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Trump taps conservative Kansas congressman for CIA

President-elect Donald Trump has offered the CIA director job to Mike Pompeo, a conservative Republican congressman from Kansas who has heavily criticized the I...

The Associated Press

November 18, 2016 11:05 am

< a min read

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has offered the CIA director job to Mike Pompeo, a conservative Republican congressman from Kansas 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 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 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.