Pompeo opts for pettiness

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered a telling explanation of why he fired Steve Linick last month as one of the inspectors general who are charged with keeping the federal government honest.
“They work for the agency head — that’s me — and they are supposed to deliver and help make that organisation better,” Pompeo told reporters. “My mistake was letting Mr Linick stay here as long as he did.”
Pompeo likes to be the boss, and he advertises his “swagger.” Got that, as Pompeo likes to say. But he chafes at the essential reality that he is a public servant, and that it’s Linick’s duty to question him, even if that’s irritating. As Alexander Hamilton promised in 1788: “Here, sir, the people govern.”
Pompeo might take a lesson in humility and accountability from General
Mark A Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who admitted in a graduation speech that
he made a mistake appearing in uniform with President Trump after police had cleared protestors near the White House. “My presence in that moment … created the perception of the military involved in
domestic politics,” Milley rightly said.
Linick’s firing is easy to overlook at a moment when we’re drowning in troubles. But it’s worth examining new details in a transcript of testimony a week earlier to House and Senate committees. They help explain how Pompeo, who can be a human Mount Vesuvius, got hot over what he saw as Linick’s intrusive questions.
Linick’s testimony suggested that he had been examining, first, whether Pompeo had improperly defied a congressional
decision, and, second, whether Pompeo had misused government resources by asking his senior adviser Toni Porter to do personal errands for him and his wife, Susan.
“We were fulfilling our obligation to review the implementation of the policy”, Linick told Congress.
Asked later if he had conducted another review that “was related to Secretary Pompeo and his wife,”
Linick answered: “All I
can say, it was related to the review of allegations relating to misuse of government resources by both of them.”
Linick was asked at another point about Porter, a longtime aide to Pompeo when he was a congressman who came to Washington with him in 2017, first at the CIA as chief of protocol and then at State as a senior adviser. Linick declined, saying that discussing Porter would require “getting into matters involving our investigation, and I don’t really want to comment on who she is or what she does or anything like that.”
The Kansas City Star reported on May 19 that Linick had been investigating Porter’s role, “and whether she as a political appointee was conducting Pompeo’s personal business on
government time.”
The article, by Bryan Lowry and Michael Wilner, said the inquiry “was triggered by multiple complaints on the IG hotline.” The Star wrote that Pompeo’s wife had been mentioned 23 times during the June 23 testimony.
What “personal business” was Linick examining? The Post’s Carol Morello reported on May 18, three days after Linick’s ouster, that he “is believed to have been investigating allegations that Pompeo directed a political appointee to run errands for him and his wife, including retrieving his dry cleaning and making dinner reservations.”
Pompeo indignantly denied that he had fired Linick in retaliation for the personal investigations. “That’s patently false,” he told reporters on May 20. “I have no sense of what investigations were taking place inside the inspector general’s office.”
Pompeo’s blanket denial is surprising. Linick said he had briefed Deputy Secretary Steve Biegun and Under Secretary Brian Bulatao that, as the congressional questioner put it, “there was an inquiry into Secretary Pompeo and his wife regarding the use of resources.”
“I just wanted to make sure that folks on the Seventh Floor [where Pompeo has his office] knew what we were doing before they just got a document request,” Linick testified.
Is walking the boss’s pet a capital crime? Of course not. But it’s the kind of petty misuse of power that most government officials work very hard to avoid — not least because they know a whistleblower could pick up the phone and call the inspector general’s office.
Inspectors general like Linick are paid to be meddlesome. Like auditors, they’re supposed to be
intrusive and sometimes disrespectful of authority. Cabinet secretaries like Pompeo are paid to take the heat and remember, always, that they are the servants of the people, not their masters.

—The Washington Post

David Ignatius is an American journalist and novelist.
He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post