By sifting through emails and other documents and interviewing staff members, investigators uncovered dozens of instances where Mike or Susan Pompeo asked State Department employees to perform tasks of a personal nature, from booking salon appointments and private dinner reservations to pickup. of their dog and arranging tours for the Pompeos’ political allies. Employees told investigators that they saw the requests from Susan Pompeo, who was not on the federal payroll, as supported by the secretary.
Mike Pompeo emphasized in an interview with researchers that the requests were often small and the kind of things that friends do for friends. His attorney, William Burck, condemned a draft of the report he received as a politically biased “compilation of picayune complaints handpicked by the drafters.”
However, the Inspector General’s Office defended the investigation, noting that many of the rules for such interactions are clear, making no exceptions for minor tasks, and that the Pompeos’ requests ended up occurring for a significant amount of time. of employees. paid by taxpayers.
The tasks the employees were given varied widely.
Susan Pompeo, for example, asked co-workers to buy a T-shirt for a friend; arrange for flowers to be sent to friends recovering from illness; and help her book appointments to hair salons while she was at the UN General Assembly in New York and had to meet with foreign dignitaries. One year, a senior adviser to the secretary and a senior foreign service official stopped by at the weekend “to envelope, address and mail personalized Christmas cards for the Pompeos,” the report said.
State Department staffers were also given more intensive assignments, such as planning events, including for groups with the Pompeos affiliated, but in a non-governmental capacity.
The apparently personal Pompeo tasks required time, both on and off duty, the report states. The Pompeos did not separately compensate the executives for the non-State Department-related work, the report said.
The report extensively mentions the personal duties performed by a state employee, using only the title of “ senior adviser, ” but the description of her background matches that of Toni Porter, who joined Pompeo at Foggy Bottom as a senior adviser after he worked for him when he was in Congress and head of the CIA.
Mike Pompeo described Porter to investigators as an old friend of his family, but Porter told investigators that “for the most part she believed she was performing the tasks described in this report as part of her official duties.” Many of the requests Porter dealt with clearly related to State Department affairs, but others did not appear to be.
Porter was given the task with many of the seemingly personal requests. Investigators found that “on an almost daily basis since the senior advisor’s employment began, Ms. Pompeo would send an email to the senior advisor’s official email account asking her to perform various tasks.”
According to the report, Porter spent “more than three months preparing for a June 2019 visit to Washington, DC, by the Kansas Chapter of the YPO (formerly the Young Presidents’ Organization), an organization of which the secretary was a member. ”
By enlisting Porter’s help, Susan Pompeo emphasized the previous political support of several members for Secretary Pompeo’s campaigns for the House of Representatives, but did not point to any connection between the visit and the department’s affairs, ”said the report.
For example, Ms. Pompeo’s list stated that one attendee was’ one of Mike’s greatest supporters during his years in Congress, where he hosted Pompeo’s largest fundraising campaign for Kansas, ‘while another attendee was’ on the Pompeo for Kansas Finance Council. was sitting. ”
Porter “organized events for the tour participants, including arranging tours of several museums, as well as visits to the Library of Congress and the US Capitol.”
The State Department did not pay for the tours or other events organized for the outside organizations with which the Pompeos were associated, the researchers note. However, they argue that that is only more evidence that the events were personal and should not have been handled by State Department employees.
Their report also refers to provisions in federal regulations, such as from the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, which state that “an employee shall not use public office for his own private gain, for the approval of a product, service. or company, or for the personal gain of friends, family members or persons with whom the employee is associated in a non-governmental capacity, including non-profit organizations of which the employee is an officer or member, and persons with whom the employee has a job or looking for or business relations. “
Pompeo’s lawyer, Burck, was fierce in his defense. The draft of the report, Burck said in an official response, “is, in short, a politicized document in the guise of an investigative report” that blows small tasks out of proportion.
The attorney alleges that Pompeo’s technique of deposing Linick, the State Department’s Inspector General, motivated the investigators. The researchers deny these and other allegations against them, noting that the probe began well before Linick was fired.
Burck noted that it was Susan Pompeo who often made the requests, not the secretary herself. “We thought the days were long gone when someone would view women as mere extensions of their husbands, but that outdated and offensive view animates the entire draft report,” he wrote.
On at least 30 occasions, Mike or Susan Pompeo instructed State Department employees to “make restaurant reservations for personal lunches and dinners with Pompeo relatives or friends,” the report said.
Employees told investigators that they viewed such duties as involving departmental matters, as diplomatic security officials would have to do work ahead of time to secure the sites. An employee said he had made similar reservations for other secretaries of state. The report suggests that the department is clarifying the rules for such requests.
An unusual case involved Pompeos’s son, Nick. In September 2019, the Pompeos and then-Undersecretary of State for Management Brian Bulatao, a longtime friend of Mike Pompeo, were planning to attend a football game at the United States Military Academy in West Point. Bulatao and Mike Pompeo are graduates of West Point. Nick Pompeo was supposed to join them, but since he was not an official guest of the military academy, he had to pay his own way.
Investigators say they have found evidence that “Bulatao was trying to get a price cut” for Nick Pompeo, and that a hotel room reserved for him was charged a “temporary rate reserved for federal employees on official business.” Pompeos’ son was not a federal employee. ”
The report did not address questions about the Madison Dinners, a series of rallies the Pompeos held that showed the pair were trying to bolster their political Rolodexes under the guise of diplomatic work. One person familiar with the matter said the investigators had investigated the Madison Dinners issue, but found that the couple had not broken the rules on such matters.
The report also did not address questions about obtaining housing for the Pompeos in a military complex. It was not immediately clear whether that problem is being investigated.
One case that needed further clarification according to the inspector general’s office involved the Pompeos using State Department funds to purchase gifts (such as golden nut shells) for the hosts of dinners who seemed personal and unrelated to diplomatic work. Investigators recommended that the department officially determine whether such gifts can be paid for with tax money.
The Pompeos have requested at least three times that diplomatic security officers perform some personal duties for them, but for the most part, they did not turn to that group for such requests, the researchers found.
In his interview, Pompeo repeatedly minimized the requests, according to the report, arguing that they were just small tasks that didn’t require such intensive scrutiny.
Since Mike Pompeo is no longer a federal employee, and his wife was not one, the State Department can do little to punish the couple for the alleged rule violations. One reason the report took so long is that Mike Pompeo continued to refuse to commit to an interview until he finally agreed to an interview in late December, less than a month before he left office.
However, the Office of the Inspector General has recommended that various departments of the State Department, such as the Legal Counsel’s Office, update or draft new guidelines that establish or further clarify the proper use of department funds and staff members when it comes to personal tasks.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, now headed by State Secretary Antony Blinken, sent a brief response to the Office of the Inspector General in which it accepted those recommendations.
Asked for comment on Friday, a State Department spokesman said: “The department appreciates the work of the Inspector General’s office and, as noted in the report, endorses all recommendations and will proceed with implementation. of it. “