Mike Pompeo
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Michael Richard Pompeo (; born December 30, 1963) is an American politician, attorney, diplomat, and former U.S. Army officer who served in the first administration of Donald Trump as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2017 to 2018, and as the 70th United States secretary of state from 2018 to 2021. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017. Pompeo was born in Orange, California. After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 1986 and his obligatory five-year service as a U.S. Army officer, Pompeo went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. He worked as an attorney until 1998 and then became an entrepreneur in the aerospace and oilfield industries. Pompeo was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2010, representing Kansas's 4th congressional district until 2017. Although Pompeo criticized Donald Trump, whom he called "authoritarian" and "not a conservative believer", as a surrogate for the Marco Rubio campaign, Pompeo later endorsed Trump after he became the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Trump appointed him Director of the CIA in January 2017 and Secretary of State in April 2018. As a politician, Pompeo has been a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party and general secretary Xi Jinping whom he calls a "dictator"; he directed U.S.–China relations in opposition to China's policies regarding the oppression of Uyghurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. He was sanctioned by China immediately after leaving office. He advocated for moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. As secretary of state, Pompeo declared that the U.S.'s human rights policy should prioritize religious liberty and property rights. During his tenure, the U.S. moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He was among the staunchest Trump loyalists in the Cabinet and routinely flouted State Department norms in aid of Trump's objectives, including supporting Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. After Trump's victory in the 2024 election, he declared in an Instagram post that he would "not be inviting Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley to join" his next administration.