Former U.S. diplomat Mike Pompeo and his wife Susan assigned personal duties to agents paid with taxpayers’ money, an ethical violation mentioned in a State Department Inspector General’s report filed Friday.
These accusations are the result of internal investigations that sparked a lively controversy when former President Donald Trump dismissed, in May 2020, at the request of Pompey, in those days his secretary of state, the inspector general who had just opened this investigation.
But inquiries continued, even after Democrat Joe Biden arrived in the White House last January.
And its result comes at a time when Pompeo is immersed in a campaign to run for the Republican candidacy for 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 Pompey and his wife commissioned more than a hundred opportunities “tasks of a personal nature” to an “agent recruited on the basis of political criteria and other officials in the secretary’s cabinet.” of State, ”the report states.
“These orders do not comply with the ethical standards of the State Department” and the U.S. government, the inspector said, the services are responsible for independently overseeing the exercise of power by of the holder of diplomacy.
Last year, Pompeo called the suspicions “crazy,” accusing 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 reservations at restaurants for lunch, such as a Sunday breakfast-lunch at the “Cheesecake Factory.”
Susan Pompeo also asked State Department employees to take care of purchasing gifts for their hosts when they were invited to the home of 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 staff in a hotel room when he had accompanied his parents to a football game. American presented as an official trip.
However, the report does not recommend any punitive action against Mike Pompeo, who was recently recruited by conservative channel Fox News as a political commentator.
The former secretary of state, most loyal to the former Republican president of Trump ministers, has been repeatedly accused by Democrats of using his office for political gain, for example organizing dinners with conservative personalities and donors to the State Department. .