Rep Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), President-elect Trump's nominee for CIA director, faced the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing, on Jan. 12 at the Capitol. (Reuters)
During his confirmation hearing, Pompeo told senators that as CIA director, he would not only commit to cross Trump, but that the president-elect would expect him to do so. Trump said during his campaign that he would consider resurrecting interrogation techniques like waterboarding.
“You have my commitment that every day, I will not only speak truth to power, but I will demand that the men and women … who live their life doing that will be willing, able, and follow my instructions to do that each and every day,” Pompeo said.
If he survives his grilling from Congress, Trump’s nominee for CIA director could soon inherit one of the most difficult jobs in Washington: liaison between the country’s intelligence analysts and a president who has repeatedly derided their work.
Pompeo’s confirmation hearing comes on the heels of the president-elect launching another broadside at the intelligence community, dismissing as “nonsense” a classified report summarizing allegations that Russia had gathered damaging personal information about him. Trump suggested that intelligence officials might have deliberately leaked the uncorroborated report to smear him, adding: “That’s something Nazi Germany would have done.”
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to be CIA director, close allies say. Here's what we know about him. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to be CIA director, close allies say. Here's what we know about him. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
Pompeo told senators that he considered the intelligence community’s report on Russia to be “sound” as an analytical product.
“It’s pretty clear about what took place about Russian involvement in efforts to hack information,”
Pompeo continued, saying he was “very clear-eyed” about the intelligence report’s findings, and promising to relay his take “not only to the president, but to the team around him.”
Yet Pompeo agreed with Republicans that the intelligence community – and government at large – does not have a strategy for counteracting and safeguarding against and the type of cyberattacks outlined in that report, from Russia and other countries.
“We have to get better at defending against this,” Pompeo said, calling for an “incredibly robust American response” and pledging to help lawmakers design such a policy.
He also offered several words of praise to the intelligence community personnel, noting that he has “seen their morale through tough times” and “I have seen them walk through fire.” He lauded the CIA as “the finest intelligence agency the world has ever known.”
Since the election, Trump has moderated some of his earlier criticisms and said he respects the country’s intelligence professionals.
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Pompeo will have to win over two disparate audiences on Thursday: the senators who will vote on whether to confirm him for the CIA job and thousands of CIA employees who will hang on his every word.
But some on the committee remained concerned that politics would creep its way into Pompeo’s thinking, even as CIA chief.
The 53-year-old Kansan served a stint on the House Intelligence Committee, where he won widespread respect for his intellect while also cementing his reputation as a fierce partisan, leading the attack against the Obama administration on the Benghazi affair and the Iran nuclear deal.
Sen. Angus King (I-Me.) questioned Pompeo about a tweet he wrote last year, promoting the WikiLeaks release of Democratic National Committee’s hacked emails and asking if anyone “need[ed] further proof that the fix was in from President Obama on down” about Hillary Clinton’s email server.
King asked if Pompeo considered WikiLeaks to be a “reliable source of information.”
“I have never believed the WikiLeaks was a credible source of information,” Pompeo said.
Democrats also challenged him about his criticism of the administration’s policy and intelligence related to Iran and its compliance with the recent nuclear pact, which went into effect last year.
Pompeo pledged to lead an agency that makes “objective, sound judgments” about intelligence related to Iran’s compliance – noting that Iran was one of the greatest threats he sees to American security, alongside the Islamic State, Russia, and mounting cyber threats, among others.
But he added that “the Iranians are professionals at cheating,” suggesting there might be breaches the intelligence community did not know about. He noted that intelligence collection would not be perfect under his watch either, but that he would work to “diminish the risk that in fact we are missing something.”
Pompeo said his focus as director would be to ensure that the agency “remains the best in the world at its core mission: collecting what our enemies do not want us to know.” He pledged to “lead the agency to aggressively pursue collection operations and ensure analysts have the time, political space and resources to make objective and sound judgments.”
But the extent of the information Pompeo hopes to collect might not sit well with all senators.
Pompeo faced sharp questions about his public posture on domestic surveillance, and his advocacy to reinstate laws allowing the government to collect all metadata, including from social media. Privacy advocates such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Pompeo to say whether he thought there were any boundaries to the information the intelligence community could collect.
“You have my assurance we will not engage in unlawful activity,” Pompeo said, arguing that if “someone’s out there on their Facebook page talking about an attack,” the intelligence community would be “grossly negligent if they didn’t pursue that information.”
Pompeo acknowledged that even if the Congress changes laws to allow intelligence officials access to more information, “not all encryption takes place in the United States.”
“The intelligence community’s going to have to figure out a way to perform its function knowing that encryption will continue to be out there,” Pompeo said.
