WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has offered the CIA director job to Mike Pompeo, the conservative Kansas congressman who has heavily criticized the Iran deal and was a member of the congressional committee that blasted Hillary Clinton over the attack in Benghazi, Libya. Pompeo is a Republican member of the House intelligence committee, which oversees U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. In 2014, he was appointed to the House Select Benghazi Committee to probe the 2011 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi.
He enrolled as a teenager at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and graduated first in his class in 1986. According to biographical information on his House website, Pompeo served as a "cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall." Pompeo is also a graduate of Harvard Law School and was editor of the Harvard Law Review. After college, he returned to south-central Kansas where his mother was from. He set up Thayer Aerospace and was its chief executive officer for more than 10 years. Later he was president of Sentry International, a company that sold equipment for oil fields and manufacturing.
Special Election Will Decide Congressman Pompeo's 4th District Replacement
If Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo is confirmed to the post of CIA director in the Trump administration, it will leave his U.S. House seat vacant. Reporter Nadya Faulx (FOE) has more on what that means for the 4th Congressional District in south-central Kansas.
Nadya Faulx is a reporter for KMUW Radio in Wichita and one of KPR's reporting partners.