Mike Pompeo

His paternal great-grandparents, Carlo Pompeo and Adelina Tollis were born in Pacentro, Abruzzo, Italy, and emigrated to the United States in 1899 and 1900, respectively.

Michael Richard Pompeo (born December 30, 1963) is an American politician who served in the administration of 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.

In 1982, Pompeo graduated from Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley, California, where he played forward on the basketball team.

After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 1986 and his obligatory five-year service as a United States Army officer, Pompeo went on to graduate from Harvard Law School.

In 1986, Pompeo graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he majored in engineering management.

He was a classmate of Brian Bulatao and Ulrich Brechbuhl, who later helped him found Thayer Aerospace.

From 1986 to 1991, Pompeo served in the U.S. Army as an armor officer with the West Germany-based 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the 4th Infantry Division.

He served as a tank platoon leader before becoming a cavalry troop executive officer and then the squadron maintenance officer.

Pompeo left the U.S. Army at the rank of captain.

In 1994, Pompeo earned a juris doctor from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

After graduating from law school, he worked as a lawyer for Williams & Connolly in Washington.

In 1996, Pompeo moved to Wichita, Kansas, where he and three West Point friends, Brian Bulatao, Ulrich Brechbuhl, and Michael Stradinger, acquired three aircraft-parts manufacturers there (Aero Machine, Precision Profiling, B&B Machine) and in St. Louis (Advance Tool & Die), renaming the entity Thayer Aerospace after West Point superintendent Sylvanus Thayer.

Venture funding for the private organization included a nearly 20% investment from Koch Industries as well as Dallas-based Cardinal Investment, and Bain & Company (Brechbuhl worked for Bain at the time).

Brechbuhl and Stradinger left the company shortly after it was founded, but Pompeo and Bulatao continued.

He worked as an attorney until 1998 and then became an entrepreneur in the aerospace and oilfield industries.

In 2006, he sold his interest in the company, which by then had been renamed Nex-Tech Aerospace, to Highland Capital Management, which had clients including Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Cessna Aircraft, Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems and Raytheon Aircraft.

Pompeo then became president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment manufacturer that was also a partner of Koch Industries.

Pompeo was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2010, representing KS's 4th congressional district until 2017.

In the 2010 election, Pompeo won the Republican primary for Kansas's 4th District congressional seat with 39% of the vote, defeating state senator Jean Schodorf (who received 24%) and two other candidates.

Late in the primary, Schodorf began to surge in the polls, prompting two outside groups—Common Sense Issues and Americans for Prosperity—to spend tens of thousands of dollars in the campaign's final days to attack Schodorf and support Pompeo.

A month before the general election, Pompeo was endorsed by former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate Bob Dole.

In the general election, Pompeo defeated Democratic nominee Raj Goyle, a member of the Kansas House of Representatives.

Pompeo received 59% of the vote (117,171 votes) to 36% for Goyle (71,866).

During Pompeo's campaign, its affiliated Twitter account praised as a "good read" a news article that called Goyle, his Indian-American opponent, a "turban topper" who "could be a muslim, a hindu, a buddhist etc. who knows".

Pompeo later apologized to Goyle for the tweet.

Pompeo received $80,000 in donations during the campaign from Koch Industries and its employees.

He also served in the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.

Pompeo represented Kansas's 4th congressional district from 2011 until his January 2017 appointment to director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In the 2012 election, Pompeo defeated Democratic nominee Robert Tillman by a margin of 62–32%.

Koch Industries gave Pompeo's campaign $110,000.

In the 2014 election, Pompeo won the general election with 67% of the vote, defeating Democrat Perry Schuckman.

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.

As secretary of state, Pompeo declared that the U.S.'s human rights policy should prioritize religious liberty and property rights.

During his tenure, the U.S. moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Once a critic of Donald Trump, whom he called "authoritarian", Pompeo turned into one of his biggest supporters after Trump became the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump appointed him director of the CIA in January 2017 and secretary of state in April 2018.

Pompeo is a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party; he focused U.S.-China relations in opposition to China's policies regarding the oppression of Uyghurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea.

In 2017, when Pompeo became head of the CIA, he named his former business partner, Brian Bulatao, the agency's chief operating officer.

He was among the staunchest Trump loyalists in the Cabinet and routinely flouted State Department norms in aid of Trump's objectives, including supporting Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Pompeo was born in Orange, California, the son of Dorothy (born Mercer) and Wayne Pompeo.