Here’s a look at the life of Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State and former CIA director.
Personal:
Birth date: December 30, 1963
Birth place: Orange, California
Birth name: Michael Richard Pompeo
Father: Wayne Pompeo, machinist
Mother: Dorothy (Mercer) Pompeo
Marriages: Susan (Mostrous) Pompeo (date unavailable publicly-present); Leslie (Libert) Pompeo (1986-1997, divorced)
Education: United States Military Academy, West Point, B.S., 1986; Harvard Law School, J.D., 1994
Military service: US Army, 1986-1991, Captain
Religion: Christian/ Presbyterian
Other Facts:
First person to have served as both CIA director and secretary of state.
Graduated first in his class at West Point Military Academy.
Loves Revolutionary War history, country music, show tunes and college basketball.
Served as a deacon and Sunday School teacher at his church in Kansas.
Timeline:
1986-1989 – US Army officer in charge of patrolling the border between West Germany and East Germany and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.
1994-1996 – Joins the Washington, DC, law firm of Williams & Connolly as a tax litigator.
1998 – Co-founder of Thayer Aerospace, an aerospace manufacturing company founded with two classmates from West Point.
2006-2010 – Serves as president of Sentry International, a manufacturing company that produces oil drilling equipment.
2010 – According to the Washington Post,while campaigning for a seat in the US House of Representatives, Pompeo received the bulk of his campaign donations from conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and several employees from their various businesses. Koch Venture Capital had also contributed to Thayer Aerospace. Pompeo was the top beneficiary of Koch Industries contributions in 2016.
January 3, 2011-January 23, 2017 – Serves as the Congressman for Kansas’ 4th District. He is re-elected three times.
2014 – Is appointed to the House Select Committee to investigate the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi.
January 16, 2016 – Arguing for a “fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities,” he co-authors an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with David B. Rifkin Jr., stating, “Congress should pass a law reestablishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information in a comprehensive, searchable database.”
November 18, 2016 – US President-elect Donald Trump announces Pompeo’s nomination to lead the CIA.
January 23, 2017 – Confirmed by the Senate on a 66-32 vote, and sworn in as the head of the CIA.
March 13, 2018 – Trump announces Pompeo’s nomination to replace Rex Tillerson as the next US secretary of state.
April 18, 2018 – Trump announces via Twitter that Pompeo visited North Korea over Easterweekend and met with leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang.
April 26, 2018 – Confirmed and sworn in as the 70th US secretary of state.
May 7-10, 2018 – Pompeo heads back to Pyongyang to finalize the agenda for the upcoming summit between the United States and the Korean Peninsula. Three detained Americans — Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak-song and Kim Sang Duk, also known as Tony Kim — are freed and arrive back at Joint Base Andrews with Pompeo, where they are greeted by Trump and first lady Melania Trumpon board the plane.
June 12, 2018 – Trump and Kim Jong Un meet in Singapore, marking the first meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader.
July 9, 2018 – Makes an unannounced visit to Afghanistan and meets with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
October 7, 2018 – Meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, in preparation for a second summit between Trump and Kim.
November 27, 2018 – In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Pompeo fiercely defends the Trump administration’s support for Saudi Arabiain light of the outrage over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, accusing critics of ignoring regional threats posed by Iran.
January 9, 2019 – Makes an unannounced visit to Iraq and meets with Iraqi officials.
January 22, 2019 – Less than a week after a deadly ISIS-claimed attack in Syria, Pompeo delivers remarks to the World Economic Forum saying, “It should not go unnoticed that we’ve also defeated the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq alongside more than six dozen nations in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.”
