U.S. President Donald Trump’s pick for top diplomat faces difficult a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday as tensions soar with Russia and Syria and a trade spat with China threatens to snowball.
Mike Pompeo, currently the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been tapped to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, in what could be one of the more consequential of many personnel shakeups since Trump took office 14 months ago.
Pompeo is a known entity for Trump, someone who briefed the president nearly daily and shares Trump’s aggressive attitude towards Iran.
Trump forged a warm relationship with Pompeo during White House meetings over the first year of his presidency and has said he feels the former Republican congressman shares more of his view of the world than Tillerson, who at times disagreed with the president.
From proposing a ban on Muslims entering the United States, to opposing letting in Syrian refugees to suggesting that these refugees could be posing as militants, Trump hasn’t shied away from voicing his anti-Muslim views. He even claimed that thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheered the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks – still an unfounded allegation.
As with Trump, many diplomats have voiced apprehension about Pompeo’s record of anti-Muslim remarks and ties to anti-Islam groups.
Most recently in March 2016, Pompeo criticized the Islamic Society of Wichita (ISW) for inviting Texas imam Monzer Taleb to speak at an event. The CIA director had called Taleb a “Hamas-connected sheik.”
Pompeo has also co-sponsored the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act several times, pushing the State Department to designate the group as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
In 2016, the anti-Muslim group ACT for America awarded Pompeo with its highest honor, the National Security Eagle Award. The group’s president Brigitte Gabriel called him “a steadfast ally” from day one after giving him the award.
The ACT has protested the construction of mosques and school textbooks for including information about Islam, which according to Gabriel is an ‘intrinsically’ violent religion.
