New CIA Director - Mike Pompeo, Army Veteran

On November 18, 2016, Mike Pompeo was selected by President Donald Trump to be the nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on a vote 66-32 on January 23rd and took the oath of office the same day.

Pompeo attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where he majored in Mechanical Engineering, graduating first in his class in 1986 and subsequently serving in the Regular Army as an Armor Branch cavalry officer from 1986 to 1991. He spent five years on active duty in the Army — part of it along the East German border — serving as a tank platoon leader. Pompeo left the Army as a captain to attend law school where he received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He then worked as a lawyer for Williams & Connolly.

Pompeo then founded Thayer Aerospace and Private Security. In 2006 he sold his interest in Thayer (which was renamed Nex-Tech Aerospace). He became the President of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment company.

Then he was elected the U.S. Representative for Kansas's 4th congressional district from 2011–17. Pompeo is a member of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party and served as a Kansas representative on the Republican National Committee.

Pompeo's Positions on Issues:

He supports the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, saying "Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed. That includes Presidential Policy Directive-28, which bestows privacy rights on foreigners and imposes burdensome requirements to justify data collection."

On July 21, 2015, Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton (another Army Veteran) alleged the existence of secret side agreements between Iran and the IAEA on procedures for inspection and verification of Iran's nuclear activities under the Iran nuclear deal. The Obama administration denied any clandestine or secret actions. However, the Obama Administration officials acknowledged the existence of agreements between Iran and the IAEA governing the inspection of sensitive military sites, but denied the characterization that they were “secret side deals,” calling them standard practice in crafting arms-control pacts and arguing the administration had provided information about them to Congress.

In a 2013 speech on the House floor, Pompeo said Muslim leaders who fail to denounce acts of terrorism done in the name of Islam are "potentially complicit" in the attacks. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Pompeo to revise his remarks, calling them "false and irresponsible".

Pompeo opposes closing Guantánamo Bay detention camp. After a 2013 visit to the prison, Pompeo said, of the prisoners who were on hunger strike, "It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight." Pompeo has criticized the Obama administration's decision to end the CIA's secret prisons (so-called "black sites"), and the administration's requirement that all interrogators adhere to anti-torture laws.