Pompeo replaces sacked Tillerson
PRESIDENT Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he had ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will replace him with Mike Pompeo, now the CIA director, ending the 14-month tenure of the nation’s chief diplomat, who repeatedly had found himself at odds with the White House on a variety of key foreign policy issues.
“We were not really thinking the same,” Trump told reporters at the White House, explaining his decision to replace Tillerson.
He added: “Really, it was a different mind-set, a different thinking.”
Tillerson found out he had been fired before dawn, shortly after his flight returned from a weeklong
trip to Africa, said Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. There was no indication during the five-nation visit that Tillerson’s departure was imminent; Goldstein said on Tuesday morning that the secretary had been expected to remain in office for the foreseeable future.
The president did not personally call Tillerson, and Goldstein said he did not know how the chief diplomat learned he had been fired. Trump announced his decision on Twitter.
The move caught even the White House staff by surprise. Just the day before, a White House spokesman berated a reporter for suggesting there was any kind of split between Tillerson and the White House because of disparate comments on Russian responsibility for a poison attack in Britain.
But on Tuesday morning, a senior administration official said Trump decided now to replace Tillerson to have a new team in place before talks with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader he plans to meet by May. The president also wanted a new chief diplomat for various ongoing trade negotiations.
At the CIA, Pompeo will be replaced by the current deputy director, Gina Haspel, who will be the first woman to head the spy agency. Both she and Pompeo would need confirmation by the Senate to take the positions.
Tillerson has been out of favour with Trump for months but had resisted being pushed out. His distance from Trump’s inner circle was clear last week when the president accepted an invitation to meet with Kim, to Tillerson’s surprise.
Trump said Pompeo “has earned the praise of members in both parties by strengthening our intelligence gathering, modernizing our defensive and offensive capabilities, and building close ties with our allies in the international intelligence community.
“I have gotten to know Mike very well over the past 14 months, and I am confident he is the right person for the job at this critical juncture,” the president continued, in a statement distributed by the White House. “He will continue our program of restoring America’s standing in the world, strengthening our alliances, confronting our adversaries, and seeking the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Pompeo, a former congressman, has become a favourite of Trump’s, impressing with his engaging approach during morning intelligence briefings. But he also, at times, has been at odds with the president – including agreeing with a CIA assessment about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.
In picking Haspel to succeed Pompeo at the CIA, Trump opted for continuity rather than bringing in an outsider. At one point last fall, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the president’s closest Republican allies on Capitol Hill, had been tentatively tapped as the frontrunner to run the agency if Pompeo moved up, but the idea later faded.
The turning point for Tillerson came when NBC News reported that he had called the president a “moron”, leading him to take the extraordinary step of holding a news conference to affirm his support for Trump and insist that he had never considered resigning.
During a trip to Beijing in September, Tillerson told reporters that he already had “a couple, three” lines into North Korea to get communication started with the United States. Trump erupted the next morning and denigrated the effort on Twitter by saying Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man”.
“Save your energy Rex,” he added, “we’ll do what has to be done!” Trump later said he wished his secretary of state were tougher. The Chinese were left to wonder why Trump sent an emissary whose message the president did not believe in.
Part of the reason for Trump’s eruption then was that Tillerson’s suggestion of secret talks with North Korea surprised President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who called the White House to complain, according to people with knowledge of the exchange. That Tillerson failed to take into account Seoul’s possible reaction was one of several embarrassing stumbles, arising from his own inexperience and decision to insulate himself from the department’s diplomatic corps.
With his ousting, Tillerson joins a long list of Trump appointees who have left or been fired, including the president’s first national security adviser, chief of staff, chief strategist, press secretary, two White House communications directors and secretary of health and human services.