned to Kansas, where he went into business and became president of Sentry International, which his website describes as an “equipment manufacturing, distribution and service company.”
Although the Benghazi panel found no new evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama administration or Mrs. Clinton, who was then secretary of state, Mr. Pompeo and another Republican member of the committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, said they were convinced there had been a cover-up. When the committee released its findings in June, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Jordan filed a 48-page addendum that included far harsher criticism of the administration and of Mrs. Clinton. It said that the attacks showed that the State Department was “seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi.”
Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Jordan said that in the days after the attack, “with the presidential election just 56 days away, rather than tell the American people the truth and increase the risk of losing an election, the administration told one story privately and a different story publicly.”
The committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, did not put his name on the addendum.
In a statement on Friday morning, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, praised Mr. Pompeo as “bright and hard working.”
“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,” Mr. Schiff said.
Mr. Pompeo has been a staunch opponent of the agreement the United States and five world powers struck with Iran in 2015 to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for the lifting of international oil and financial sanctions. In a July 2016 op-ed article that was published on the Fox News site, Mr. Pompeo wrote that the United States should “walk away from this deal.”
Mr. Pompeo has ties to Charles G. and David H. Koch, the billionaire conservatives whose Kansas-based company, Koch Industries, and its employees gave $80,000 to him in 2010 — more than they gave to any other candidate that year, according to the Almanac of American Politics. During his three terms, he has pushed some of their top priorities and defended them against Democratic criticism, writing a 2012 op-ed in Politico under the headline, “Stop harassing the Koch brothers.”
“Given that many Americans are now desperate for jobs, we should be begging entrepreneurs to look for new opportunities — not attacking them because their companies might make a profit,” he wrote.
Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York. Emmarie Huetteman contributed reporting.