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With an Eye on 2024, a Rarely Bashful Pompeo Grows More Combative
[NYT via the generally deplorable Yahoo.com] WASHINGTON — As secretary of state during the Trump administration, Mike Pompeo had little regard for his job’s genteel diplomatic protocols, routinely throwing verbal punches against foreign governments, political opponents and the mainstream media.
What was he like as President Trump’s CIA director?
Out of office for more than two months, Pompeo has not stopped punching. In a series of speeches, interviews and Twitter posts, he is emerging as the most outspoken critic of President Joe Biden among former top Trump officials. And he is ignoring, much as he did in office, the custom that current and former secretaries of state avoid the appearance of political partisanship.

In back-to-back appearances in Iowa and during an interview in New Hampshire over the past week, Pompeo questioned the Biden administration’s resolve toward China. In Iowa, he accused the White House of reversing the Trump administration’s immigration policy "willy-nilly and without any thought." He derided Biden for referring to notes during his first formal news conference on Thursday.

"What’s great about not being the secretary of state anymore is I can say things that when I was a diplomat I couldn’t say," Pompeo said the next morning, to a small crowd at the Westside Conservative Club near Des Moines.

Never mind that he was hardly known for biting his tongue, even as the nation’s top diplomat. It seems clear that Pompeo, a onetime Republican congressman from Kansas, is animated not just by freedom but also by a drive for high elective office that has long been evident to friends and foes. His appearances in a pair of presidential battleground states only seem to confirm his widely assumed interest in a 2024 presidential campaign.
Posted by: Besoeker 2021-03-30
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=598257