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The secretary of state has been drawn deeply into the Ukraine scandal, with a parade of his diplomats testifying. He is sticking by the president.
WASHINGTON — As President Trump’s first C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo was briefed by agency officials on the extensive evidence — including American intercepts of conversations between participants — showing that Russian hackers working for the government of Vladimir V. Putin had interfered in the 2016 American presidential campaign. In May 2017, Mr. Pompeo testified in a Senate hearing that he stood by that conclusion.
Two and a half years later, Mr. Pompeo seems to have changed his mind. As Mr. Trump’s second secretary of state, he now supports an investigation into a discredited, partisan theory that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked the Democratic National Committee, which Mr. Trump wants to use to make the case that he was elected without Moscow’s help. “Inquiries with respect to that are completely important,” Mr. Pompeo said last month. “I think everyone recognizes that governments have an obligation — indeed, a duty — to ensure that elections happen with integrity, without interference from any government, whether that’s the Ukrainian government or any other.”
Mr. Pompeo’s spreading of a false narrative at the heart of the Ukraine scandal is the most striking example of how he has fallen off the tightrope he has traversed for the past 18 months: demonstrating loyalty to the president while insisting to others he was pursuing a traditional, conservative foreign policy. Mr. Pompeo, 55, now finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress that Mr. Trump and his allies hijacked Ukraine policy for political gain — and as congressional investigators look into what Mr. Pompeo knew of the machinations of Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.
It was Mr. Pompeo who helped Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani oust the respected American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, in April. Both Michael McKinley, a senior adviser to Mr. Pompeo and a four-time ambassador, and Philip T. Reeker, the acting assistant secretary for Europe, testified that they asked State Department leadership to defend Ms. Yovanovitch from false accusations, only to be rejected. Mr. McKinley said he personally urged Mr. Pompeo three times to issue a defense.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Pompeo did not speak out on behalf of the veteran State Department diplomat he asked to fill Ms. Yovanovitch’s job, William B. Taylor Jr., after Mr. Trump attacked the diplomat over his blistering testimony on the president’s quid pro quo demands. In fact, Mr. Pompeo has tried to block officials under him from testifying.
At the same time, Mr. Pompeo is facing a revolt in the State Department. Confidence in his leadership has plummeted among career officials, who accuse him of abandoning veteran diplomats criticized by Mr. Trump and letting the president’s personal political agenda infect foreign policy.
Many diplomats now contend that Mr. Pompeo has done more damage to the 75,000-person agency than even his predecessor Rex Tillerson, an aloof oil executive reviled by department employees.
“In my view, and I say this with a great deal of reluctance as Secretary Pompeo tried at the start of his tenure to lift up the career service, he has failed the men and women of the department in his most important responsibility — to support them in the deepest crisis the service has faced in memory,” said Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s top career official under President George W. Bush and now a Harvard professor who advises Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign.
Some State Department officials have resorted to back channels to voice their complaints, congressional aides said. Over the summer, as confidence in Mr. Pompeo eroded, a stream of career officials spoke quietly with congressional offices about their concerns over administration policy — on the hold on Ukraine military aid, a move to cut $4 billion of foreign aid and arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
On Oct. 23, the three congressional impeachment committees said Mr. Pompeo had overseen a “culture of harassment and impunity.” That echoed what Ms. Yovanovitch had told investigators: The State Department was being “attacked and hollowed out from within,” she said.
In interviews on Oct. 30 with Fox News and The New York Post, two of Mr. Trump’s favorite media organizations, Mr. Pompeo pushed a new conspiracy theory involving Mr. Biden’s son and President Barack Obama’s policy of military aid to Ukraine — a theory that career officials under him find outlandish.
“Pompeo has consistently demonstrated that the only safe place on Trump’s foreign policy team is to be more Trumpian than the president himself,” said Andrew Weiss, a former official with the White House National Security Council, the State Department and the Pentagon in Democratic and Republican administrations. “Whether that means trafficking in over-the-top partisan attacks on Trump’s opponents or conspiracy-mongering about the 2016 election and the Ukraine scandal, he’s always willing to go there.”
“It seems that the only thing Pompeo is consistently prioritizing is his own personal political ambitions as opposed to what’s actually good for the country’s long-term national interests or the institutional well-being of the State Department,” added Mr. Weiss, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The recent wave of criticism has made Mr. Pompeo, known for a short fuse, even more testy in public. When a reporter asked Mr. Pompeo whether Mr. Trump’s abandonment of Kurdish partners in Syria had undercut American credibility, he lashed out, saying, “The whole predicate of your question is insane.”
A battered diplomatic corps is finding some solace in the nomination by Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo last Thursday of their North Korea envoy, Stephen E. Biegun, as the deputy secretary of state. Mr. Biegun is a longtime national security professional who worked for Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration.
Still, Mr. Pompeo’s problems are growing as his frequent trips to Kansas, his adopted home state, come under greater scrutiny.
Last Tuesday, Senator Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked the United States Office of Special Counsel to look into whether Mr. Pompeo was violating the Hatch Act by traveling to Kansas four times this year, three on taxpayer-funded official trips. Many people speculate that Mr. Pompeo, a former Republican Tea Party congressman backed by the Koch family, plans to run for the Senate next year, and that the trips amount to a shadow campaign.
On Oct. 25, as Mr. Pompeo was on his most recent visit, made with Ivanka Trump, The Kansas City Star ran an editorial with the headline “Mike Pompeo, Either Quit and Run for U.S. Senate in Kansas or Focus on Your Day Job.”
“He should by all means focus on U.S. diplomacy — remember diplomacy? — and stop hanging out here every chance he gets,” it said.
But it is Mr. Pompeo’s murky role in the shadow Ukraine policy that is keeping him in the cross hairs. Congressional investigators have subpoenaed his old friend and former business partner, Ulrich T. Brechbuhl, the State Department’s counselor.
The State Department did not answer detailed questions submitted for this article. In a combative interview with ABC News on Oct. 20, Mr. Pompeo declined to discuss Ukraine. He addressed the issue of low morale in his department by saying, “I see motivated officers.”
The revelations on Ukraine have shown Mr. Pompeo had direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s shadow policy, and seems to have enabled it.
In October, after the publication of news reports, Mr. Pompeo admitted he took part in the pivotal July telephone call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. That was the same call that prompted a C.I.A. employee to file the whistle-blower complaint that ignited the impeachment inquiry.
And in August, Mr. Pompeo received an urgent cable from Mr. Taylor, the chief of mission in Ukraine, saying it was “folly” to withhold American military aid to Ukraine.
Though Mr. Taylor said that he heard Mr. Pompeo brought that Aug. 29 cable to the White House, Mr. Pompeo has refused to say what he advised. Some people familiar with the issue say he urged the president to resume military aid in September, fearful that the pressure on Ukrainian leaders for political favors would come back to bite the administration.
In April, Mr. Pompeo complied when Mr. Trump ordered Ms. Yovanovitch removed from her ambassador post, the result of a right-wing media campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his associates that asserted, without evidence, that the ambassador had disparaged Mr. Trump.
John J. Sullivan, Mr. Pompeo’s deputy and Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Russia, conceded at a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday that he knew Mr. Giuliani was among those trying to “smear” Ms. Yovanovitch, but said he was told by Mr. Pompeo only that the president “had lost confidence in her.”
For career officials, Ms. Yovanovitch, a three-time ambassador, is a rallying point. Multiple op-eds and open letters with scores of signatures from former officials have called on Mr. Pompeo to defend Ms. Yovanovitch and the other officials who are shedding light on policies.
The latest letter, with more than 400 signatures from mostly former employees of the United States Agency for International Development, said State Department colleagues were “under siege.” “We are angered at the treatment of dedicated, experienced and wise public servants like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch,” it said.
Mr. McKinley told lawmakers on Oct. 16 that he resigned five days earlier because department leaders had failed to support diplomats caught up in the impeachment inquiry, and because of “the engagement of our missions to procure negative political information for domestic purposes,” according to a transcript of the testimony.
He said he believed the State Department was being used to dig up dirt on a political opponent of the president. “In 37 years in the Foreign Service and different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that,” he said.
Mr. McKinley also spoke of low morale arising from the leadership’s inaction after the department’s inspector general released a report in August that detailed how two political appointees in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs — the assistant secretary Kevin Moley and his senior adviser Marie Stull — had harassed career employees. The inspector general is finalizing a similar investigation into another appointee, Brian H. Hook, the special representative on Iran.
“Morale at the State Department is rock bottom, but spirits have been lifted by the courage of these patriots,” Wendy Sherman, the department’s third-ranking official under President Barack Obama, said of Mr. McKinley and others testifying.
While failing to back his veteran diplomats, Mr. Pompeo has taken to the airwaves to defend Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Pompeo told CBS News on Sept. 22 that Mr. Giuliani’s request of Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden was appropriate. “I think the American people deserve to know,” he said.
Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Pompeo had told him that he “was aware of” Mr. Giuliani’s efforts, and Mr. Giuliani passed a dossier of questionable documents on Ukraine to Mr. Pompeo. The State Department special representative for Ukraine, Kurt D. Volker, was involved in Mr. Giuliani’s interactions with Ukrainian officials.
Gordon D. Sondland, a Trump campaign donor and ambassador to the European Union who was a main player in the quid pro quo demands on Ukraine, told congressional investigators on Oct. 17 that Mr. Pompeo had endorsed his activities.
“I understand that all my actions involving Ukraine had the blessing of Secretary Pompeo as my work was consistent with longstanding U.S. foreign policy objectives,” he said. “Indeed, very recently, Secretary Pompeo sent me a congratulatory note that I was doing great work, and he encouraged me to keep banging away.”
Lara Jakes, Nicholas Fandos and Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.
