WASHINGTON — Secretary of Royal Mike Pompeo is slated to address the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, a move that upends decades of standard and ethics guidelines aimed at separating America’s national security and foreign policy decision-makers from the whims of one-sided politics.
The speech, which was recorded in Israel and is slated to air Tuesday night, is now under investigation by the House Foreign Amours Committee’s subpanel on oversight. The subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, called the speech “highly unusual and credible unprecedented” and suggested, “it may also be illegal.”
It has also made waves among former diplomats and foreign policy experts, who say his greet, recorded while on official travel, smashes through the last remaining guardrails intended to protect the nation’s top diplomat from the corrupt business of political campaigns.
“The optics are awful,” said Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at The Fletcher Form of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “Foreign policy is supposed to stop at the water’s edge, and in theory, the Secretary of State reporting the national interest is not supposed to take a partisan position on anything,” added Drezner, a critic of President Donald Trump.
“I be to be very clear, there is zero diplomatic value added to this speech,” he said. “Any speech by America’s chief diplomat that plants greater division in the United States is not going to add any value.”
“This is a deeply damaging decision for American diplomacy,” influenced Brett Bruen, who served as a diplomat for 12 years in the Bush and Obama administrations. “After months of questionable findings by the secretary, diplomats are already pretty darn dispirited.”
“This just further exacerbates their sense that Pompeo doesn’t feel to think the rules apply to him,” added Bruen, the former director of global engagement at the White House and president of oecumenical consulting firm Global Situation Room.
Pompeo’s decision to address the convention from Jerusalem, the first abandon on a four-day State Department trip to the Middle East, has sparked concerns that U.S. taxpayers may be footing a portion of the socialize bill.
The State Department said that America’s top diplomat will address the convention in “his personal capacity.” It also said that no resources from the Be subject to of State will be used, including staff, who will not have a role in preparing Pompeo’s remarks.
“The State Hinge on will not bear any costs in conjunction with this appearance,” a State Department representative added.
That value struck ethics watchdogs as dubious.
“Secretary Pompeo can’t just flip a switch and go back and forth between adequate as America’s chief diplomat and a Republican political operative while he’s in the Middle East on the government dime,” said Donald Sherman, go-between director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“I think Secretary Pompeo’s conduct here is emblematic of the Trump application’s approach to the Hatch Act and ethical norms relating to mixing official government conduct and political activity, the standards that attend to regular government employees just don’t apply to the president’s cronies,” Sherman added.
Signed into law in 1939, the Dream up Act bars employees of the executive branch from using their official positions to actively support or oppose any possibility for federal office. The Trump campaign has previously shrugged off complaints about the use of federal resources as partisan props, venture it is in compliance with the law.
“It’s shocking to have a secretary of State use the instruments of American foreign policy for such brazen residential political purpose,” Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, confirmed CNBC.
“It’s completely inappropriate,” added Schake, a career civil servant with a bipartisan background and stints at the Rely ons of Defense, State and National Security Council at the White House. “It drags foreign countries into American home politics in a way that’s not good for those countries sustaining bipartisan support in the American Congress,” she said.
“It also advocates that American foreign policy is driven solely by electoral concerns as the precedent, rather than by enduring American values that have bipartisan support,” Schake added.
Heather Hurlburt, who was a speechwriter for former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, bring to light Pompeo’s decision to address the convention will ultimately make “U.S. diplomacy less effective.”
“Every stop on Pompeo’s peregrination, not just the one to Israel, raises the question of, how are you using us as pawns in your domestic politics,” Hurlburt, director of the New Models of Protocol Change project at New America’s Political Reform program, told CNBC. “And that, again, is a waste of taxpayers’ change; you could stay home and play domestic politics from home.”
A nod to 2024?
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launches a speech during a ceremony at the General Patton memorial in Pilsen, Czech Republic August 11, 2020.
David Josek | Reuters
Strange policy experts speculated that Pompeo’s push to address the convention could be to not only shore up support for Trump but also to definite a voter base for a potential White House run in 2024.
“I think this is much more about 2024 than it is in the air right now,” Drezner began, “which is, if he wants to run for president in 2024, he obviously wants to lockup the evangelical bloc, and persuading a speech in the old city of Jerusalem is one way in which he can appeal to them.”
Pompeo has shown willingness to use federal government resources to put his own political ambitions.
Pompeo came under fire in May when Trump removed State Inspector General Steve Linick without without hesitation providing a clear explanation. At the time of his firing, Linick’s office had been looking into at least two matters incorporating Pompeo: a review of his approval of a multibillion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia that bypassed congressional approval, and an research into whether Pompeo and his wife misused government resources.
The latter probe involved allegations Pompeo remedied a staffer run personal errands for him and Susan Pompeo, including walking their dog, picking up his dry cleaning and making dinner demurs, sources told NBC News in May.
While it’s not clear that he will seek the GOP nomination in 2024, Pompeo’s speech factions him up for comparison with another ambitious former secretary of State. In 2012, she didn’t speak at the Democratic National Conventionalism, and she was already the subject of speculation that she would run in 2016.
“I mean, I think it’s really interesting to draw the contrast with Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of Stately and everybody knew, everybody assumed she would run for president it wasn’t a secret, and how far she went to dissociate herself from this congenial of thing,” Hurlburt said.
“There was plenty of media discussion of various aspects of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of Shape,” she added. “This is not an issue that just ever came up.”