State Department’s Michael McKinley throws Mike Pompeo under the bus
Thus far, four current and former Trump administration personnel have testified to the House impeachment inquiry behind closed doors – and by all accounts, each has been bad news for Donald Trump. Today a fourth witness is testifying, and it looks like this one is going badly for both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Last week Michael McKinley resigned his position as a senior State Department adviser, in protest of how Mike Pompeo has been conducting himself during the impeachment probe into the Ukraine scandal. Today, the newly unshackled McKinley is testifying in private for the House impeachment inquiry.
According to the Washington Post, McKinley is going to use his testimony to spell out that Mike Pompeo has displayed a consistent pattern of derailing the careers of diplomatic professionals for his own political reasons. This helps establish that U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch really was improperly fired because she was in the way of Rudy Giuliani’s criminal antics in Ukraine.
This testimony isn’t a surprise, as McKinley just got done resigning in protest of Mike Pompeo. But it helps set Pompeo up for criminal charges once Donald Trump is out of the way, and thus it places further pressure on Pompeo to cut a resignation plea deal while there’s still a lenient deal to be had. This comes after State Department official George Kent’s testimony yesterday was terrible for Team Trump. Pompeo isn’t caving yet, but his negotiation position for a plea deal gets worse by the day.
