Mike Pompeo
Mike Pompeo
30.12.1963 (60 years) (Orange, California, USA)
Michael Richard Pompeo (; born December 30, 1963) is an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served under President Donald Trump as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2017 to 2018 and as the 70th United States secretary of state from 2018 to 2021. He is the first person to have held both of those positions. After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 1986 and his obligatory five-year service as a United States Army officer, Pompeo earned a law degree from Harvard Law School. He worked as an attorney until 1998 and then became an entrepreneur in the aerospace and oilfield industries. Pompeo was elected to the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017, representing Kansas's 4th congressional district. Once a critic of Donald Trump, whom he called "authoritarian", Pompeo became one of his biggest supporters after Trump became the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Trump appointed him Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in January 2017 and Secretary of State in April 2018. Pompeo was the Trump Administration’s most vocal critic of the Chinese government, including his opposition to the oppression of Uyghur Muslims, and focused U.S.-China relations in opposition to China's policies regarding Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea. He advocated for moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. During Pompeo's tenure as Secretary of State, he prioritized grounding human rights in religious liberty and brokering peace in the Middle East. He established the Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, moved the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and negotiated the Abraham Accords which established diplomatic normalcy between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. He was among the staunchest Trump loyalists in the Cabinet and routinely flouted State Department norms in aid of Trump's objectives.