Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has what appears to be a long history of heaping praise on former Attorney General Bill Barr and CIA Director Gina Haspel, individuals whose loyalties to President Trump and the patriot movement are being questioned by some Americans.
Pompeo recommended Barr for a position on a CIA advisory council, a group of outside advisors that Pompeo reportedly lavished dinners and trips to secret CIA training facilities on.
Agency veterans believed the group to be overrepresented by wealthy individuals and connected political types, and, while not illegal, also believed those activities “crossed a line.”
When he resigned in December, Pompeo penned several tweets effusive of praise for Barr:
AG Barr first served our Administration as a member of my Advisory Board at the CIA. He made me a better Director and the Agency a stronger espionage force.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) December 15, 2020
AG Barr crushed the propaganda generated by Mueller against President Trump and preserved our Republic from the rogue FBI and Special Counsel’s efforts to undermine the 2016 election based on a bogus theory of Russian collusion.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) December 15, 2020
It was a joy and an honor to serve alongside you Bill. Well done.
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) December 15, 2020
Barr angered many supporters of President Trump when in October he confirmed that long-awaited results of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s report on SpyGate would not be released before November’s election.
“This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election,” a GOP congressional aide told Axios at the time.
Barr angered conservatives further when in December he said he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in [November’s] election.”
The relationship with the president may have reached a breaking point just weeks later when Barr said he saw “no reason” to appoint special prosecutors to investigate either election fraud in the 2020 election or the Hunter Biden scandal, both of which Trump supporters had pushed for.
Similarly, Pompeo has been somewhat of a champion of Gina Haspel, a 40-year CIA veteran who didn’t have much support within the Agency or on Capitol Hill for becoming director when Pompeo became Secretary of State in 2018.
Pompeo reportedly took Haspel under his wing, if only in terms of how to navigate Trump world, giving her pointers on how to endear herself to President Trump and introducing her to trusted figures in Trump’s orbit like Fox’s Sean Hannity.
There are reports however, that Haspel banked on Trump losing in November so that she would be able to keep documents relating to the origins of SpyGate classified.
Barr, Pompeo and Haspel all visited Rome, Italy, within several weeks of each other in the late summer and early fall of 2019, purportedly to get to the bottom of SpyGate. To date, it’s unclear what has come of those efforts.
Italy finds itself once more in the spotlight vis a vis American national security as reports have surfaced that a whistleblower is set to testify in Italian court that operatives from various intelligence agencies remotely manipulated votes in the U.S. election from the U.S. Embassy Rome (and perhaps other locations), and used military satellites owned and operated by Italian defense contractor Leonardo SpA to do it.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons