Matthew Kelly and Chance Swaim, The Kansas City Star on
“Oh, goodness no,” Pompeo told a reporter before the event.
“Because we’re still thinking about running ourselves, and it will be interesting to see who else enters the race.”
He then spent an hour defending to a hometown crowd his tenure in the Trump White House, which he called “one of the most unique presidential administrations in history.”
“I was a follower,” Pompeo said. “President Trump was in charge. He was the one that got 270 electoral votes. I got zero.”
Pompeo’s memoir — “Never Give An Inch” — is the latest signal that he is considering run for president. He started a political action committee in April 2021 and has been visiting early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
On Friday, Pompeo’s tour stopped at Wichita State University, where he also answered reporters’ questions on a federal abortion ban, election integrity and spy balloons.
Pompeo said he and his wife, Susan, expect to make a decision on a presidential run by late spring or early summer.
“The moment my wife and I have sorted our way through this, we will let everybody know and then you’ll be able to see it too because we will begin to campaign with the same energy and the same listening to people that we did when I ran for Congress,” Pompeo said.
“I’m very hopeful that people won’t choose tweets and celebrity but rationality and arguments. That we’ll have a real conversation within our party.”
He spoke to a crowd of about 200 Friday at Wichita State University.
The Wichita State Foundation crowd has crossover with Pompeo’s potential campaign funding base. Some of Wichita State University’s largest donors (Koch Industries and Dave Murfin) have also bankrolled Pompeo’s business and political ambitions.
Pompeo would not say if he was meeting with Charles Koch or any other donors while visiting his home district. The Koch network’s flagship political organization Americans for Prosperity signaled last week that it would back a GOP candidate other than Trump in 2024 with the aim of turning “the page on the past.”
“I have lots of meetings that I’ll do but I’m not going to talk about the private meetings that I’m going to have,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo’s political career started in Wichita. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Kansas’ Fourth District from 2011 to 2017, when he was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency by President Donald Trump. He was elevated to secretary of state in 2018.
When Pompeo left Congress, he had received more money from Charles and David Koch’s political network than any other federal politician.
Abortion stance
His first post-Trump visit to Wichita was a closed-door fundraiser for Kansans For Life ahead of the Value Them Both amendment that sought to remove abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution in August 2022. The measure failed by a wide margin.
Pompeo told a reporter Friday that the ballot question was “very confusing” and that he thinks a majority of Kansans actually oppose abortion.
“They should continue to pray, continue to work with the state legislature, which state legislatures now have the authority to make those decisions,” Pompeo said.
Asked if he would sign a bill as president banning abortion at the federal level, Pompeo indicated he would not.
“You know, I think we’ve got it right,” Pompeo said of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs decision, which overturned the federal right to an abortion last year. “For a decade or so, I worked hard to return the authority to the states. I think that’s the best place for it and that’s where it sits now.”
‘Free and fair elections’
As the top U.S. diplomat, Pompeo traveled the world advocating for free and fair elections. Asked if he has faith in the integrity of the 2024 election, he struck a cautious tone.
“I’m worried about it,” Pompeo said. “Here’s what I’m really worried about. The American people have to believe these are free and fair elections.
He said to restore trust, states should strengthen their voter ID laws and limit mail-in balloting. Toning down inflammatory rhetoric on stolen elections will also be important, Pompeo said.
“We have a former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claiming that the election was stolen from her in 2016 — she says it to this day. That’s dangerous and indecent,” Pompeo said. “We have President Trump saying he thinks the presidency was stolen in ‘20.”
Asked if he thinks it’s equally dangerous for prominent politicians of either major party to sow distrust in the integrity of elections, he responded unequivocally: “One hundred percent.”
“I’ll go further. It’s equally dangerous for senior leaders of both political parties to put classified information where it shouldn’t be.”
Spy balloons, Ukraine
Pompeo has been highly critical of President Joe Biden’s handling of the Chinese spy balloon, which appeared in the Kansas sky before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Everybody wants to know what happened with the darn balloon. It looks like we just shot another one down a couple hours ago,” Pompeo said, referencing the “high altitude object” shot down over Alaska on Friday.
Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, credited improved surveillance under Biden with the detection of the balloon, while the top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that several Chinese balloon incursions may have gone undetected during the Trump administration.
“This administration has made it clear that they think it happened but no one knew,” Pompeo said. “No one in the Trump administration was aware, so it’s not fair to say this happened in the Trump administration in the same way.”
Pompeo did not rule out China spy balloons going undetected while he was in the White House but he said they likely were on the fringes of the country.
“It could be that our failure was we didn’t identify it,” Pompeo said. “But it sounds like it was different.”
Pompeo also shared his thoughts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I’ve spent enough time with Vladamir Putin personally to know that he has never changed,” Pompeo said. “He believes that good swaths of Europe are part of greater Russia, and he is determined to make that happen. . . . He doesn’t give a whipstick about human life.”
“It’s hard for Americans to get those two thoughts in their head,” he said. “But once you do, the path forward is incredibly clear. You have to crush him.”
“My critique of the Biden administration here is not that they’ve provided those tools, but they’ve done so too slowly,” he said.
“Every day that goes by increases the chance that Putin uses a nuclear weapon, which will draw us in even further, and that is not in America’s best interest.”
Pompeo was also asked if he thinks Matt Schlapp, another prominent Republican from Wichita, should step down as chair of the American Conservative Union amid pending litigation and accusations that he groped a Herschel Walker campaign staffer last October.
“Matt will have to sort that out,” Pompeo said. “I’ve seen these allegations. Sounds like there’s legal action too if I’ve read it correctly. He’ll sort his way through that and so will the organization that he’s leading. And in the end, so will the court system.”
———
©2023 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
