Pompeo defends wife on Fox News, calls reporting of her emails ‘pathetic and sad’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed back Monday night at reporters “picking on my wife,” when they wrote about her emails that included personal requests of State Department staff.
Pompeo, appearing on Fox News with host Martha MacCallum, was asked to respond to Sunday’s McClatchy story about emails indicating that Susan Pompeo wanted his staff to work Christmas week to complete the family’s personal holiday cards. The emails, obtained by McClatchy, also showed that Susan Pompeo asked that they keep the circle small because of the private nature of the assignment.
“The fact that they’re picking on my wife, who has done yeoman’s work as a volunteer to try and make life better for every officer at the State Department, I find pathetic and sad,” Pompeo told MacCallum. “But we’ll keep doing the right thing, we’ll keep obeying the law, we’ll keep doing everything that’s proper, and we’ll leave the State Department a better place than we found it when our time here is done.”
Pompeo did not refute the report’s accuracy.
Emails show Susan Pompeo wrote to Toni Porter, a longtime confidante and aide to the secretary from his days as a Kansas congressman, asking who would be in the office to help with Christmas cards.
“I see that you are out of the office all next week...” she wrote to Porter on Dec. 19, 2019, from a personal email account. “I’m wondering if we are sending the last of our personal cards out, who will be there to help me. Mike will not want to go outside you and Joe for this assistance.”
“Joe” is Joe Semrad, an assistant to the secretary who filled in when Porter was unavailable to complete the Pompeos’ personal requests.
Porter, a State Department employee who serves as an adviser to the secretary, forwarded the email to Lisa Kenna, executive secretary at the State Department and a career member of the Foreign Service. Kenna said she would assist the Pompeos.
“I’d worry about asking others for personal things,” Kenna wrote Porter.
Porter also, according to newly released testimony last week, recently told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that she would manage projects for Pompeo “of special interest” to the secretary, which sometimes were relayed through Susan. Later in the interview, she was asked if she had ever been given tasks that made her “uncomfortable, whether ethically or otherwise?” and said, “Yes,” referring to two instances she helped with Christmas cards.
As a congressman, Pompeo previously was critical of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system when she served at the State Department.
“Secretary Clinton tried to hide every one of her emails, she destroyed 30,000 of them, and now we have an FBI investigation of those very emails,” Pompeo told NBC in 2015.
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 11:32 AM.
