Mike Pompeo

Biography

Mike Pompeo was born in Orange, California, in 1963. He graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1986 and served five years as an armor officer with a cavalry squadron in West Germany, leaving the army as a captain. He then earned a law degree at Harvard Law School in 1994, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and practised at the Washington firm Williams & Connolly.

In 1996 he moved to Wichita, Kansas, where he and several West Point classmates bought aircraft-parts manufacturers and formed Thayer Aerospace. He sold his stake in 2006 and became president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment maker. Elected to Congress as a Republican in 2010, he represented Kansas's 4th district in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.

Donald Trump appointed him director of the Central Intelligence Agency in January 2017 and secretary of state in April 2018. He took a confrontational line toward China, backed the withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, oversaw the move of the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, negotiated with North Korea at a series of summits and helped broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. He resisted congressional subpoenas during the Trump–Ukraine impeachment inquiry, and a federal review later found that a speech he gave to the 2020 Republican convention broke the Hatch Act.

China imposed sanctions on him as soon as he left office in January 2021. After winning the 2024 election, Trump said that Pompeo would not be part of his new administration.