Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined me this morning to discuss the CCP’s spy balloon:

Audio:

02-06hhs-pompeo

Transcript:

HH: Joined by former Secretary of State, former Director of Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo. Mr. Secretary, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

MP: Hugh, it’s great to be with you this morning.

HH: Before we turn to the Chinese balloon and your book, and by the way, congratulations, debuting at number four on the New York Times bestseller list, Never Give An Inch. I want to ask you about the disaster that has hit Syria and Turkey this morning, back to back 7.5+ earthquakes, and the second round video is just terrible. What does, what does the State Department do in a situation like this, Mr. Secretary?

MP: Hugh, it is a tragedy. The State Department, our team on the ground in Ankara, team on the ground in the region will work with the Turkish government to try and figure out what they need, how to get it there. There’ll be big efforts, not just U.S. government efforts, but the State Department will work to coordinate with NGOs that can provide assistance. We’re certainly all praying for people of Turkey and Syria. I’m sure there will be Americans in the area as well. It will do its best to identify American citizens that are there. They’ll help the Europeans. We’ll have a big effort, and we will be a great partner in helping the Turkish people and the Syrian people recover.

HH: Now we’ve got a big military base in a different part of the country, and I think we’ve got a small military base along the Turkish-Syrian border. Do those assets stay off the radar in a situation like this? Or do they come into the fray as well with assistance that they can render?

MP: No, they could well be asked. If the Turkish government makes a request, we could end up using either the facility itself, Hugh. That is, we could house people, house equipment. It could be that the runways that are available there will be used to bring in humanitarian assistance as well. I mean, it will be a full-scale U.S. government effort to try and provide this humanitarian assistance. And Hugh, it is the case that one of the great things about our country is there’s no other country in the world that can pull off that in so many places in such an important way and make the lives for those people better in this incredible moment of crisis for them.

HH: Okay, I will update this as this goes along. Mr. Secretary, let’s talk about Never Give An Inch for a moment. Are you surprised? I mean, number four on the New York Times bestseller list? Everybody wants that. Very few people get that in the non-fiction category. Are you surprised?

MP: Yes, I’m surprised, but I’m also pleased. I’m happy that folks are reading it. I think the biggest reaction has been oh, my gosh, Mike, there’s a lot of humor in it, and it’s real. It’s not just a political memoir. It’s not boring, and it sounds like you. And there’s no higher praise from your friends when they say yeah, Mike, it sounds like you really wrote the darn thing. And it’s been, folks have said it’s a page-turner, and that makes me happy. And if we could just get past Prince Harry, maybe we’ll get to number one, Hugh.

HH: Well, getting past Prince Harry is going to be a tall order. I have to ask, you know, I don’t rag on my former colleagues, and so I’m not going to critique Chuck Todd here. But I’m going to play Chuck’s comment about you to Andrea Mitchell yesterday for your reaction. This came as they were talking about Nikki Haley and your former colleague’s likely declaration to run for president in a couple weeks. Here is what that exchange sounded like. Cut number 27:

AM: She certainly can compete against Mike Pompeo, because she was in that cabinet circle. She was a strong figure in that cabinet.

CT: Let me take, I mean, I don’t really take the Pompeo candidacy all that seriously. This is a guy that’s never won statewide…

AM: Oh, boy, he’s organizing.

CT: …let alone, let alone run anything else.

AM: He is going governor to governor. He is wrapping up party officials. He has the diet, I’m just going to say…

CT: Oh, I think there’s no doubt he has the personal ambition.

AM: …you know, cosmetically.

CT: I just don’t see, I just don’t see it.

AM: He’s doing a lot of groundwork. That’s what I’m tracking.

CT: Yes.

AM: And he’s a real knife-wielding player. He was on that Benghazi committee. He went after Hillary Clinton. He really understands national politics about that.

CT: But his book was so gossipy. It felt very personal. It just seems like he made nothing but…

AM: Oh, but Nikki Haley, I would say…

HH: So did you run over Chuck Todd’s dog? I mean, what did you do to Chuck Todd?

MP: Oh, goodness gracious. I don’t know what Chuck’s talking about. Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, I suppose, Hugh. In the end, the candidacy for president, whoever all decides to get in, it won’t be decided by Chuck Todd, and that’s a good thing for America.

HH: Well, you know, we talked about this at length when I interviewed you about Never Give An Inch. It’s like the least gossipy book ever. It’s the account of the, even the President, the former President who gets a couple of dings in this liked it when I interviewed him last week.

MP: I saw that, and look, it’s not gossipy. If there’s one thing that we avoided was telling tales that didn’t make any difference to the American people. We were trying to communicate how it is. You take the idea of America first, putting the American people first, how a practitioner, how a pragmatist actually delivers good outcomes. We did for four years. I hope Chuck will actually read the book one of these days.

HH: Yeah, don’t hold your breath. I’m going to come back to that in a second, but let’s go to the balloon. First couple of factual questions. When, when you were the director of the CIA, would you learn about something like this before or concurrently with the Department of Defense? And when do you think we knew about the balloon entering or headed towards American territory?

MP: I would have learned about it simultaneously with the discovery, something of this scale, right, a large…at least I think it would have. Now, there’s some folks saying that gosh, this happened and no one told anybody in the Trump administration. That still boggles the mind to think that might be possible. But the normal process would be pretty straightforward. There’d be something, it would be an external threat to the United States of America, and there would immediately be either messages sent if we were traveling, or meetings for us to be briefed on precisely this kind of thing. A balloon traveling at a slow rate over the Continental United States the size of a couple of buses is not a minor incursion. That is a serious matter, and I am confident every senior leader, political leader in the Trump administration, would have known about it if that had happened.

HH: You know, Mr. Secretary, we have had the classic ‘it’s not my dog, it didn’t bite you, besides, you kicked him first’ defense from Team Biden. First, we didn’t know about it. Then, it was a risk to shoot it down. Then, it wasn’t very, we were surveilling it, and by the way, it happened under Trump a lot. And now, we’re down to none of that’s true. It’s just like a series of Keystone cop responses. Are you amazed at the incompetence of this team?

MP: I am. But we’ve seen this. This isn’t the first demonstration of the inability to do the simple things to protect the country, you call it incompetence, just the absence of a gut instinct that says this is the things we need to do. Afghanistan is probably the quintessential public example, but we could go time and time again to watch the Biden administration simply fail to do the basics of the things that matter most and deter aggression. We now have a war in Europe. We’ve got the Chinese on the march. This has not been a good first two years. I hope the President tomorrow night in the State of the Union will candidly acknowledge that he got this one wrong. It boggles the mind. The whole world was watching, Hugh. The whole world was watching, saying oh, my gosh, the Americans are letting a balloon fly over their country. I can’t imagine what was going on in those capitals around the world, and as our friends were worried about our willingness to help them, and our adversaries thinking green light.

HH: So to me, it enters over our first line of defense, the Aleutian Islands, then it goes over strategic assets in Alaska. Then, it goes over our missile fields in Montana and neighboring states, and it ends up exiting in Charleston, where a lot of our nuclear submarines are maintained and often forward positioned and being drydocked. It’s as though the Chinese designed the low sweep. And I hear from people, oh, they’ve got spy satellites that do that anyway. Mr. Secretary, back to your CIA days, would you like a 60,000 foot view of what’s going on in China?

MP: Yes, absolutely. And it is absolutely the case they have satellites. They can get good pictures. I’ve heard others say oh, you can get a good image for $10 bucks. That’s also true. But don’t just think imaging. Think all kinds of signals collection/detection work that could likely have been going on. That array that I saw, and granted, I saw commercial images, that array looked very much like a pretty sophisticated tool. And I would love to have had that over our adversary’s sites. Our ability to detect what they were doing, when they were doing it, how they were doing it, how they responded to the fact that we were there, all of those things would have been incredibly important. And the Chinese Communist Party now quite likely knows those things about us. They also know how the Biden administration is going to respond to these kinds of probing by them.

HH: In your four years at the senior level of the Trump administration, both at the CIA and at State, did you ever get briefed on a similar incident by China or any other country?

MP: Never.

HH: You see, that’s what O’Brien has said, Bolton has said, Ratcliffe has said. I don’t know how they make that claim. Would the Department of Defense conceivably have concealed it from the President and everybody else?

MP: It seems unimaginable to me, Hugh, that that would have happened. But the Biden administration needs to come forward and explain to the American people that the military failed its political leadership, if that really happened. I’m completely confused. I’ve talked to others in the administration, too, folks from my team, Hugh, asking them did I just miss that? Was I traveling? Was there a lot going on? I mean, you can imagine, I suppose, no one has any recollection of anything remotely like this scale of activity for this duration of time over these numbers of sensitive sites. Nothing like it at all.

HH: Now you’re also a veteran of House Intel, and you know when you get briefed and when you don’t get briefed. Congress was not briefed about this until Montana public journalism revealed it. Does that surprise you as a former member of the Intel Committee?

MP: It does, although in real time, had the President been working diligently to respond, you can imagine there being some flash to bang, some gap between identifying this risk and notifying Congress. But when it came into the country across the Northeastern part of Alaska, excuse me, Northwestern part of Alaska, that would have been the time that within just a handful of hours at the very least, the Gang of 8 should have been briefed.

HH: Ryan Zinke was on, and the Congressman from Montana just told me the balloon went over something called Petroleum County, which has fewer people in it than Congress does have members. As a CIA director and as a former veteran of the Army, do you think we could have brought that down safely in the United States somewhere?

MP: I do think we could have. I don’t think that was a logical response to say gosh, we’re going to take it down, but we’re going to let it drift over important assets. It’s always a risk/reward trade-off. In Never Give An Inch, I spent a lot of time about risk taking, right? So it may be the case that they thought boy, the debris field might hit a building, or hit a caribou. I don’t know. And they were worried about it. But the risk associated with that was very significant. I do not see how you could make that risk tradeoff between sparsely-populated real estate in Montana and the risk that the Chinese Communist Party will be able to collect, information on important military assets inside the United States.

HH: Oh, you’re absolutely right about that. The Never Give An Inch is all about risk assessment when it comes to confronting enemies and adversaries. And here, I just don’t understand it. The last excuse that’s been offered up, I just want your CIA director hat on here, is that we were collecting, you know, sort of Spy Vs. Spy. We know what they know, which we know, and we know. It’s out of the Princess Bride. Do you believe that for a moment that we were jamming them and learning what they were after in some kind of supersecret four-dimensional chess game?

MP: I hope so. I hope. I hope there is a rational explanation for the decision making process that appears, and granted, I do not know everything that was going on. I’m no longer in government. I hope that there is a rational explanation, and you can’t, there’s a justification for what they chose to do. It seems intensely unlikely to me, Hugh, but I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that this was actually a brilliant intelligence collection operation for us to allow this balloon to spend days over the Continental United States. But someone’s going to have to at least walk Congress through this if they can’t do so publicly.

HH: Tomorrow night, I don’t know if balloons will appear at the State of the Union, but what would you like to hear the President say about China tomorrow night, Secretary Pompeo?

MP: I’d like him to acknowledge for the first time that this threat to our way of life is real, that these aren’t folks that we can find lots of common ground with and we’re going to work with them, and we’re going to meet with them, that whether it’s this balloon or TikTok, or as I wrote about in the book, the fact that they were operating a spy ring from their diplomatic facility in Houston, Texas, or the virus that they did nothing to prevent millions of people from dying, I hope President Biden will lay out that full case and make an argument to the American people for why the United States should be serious about protecting American workers, American intellectual property, and our national security by confronting the Chinese Communist Party in every dimension.

HH: So I have a theory, and it’s just a theory. I don’t know anything, either, but that Secretary Blinken so valued the trip to China, because it’s something secretaries of State like to do since Kissinger did it for the first time, that he wanted the optics more than they cared about the security threat posed by the balloon. Do you think I’m far off here that the optics of cancelling the China trip had a part of this decision tree?

MP: The timing certainly suggests that, right? They didn’t alert the American people to this until they were forced to do so, until there were images of this balloon traveling. I don’t know, Hugh. It is the case that this administration loves meetings. They love diplomacy for the sake of diplomacy. They love communiques. They want to go to big COP meetings on climate change. It is certainly the case that they have a different vision for the exercise of American power than we did during our four years. Maybe that was part of it, Hugh.

HH: You also see a new charm offensive from President Xi that is attempting to persuade the world that nothing to see here, move along. What do you make of this?

MP: Yeah, they got caught. You know, I ran the CIA. Every now and again, you’d have an operation that ends with your adversary figuring out what you were doing. It’s certainly embarrassing for you, and you try to mitigate what was going on and say this isn’t important. Xi Jinping is not for a moment going to back away from this. He now has seen how the Biden administration responds to a direct threat to American sovereignty. He sees what’s happening at our southern border there. And I am confident that if you’re the Taiwanese people, you now wonder if he’s not going to stop a balloon from going through the United States, will he really show up to provide us what we need when push comes to shove?

HH: Now I want to finish, Mr. Secretary, by going back to Chuck Todd’s dismissal of Never Give An Inch as gossipy. Where it’s not gossipy is in the specifics about the Russia, Russia, Russia report. The Columbia Journalism Review came out with a four-part, it did not get mentioned on any of the Sunday shows last week, devastating analysis of mainstream media treatment of Russia, Russia, Russia, which is a little bit late given that you put it out a week earlier in Never Give An Inch. Did you see anybody anywhere cover the Columbia Journalism Review? And did you get asked on your book tour about that first January 6th, 2017 meeting, which was the ambush of former President Trump?

MP: It is both remarkable, Hugh, and unsurprising that Columbia’s work didn’t get noted, nor did January 6th, 2017. I spent a fair amount of time talking about it in the book, because it had an enormous impact on our four years in office. This was Jim Comey, Jim Clapper, John Brennan, walked in January 6th, 2017, to President-Elect Trump, and told him essentially that he was a Russian asset, and they almost certainly at that point knew that it wasn’t true. They definitely knew it was unsupportable. No, the mainstream media is not going to cover this. They want to talk about other things. They spent two and a half years foisting this hoax on the American people, and it made it harder for us to perform the important functions on behalf of the people o the United States of America.

HH: So my last question, I think legacy media is invested in people not reading the Columbia Journalism Review assessment, and not reading Never Give An Inch, because it will damage even further their credibility. And I’m not sure if I’m the Republican National Committee I let any of the networks partner on the debates. What do you think?

MP: We need to make sure that those debates are serious debates, Hugh. We can’t be talking about Twitter. We can’t be talking about silliness. This time in America is too important. We need to talk about the things that can impact people’s lives. And there is not a level of seriousness in most of the mainstream media that’s prepared to actually evenly allow candidates to make their case about how their actions, how the promises they’re making to the American people can impact them. So I’ll let the RNC sort through the who and the how, but the mission set has to be to have a set of debates that enlighten, not enrage, and actually deliver information so folks can make good decision about how to take the country forward.

HH: A quick bonus question. The CCP Committee, the Gallagher Committee, named its Democrats. They appear to be serious people. What did you make of their appointments?

MP: Yeah, it looks pretty good. And I have great confidence in Congressman Gallagher and some of the other Republicans that are there. I am very hopeful that their work will not be about headline-grabbing, but be about delivering the case, the laydown case for the things that the United States needs to do to protect itself from this hegemonic intent of Xi Jinping. I think the folks the Democrats chose can do that. I hope that they will.

HH: Once again, Secretary Pompeo, thank you for Never Give An Inch: Fighting For The America I Love. I’m going to be in conversation with Secretary Pompeo at the Nixon Foundation Library in Yorba Linda tomorrow night. I think it’s sold out, but you can still try and get the events there.

MP: I’m looking forward to seeing you there, Hugh.

HH: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

MP: Yes, sir. So long.

End of interview.