I’m grateful to @POTUS for the honor to serve as our nation’s 70th Secretary of State. So many matters of global importance demand our focus. I’m committed to putting the interests of the American people first and look forward to serving with the world’s finest diplomatic corps. pic.twitter.com/qEWQ6oa3Rm
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) May 1, 2018
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo graduated from the West Point Military Academy as valedictorian. He would go on to work for a litany of top law firms including most notably, Williams and Connolly. The list of former WC clients reads like a who’s who of Washington’s elite.
From the firm’s website:
William & Connolly’s clients have included President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush; Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and George Shultz; Health and Human Resources Secretary Donna Shalala; Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers, James Baker, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson; military leaders, including David Petraeus, William McRaven, Stan McChrystal, and Mike Mullen; Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan; Presidential Advisors David Plouffe, Josh Bolten, Mary Matalin, Dee Dee Myers, Andrew Card, Marlin Fitzwater, Mike McCurry, David Axelrod, and Gene Sperling; former members of Congress, including Senators Sam Nunn, Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan, Jon Kyl, and Representatives John Boehner, John McHugh, Tom Foley, Mike Oxley, Geraldine Ferraro, and many more.
While at WC Pompeo worked on a case involving a proposed amendment to the Arkansas State Constitution that would impose term limits. The client in the case, U.S. Term Limits, was funded indirectly by the billionaire Koch brothers, a fact that was not known at the time and would be the source of some controversy.
After leaving the law profession Pompeo would go on to found Thayer Aerospace, an aircraft machinery manufacturer based in Kansas. The firm was reportedly funded with investments from several venture capital firms including Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and the Koch brothers’ Koch Venture Capital. The $90 million raised is notable because although one of Pompeo’s partners had worked directly for Bain, none seemed to have experience in the Aerospace sector at that point.
Thayer would be granted a number of large contracts from some of the top defense firms in the nation in the years that followed, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon.
In 2006 Pompeo would leave Thayer and become president of Sentry International, a manufacturer of oilfield equipment, again a career move of some note as Pompeo had no apparent knowledge of the oil industry at that point.
After leaving Thayer, the company would be bought out and have its name changed to Nex-Tech Aerospace. It was acquired by Highland Capital Management LP at the time. Just weeks after Pompeo was elected to Congress in 2011 Nex-Tech would be sold to H.M. Dunn. H.M. Dunn is a portfolio company of Connecticut-based Gridiron Capital LLC.
The pattern of selling and name changes is consistent with firms in the defense industry.
As State of the Nation reports:
“They interlock their ownership in sales of various divisions and then [contract] the work back to each other. Then, whenever they need to place a groomed individual into the business, they make him CEO, feed him cash to look like he is a connected financial genius, then obtain warrants to purchase stock.
Once the CEO has been sufficiently groomed, and in order to keep his resume clean, they facilitate a sale of that division back to the previous corporate owner, with a few name changes thrown in to throw regulators off the scent. The groomed one is then touted as a “mergers and acquisitions” genius.
During the entire time of the groomed one’s time as CEO, he does no work, subcontracts all the real work to the company who sold the business to him in the first place, and then dutifully makes speeches and accepts accolades and awards.”
The British Pilgrims Society, a society founded to encourage “Anglo-American good fellowship,” is said to have wielded outsized influence on U.S. politicians and policy since its inception in 1902. One of the founding members of the Pilgrims of the United States, former U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root, is quoted as saying “the Pilgrims Society has groomed every U.S. Secretary of State, War and C.I.A. director, since 1899.”
Pompeo has served as both CIA Director and Secretary of State.
Some say Pompeo’s near-perfect resume – top of his class at West Point, military service, white-shoe law firm experience, heading of firms in defense and oil, Congress, CIA and State Department – is consistent with the “grooming” of groups like the Pilgrims Society.
Pompeo’s background is getting extra scrutiny in the wake of allegations of election interference that have come out of Italy.
Those allegations say the Nov. 3 election was hacked by individuals in various locations in Italy – including the U.S. Embassy in Rome. An operation highly unlikely to have taken place without Pompeo’s knowledge.
Pompeo was in Italy on January 7, just two weeks before stepping down as Secretary of State. A week later two Italian military planes – closely following one another – landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. There is speculation one of those planes was carrying a whistleblower with information on the election hack.
Inquiries with the Italian Embassy in Washington as to what the planes’ stated missions were have gone unanswered.
Pompeo, former Attorney General Bill Barr and former CIA Director Gina Haspel all visited Italy within weeks of each other in the late summer/fall of 2019 – with Barr actually visiting twice.
Barr had reportedly been investigating allegations of the possible involvement of Italian intelligence officers, or other officers acting within Italy, in SpyGate – the beginnings of the investigation of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte reportedly assured Barr that no such involvement took place. But if Conte proved to Barr that nothing had happened in Italy in 2016, why did Haspel come to Rome just two weeks later?
We have not been able to ascertain the answer to that question.
Pompeo also 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 are questionable at best.
Pompeo was interviewed on the morning of his graduation from West Point in 1986 by Good Morning America. The keynote speaker at the commencement ceremonies that year was Secretary of Defense under Ronald Regan Caspar Weinberger, a member of the executive committee of the Pilgrims Society at the time. (Weinberger’s clip begins at the 41:55 mark in the video below, Pompeo’s at 44:22)