During visit to Rice, Pompeo makes joke about ‘quid pro quo’
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joked Friday that his appearance at Rice University’s Baker Institute was the fulfillment of a “quid pro quo” with James Baker, alluding to the language central to an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives that largely focused Friday on the department Pompeo oversees.
Although he didn’t address the impeachment proceedings directly, Pompeo opened his remarks in Houston with the joke. He said he summoned Baker, a former secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, to Langley for advice when Pompeo was appointed to the job in April after serving as director of the CIA.
In exchange, Pompeo joked, he agreed to come to Houston to speak at the Baker Institute.
“I’m now upholding my end of the quid pro quo,” Pompeo said, referring to the term Democrats have used to describe President Donald Trump’s requests for Ukrainian investigations into his political rivals in exchange for releasing military aid.
“You gotta have fun along the way,” Pompeo said after robust laughter in the crowd.
In the hours before Pompeo’s Houston appearance, State Department employee and former
Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House lawmakers she was the subject of a “smear campaign” by Trump’s allies. She added that the undermining of diplomats and foreign service professionals under the current administration “will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already.”
Pompeo did not discuss that testimony. He focused his 15-minute remarks on “the natural hunger for human freedom and why we should never underestimate its great and awesome power.”
Pompeo, who was in Germany last week to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, directly thanked Baker, who was secretary of state when the wall effectively came down in 1989.
Though he left a month before the wall fell, Pompeo was an Army lieutenant on a tank unit during that time, he said, patrolling part of the border between East and West Germany.
“No one should ever underestimate Secretary Baker’s individual contribution to taking down that wall,” Pompeo said.
After the wall came down, Pompeo said the traffic moved in only one direction: West, toward freedom. He recalled the story of a guide he met at the Stasi Museum in East Germany, who served as a prisoner there before the wall fell.
He told Pompeo he was in total isolation, and the guards would let him outside — in a cage — a few times a week. During those periods, he often would glance up and see a PanAm airplane in the sky.
“He said it was his dream to get on one of those planes that day,” Pompeo said. “What remarkable courage. We should all be proud of what he did, and what those seeking freedom did, and what the world did, and what America did to allow him to have that opportunity.”
He said America is “a force for good” and has a responsibility to help people across the globe who are seeking that same freedom, specifically mentioning citizens in Iran, Venezuela and Hong Kong.
“What day their freedom will come, we do not know,” Pompeo said. “But we know that if we work and collect friends and build out a mission set and support those seeking freedom, that that moment will come.”