Mike Pompeo's Speech May Have Been Meh but His Trolling Skills Were at Master Level

Nicholas Kamm/Pool Photo via AP
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives for a press briefing at the State Department on Wednesday, May 20, 2020, in Washington. (Nicholas Kamm/Pool Photo via AP)
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Last night, one speech stood out as an attempt to troll the Democrats.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to the virtual convention from Jerusalem.

 

In my view the speech was just okay. It said things that needed to be said, but it didn’t have the same quality as some of the other speeches. I say this as someone who believes that Pompeo will be a strong contender for the GOP nomination in 2024.

The announcement that he was speaking did get the desired reaction. All the Logan Act authorities who have been unemployed since the early days of the Trump administration, perhaps moonlighting as Wuhan virus experts and epidemiologists to keep body and soul together, now had a new lease on life as Hatch Act experts.

They are A-freaking-GHAST!!1!!11! I tell you.

I don’t know who this is but a neckbearded toad like this on the verge of losing bowel control is irresistable from a comedy aspect

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The degree to which this agitated Democrats was apparent from the moment it was revealed that Pompeo was speaking. The commie who runs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the aptly named Raul Joaquin Castro, announced his intention to investigate the matter.

This is all nonsense from several aspects. The only vulnerability that Pompeo has under the Hatch Act, as a cabinet secretary, is if it was revealed that he was at an official event when he made the remarks. That, oddly enough, is exactly what happened to Raul’s twin brother Fidel during the 2016 campaign when he used an official speech as the venue to encourage people to vote for Hillary Clinton. But back in 20102, Politico wrote a fawning article about how Obama was using his cabinet secretaries to further his campaign.

If the Office of Special Counsel, the office charged with enforcing the Hatch Act, did find Pompeo was in violation of the law, it doesn’t have the authority to do much more that get all pouty-face as the decision on what, if anything, will be done would be made by the president.

This is not to say that Pompeo’s involvment is without some risk. He has issued a State Department policy which says that even officials with Senate confirmation cannot even attend a political conventiuon.

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The problem here, though, is one of atmospherics. It is Pompeo’s policy and he can easily exempt himself from his own policy. Should he? From a leadership perspective, no. Unless he’s decided that the State Department staff are so hostile to him and to the administration they are sworn to serve that he no longer cares about what they think.

And Susan Rice makes some good, if overblown, points here.

The bottomline, though, is that President Trump served notice that he is serious about winning an he will use every power available to him as president to make that happen. And that is a good thing.

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