Mike Pompeo’s gaudy, taxpayer-funded dinners should make him damaged goods in Kansas

The grandiosity of the gaudy, taxpayer-funded, rolodex-building “Madison Dinners” that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife Susan have been throwing at the State Department hideously profanes “Publius,” the name under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay authored the Federalist Papers.

Madison, as you may not have been reminded recently, served as both secretary of state and president, hint hint. And somehow, Pompeo’s neo-royalist soirees, complete with a harpist and Champagne cocktails, are supposed to be in the tradition of James and Dolley Madison.

Only, Madison would not approve. They’re not in the tradition of the Hatch Act, either, and seem to be building a donor base for Pompeo for President in 2024, with detailed contact information being sent to his wife’s private gmail account.

Even in a town built on a swamp, this is one bold hustle by the former congressman from Wichita, who is still regarded as an automatic frontrunner if he decided to make a late jump — yes, even if pushed — into this year’s U.S. Senate race in Kansas. Do we really have no standards?

These “Madison Dinners” are just the sort of gross exploitation of both the public trust and the public purse that Madison and his friends, who knew a lot about human nature, worked so hard to get out ahead of with checks and balances and more checks and balances.

“Madison certainly paid his own entertainment expenses,” his biographer Kevin Gutzman told NBC News, which broke the story.

In any other administration, Pompeo would be gone already, and not to run for office back home, either. But if he settles for a U.S. Senate campaign here, will he even be seen as damaged goods?

The unblinking chutzpah of using a fund set aside for “confidential requirements in the conduct of foreign affairs as well as other authorized activities that further the realization of U.S. foreign policy objectives,” to catapult Pompeo into a job better suited to his ego is unlikely to have offended his boss. President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have known about the dinners.

He would fire his favorite cabinet secretary anyway, of course, if Pompeo became a liability. (Remember when Trump called luxury travel-loving, $43,000 soundproof phone booth-building EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who had his security detail run the sirens to get him to his favorite French restaurant faster, to say not to worry about all those silly scandals and to hold his head up because he had his back? Pruitt does.)

For now, though, after months in which the only story in the country has been this administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, maybe some old-fashioned corruption scandals involving somebody, anybody else, aren’t so disagreeable to the president.

And if, at some point in the next 10 days before the filing deadline, Pompeo suddenly discovers that his heart really is in this Kansas Senate race, we’re sorry to say that in a time of such severe scandal deflation, voters might not find Pompeo’s behavior disqualifying, either.

According to NBC, just 14% of those invited to the dinners were diplomats or foreign officials, while “every single member of the House or the Senate who has been invited is a Republican.” So why would anyone think this was partisan and thus inappropriate?

After news of these “intimate evenings” broke, a State Department spokesperson said they’re “a world-class opportunity to discuss the mission of the State Department and the complex foreign policy matters facing our exceptional nation.”

Nothing against Reba McEntire or Dale Earnhardt Jr. or anti-abortion lobbyists or Fox news anchors, but it’s a lot harder to see what they have to do with foreign policy than how they could help fund and admiringly narrate a future campaign.

Pompeo is not embarrassed, even if these events weren’t on his official schedule, and he has no intention of missing out on this world-class opportunity in the future, either: “The secretary looks forward to continuing these Madison Dinners as they are an important component of the execution of his duties as secretary of state.”

That’s not the only ethics issue for the former West Point valedictorian, who is so loathed inside the State Department because he doesn’t much value what diplomats do, that the leaks about his lapses should come as no surprise.

Both Pompeo and Trump have said that the president fired State Department inspector general Steve Linick last Friday night because Pompeo asked him to.

Trump said he has no idea why Pompeo wanted Linick gone, and didn’t ask. Pompeo said he doesn’t need to tell us why, which is his attitude about everything. But he will say, and did, that he “frankly should have done it some time ago.”

We do know now that Linick was investigating Pompeo’s decision to go around Congress to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And he was looking into whether Pompeo makes longtime political aide Toni Porter run personal errands and walk his dog. She is also the chief liaison between Pompeo’s office and the Office of the Chief of Protocol, which runs the Madison Dinners. We don’t know how seriously Linick was looking into those.

But Pompeo’s office was reportedly notified when Linick contacted the protocol office last week with some kind of query. And then, before you could say “above the law,” the inspector general was fired.

At a brief news conference on Wednesday, Pompeo said he couldn’t have fired the inspector general in retaliation for investigations he knew nothing about, though he also said he did answer questions from Linick’s office on at least one occasion.

“I have no sense of what investigations were taking place inside the inspector general’s office. Couldn’t have possibly retaliated for all the things — I’ve seen the various stories, that someone was walking my dog to sell arms to my dry cleaner.”

Funny, but not funny.

When Madison wrote, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he meant that the competing interests of the three branches of governments and of the officials in them would help keep all of them under control. At the moment, though, it looks like he might have been overly optimistic.