Days after three Democrat-controlled House committees subpoenaed him over his knowledge of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that he was in fact on the call.
“I was on the phone call,” Pompeo told reporters during a press conference in Rome, Italy on Wednesday.
Asked if anything he heard on the call raised any red flags, Pompeo suggested that there wasn’t, dismissing the whistleblower and the Democrats’ allegations as “noise.”
“The phone call was in the context of — now I guess I’ve been secretary of state for coming on a year and a half,” he said, as reported by CNN. “I know precisely what the American policy is with respect to Ukraine. It’s been remarkably consistent, and we will continue to try to drive those set of outcomes.”
“It’s what our team, including Ambassador (Kurt) Volker, were focused on was taking down the threat that Russia poses there in Ukraine,” Pompeo explained. “It was about helping the Ukrainians to get graft out and corruption outside of their government and to help now this new government in the Ukraine build a successful thriving economy. It’s what the State Department officials that I’ve had the privilege to lead have been engaged in. And it’s what we will continue to do. Even while all this noise is going on.”
Pompeo promised that his department would do its “constitutional duty to cooperate with this co-equal branch,” then added: “But we are going to do so in a way that is consistent with the fundamental values of the American system — and we won’t tolerate folks on Capitol Hill bullying, intimidating State Department employees.”
The House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight committees sent subpoenas to Pompeo late last week demanding any documents related to the alleged efforts of Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
The subpoenas are part of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry which was prompted by a whistleblower complaint based on second-hand knowledge about Trump’s alleged attempt to “[use] the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” particularly by “pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
Amid the left-leaning media-flamed firestorm over the complaint, Trump authorized the release of the full complaint as well as the transcript of the call, which revealed that while he did ask Zelensky to “look into” corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, he offered no “quid pro quo,” as Democrats had alleged.
“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down, and that’s really unfair,” Trump told Zelensky on the July 25 call. “A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”
Trump’s request for Zelensky to “look into” the Bidens relates to a previous corruption investigation into the Ukrainian company that hired Hunter Biden weeks after then-Vice President Biden was appointed by President Obama to head-up Ukrainian-U.S. relations. Biden subsequently threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine unless they remove the prosecutor who had overseen the investigation.
Related: Report: Newly Revealed Documents Blow Up Biden’s Ukraine Story