Former U.S. diplomacy chief Mike Pompeo and his wife Susan have assigned personal duties to agents paid with tax money, an ethical violation cited in a State Department Inspector General’s report released Friday.
These allegations are the result of internal investigations that sparked a lively controversy when in May 2020, at the request of Pompeo, former President Donald Trump subsequently fired his Secretary of State, the Inspector General who had just opened this investigation.
But investigations continued even after Democrat Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House in January.
And his result comes at a time when Pompeo is plunged into a campaign to run for the Republican candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.
Not a day goes by without the former Secretary of State attacking the Biden government.
The Inspector General’s Office found that Pompeo and his wife had assigned “duties of a personal nature” more than a hundred times to an “agent recruited on the basis of political criteria and other officials of the Secretary of State’s cabinet” , the report said.
“These requests are not in line with the State Department’s ethical standards,” and the US government, said the inspector, whose services are responsible for independently monitoring the exercise of power by the chief of diplomacy.
Last year, Pompeo called these suspicions “crazy” and accused the inspector who opened the investigation, Steve Linick, of being a “nefarious actor.”
According to the report, the couple asked a “counselor” to walk their dog and make more than 30 restaurant reservations for private meals, such as Sunday brunch at the “Cheesecake Factory.”
Susan Pompeo also asked State Department employees to arrange gifts for their hosts when they were invited by a television reporter or political commentator.
In addition, the inspector noted that the couple’s son, Nick Pompeo, had benefited from a discount normally reserved for government employees in a hotel room when he accompanied his parents to a football game that was presented as an official trip.
However, the report does not recommend punitive action against Mike Pompeo, who was recently recruited by the conservative Fox News channel as a political commentator.
The former secretary of state, most loyal to the former Republican president of Trump’s ministers, has been repeatedly accused by Democrats of using his position for political gain, for example hosting dinners with conservative personalities and State Department donors. .