Unlike past directors, who typically sought to avoid policy discussions, Mr. Pompeo readily joins in when the president asks for his opinion, even on matters far afield of national security, such as health care. And he brings to the table the views of a former congressman first elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010 who staked out ground on the far right of the Republican Party.
While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo argued for domestic surveillance on a wide scale, insisted that waterboarding was not torture and dismissed a hunger strike by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a “political stunt.” He said he believed Hillary Clinton had engaged in covering up the 2012 attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, even after a Republican-led House inquiry found no new evidence to support the claim. Like almost all congressional Republicans, he opposed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.
Mr. Pompeo, 53, is just the kind of well-credentialed tough guy Mr. Trump admires. He graduated first in his class from West Point, served as an Army tank officer and went to Harvard Law School. Since arriving at the C.I.A., he has proved eager to push limits, whether they be on covert operations or on calling out the press for what he considers its failings.
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As a congressman from Wichita, Kan., the home of Koch Industries, Mr. Pompeo was a favorite of the Koch brothers, the conservative billionaires who run the company. But he can still charm an audience of mixed political views, getting laughs at the Aspen Security Forum by cracking wise about things like “this fuzzy little First Amendment,” while attacking favorite Republican targets like the Obama administration and WikiLeaks (failing to mention that he had once cheered WikiLeaks’ disclosures).
But Mr. Pompeo knows whom not to criticize — namely, Mr. Trump. Since taking over the C.I.A., Mr. Pompeo has gone out of his way to praise what he describes as Mr. Trump’s open-minded approach to intelligence, recasting the president’s churlish mocking of American intelligence agencies as the healthy skepticism of a smart leader.
