Pompeo Baldly Violates Hatch Act by Addressing Republican Convention—Does He Care?

Aug. 25, 2020 (EIRNS)—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to address tonight’s Republican Convention has unleashed a scandal, because it baldly violates stated law—the Hatch Act—that bars government employees from publicly engaging in partisan politics. According to NBC News, other diplomats are “aghast” at Pompeo’s blatantly political move. The fact that he will be speaking during an official overseas trip to Jerusalem, and that his trip there was paid for by the U.S. government, makes his decision all the more egregious.

Former State Department career officer Linda Thomas-Greenfield told NBC that “Pompeo is clearly ensuring the State Department is politicized by using his position to carry out what is basically a partisan mission.” None of this should come as any surprise, however. As Renée Sigerson points out in an upcoming article for EIR, “Today, it is Pompeo, a distilled by-product of international globalists’ poisonous, decades-long subversion of the U.S. political process, who is daily usurping Presidential authority.” At least one memo issued by the State Department’s office of the Legal Adviser, states explicitly that no “Senate-confirmed Presidential appointee” can even attend “a political party convention.”

Pompeo himself warned State Department employees not too long ago not to get involved in partisan politics. And Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun wrote a forceful memo last February to employees proclaiming that he would not even discuss politics in emails with friends, and announced that as a Senate-confirmed department official, he would be “sitting on the sidelines of the political process this year and would not be attending any political events.” But Pompeo insists that he is speaking tonight in a “personal” capacity,” that the Trump campaign is paying for everything, and that he’s only there to talk to Americans about how Trump has made him and his family “safe” from harm.