Senators to grill Pompeo on Trump-Putin summit
Kim Jong Un meeting also up for debate
WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can expect an intense interrogation when he heads to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to detail the Trump administration’s policies toward Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Pompeo’s scheduled appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee comes just nine days after President Donald Trump sparked alarm and outrage on Capitol Hill by downplaying the conclusions of America’s intelligence agencies and saying he accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump made those comments at a joint news conference with Putin after the two leaders met privately during a summit June 16 in Helsinki. Trump later walked back his remarks, but he has not disclosed what he and Putin discussed during their closed-door tete-a-tete.
“No one knows what happened (with) Russia,” said New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the committee’s top Democrat. “I look forward to (Pompeo) telling us what’s the real story.”
“That’s what we’re all anxious to hear,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a member of the committee. “We ought to know what happened there.”
Lawmakers said they also will be questioning Pompeo about Trump’s closed-door meeting in June with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, initially asked Pompeo to testify weeks ago – shortly after Trump’s June summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. As with the Putin summit, Trump met privately with Kim; afterward, both men signed a vaguely worded document in which the North Korean leader affirmed his commitment to the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
But North Korea has not agreed to specific steps. And when Pompeo visited North Korea this month in an effort to follow up, the North Koreans accused him of making “gangster-like” demands to give up the country’s nuclear weapons and seemed to back away from the denuclearization pledge.
“I don’t know if anything occurred in North Korea other than a press conference,” Corker quipped last week at a committee meeting. Corker promised a “fulsome” hearing in which “every committee member will have a chance to grill (Pompeo).”
In a speech on Sunday, Pompeo did not address Russia or North Korea. Instead, he focused on Iran, denouncing that country’s leadership as corrupt con artists. Trump quickly weighed in with a tweet warning Iran – in all capital letters – of unspecified consequences if the country’s leaders continued to threaten the United States.
That bellicose rhetoric will almost certainly come up on Wednesday.
“Iran clearly continues to be a threat,” Democratic Sen. Jean Shaheen told reporters in her home state of New Hampshire on Monday. But “what we need is for the president to consult with his foreign policy team … and come up with a strategy for how to respond to Iran, as opposed to tweets that aggravate the situation.”
Still, Shaheen and others said Russia would be their main focus.
The only substantive information about the Trump-Putin meeting has come from the Russians. Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, told reporters that the two men reached “important verbal agreements” on arms control matters, among other issues.
How much Pompeo knows about the Trump-Putin conversation is unclear. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump has met and consulted with all of his national security team since the summit. She did not elaborate.
“It would be extremely unusual and extremely embarrassing if (Pompeo) doesn’t know enough … to be able to brief the Congress and answer their questions about what’s changing and what’s staying the same in this critical relationship,” said Jeff Prescott, who was a special assistant on national security to former President Barack Obama.
“There are a lot of people scratching their heads after the president’s performance in Helsinki.”
“We ought to know what happened there.” Sen. Jeff Flake R-Ariz.