Donald Trump’s Secretary of State and CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, highly criticized his former boss over his classified documents scandal on Tuesday, just hours before the ex-president will be arraigned in a 37-federal felony count indictment.
A former U.S. Congressman from Kansas and former Army Captain who holds a Harvard Law degree and earned his bachelor’s at the U.S. Military Academy, Pompeo also spent years in the military-industrial complex. He is a highly-partisan religious right conservative who declined to run for president in 2024.
Pompeo told Fox News that Donald Trump’s actions surrounding the hundreds of classified documents he is accused of unlawfully retaining and refusing to return is “inconsistent with protecting America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines.”
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“Two things I think are both true at this point,” Pompeo told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, as The Daily Caller reported. “First, if the allegations are true, and there’s lots of indications that they are, President Trump had classified documents where he shouldn’t have had them and then, when given the opportunity to return them, he chose not to do that for whatever reason. That’s just – Brian, you talked about me having classified documents, I handled thousands and thousands of them during my time in Congress and as CIA Director and Secretary of State.”
Pompeo did try to give Trump an out, suggesting taking the documents was a mistake.
“I suppose we can all make mistakes and get them to the wrong place, but when somebody identifies that, you gotta turn them in. So that’s just inconsistent with protecting America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines and if the allegations are true, some of these were pretty serious, important documents. So that’s wrong,” he concluded.
Pompeo joins former Trump UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and former top Trump defender, his ex-Attorney General Bill Barr, both of whom have in recent days highly criticized their former boss’s decisions surrounding the classified documents.
Watch below or at this link.