What to know about CIA pick Mike Pompeo

Congressman Mike Pompeo is Trump’s pick to head the CIA.

Pompeo was a vocal member of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Select Committee on Benghazi. He went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Harvard Law School and was an editor the Harvard Law Review. He was in the Army, and the New York Times reported that his website says he “served as an officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

…he once said that Muslim leaders could be “complicit” in terrorism if they didn’t condemn it sufficiently.

“When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith and are performed in the name of that faith, a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith,” the Kansas representative said in 2013. “Instead of responding, silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations characterized these remarks as “false and irresponsible.”

He has indicated a greater ability to distinguish ordinary Muslims from militant Islamists than his soon-to-be-boss, though. Last year after a trip to the Middle East, Pompeo warned against conflating Muslims with extremists.

…Pompeo is a major backer of an increased surveillance state, pushing for Congress to roll back reforms limiting the mass collection of metadata. “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed,” he has argued in the Wall Street Journal.
On top of that, Pompeo called for the death penalty for Edward Snowden, accusing him of treason and of handing over information to foreign powers that put American lives at risk. “He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” he said.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.