Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is overseeing employees who are reportedly growing more fed up with him by the day as he becomes further enmeshed in the scandal over President Donald Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.
Six current and former State Department officials told ABC News on Thursday that career staffers are upset with the way Pompeo using the department to help Trump fend off the House impeachment inquiry.
According to ABC, they’re particularly angered by Pompeo’s silence over Trump’s decision to remove Ambassador to Ukraine Maria Yovanovitch, who was well-respected among her colleagues, from her post for hindering Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to legitimize his conspiracy theory about Joe Biden.
“It does not escape notice that [Pompeo] was on the call where Trump sold the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine up the river,” one official told ABC, referring to when Trump told Ukrainian Present Volodymyr Zelensky that Yovanovitch was “bad news” during their infamous phone call in July.
State Department officials are also upset with Pompeo’s renewed push to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails, which involved contacting 130 officials who appeared in the inbox of Clinton’s private email account and informing them the emails were now considered “classified” and therefore security violations.
A former senior official told the Washington Post that the move was an attempt to help Republicans “keep the Clinton issue alive” amid Trump’s political disasters.
