Rep. Mike Pompeo (KS-4) on Gitmo Detainees

Frank Gaffney: A member of Congress with whom I am very pleased to say we’ve had the privilege with to work closely is Congressman Michael Pompeo. He represents the people for the 4^th District of Kansas in the United States House of Representatives. He’s had a distinguished record of public service going back to his time as the first in his class graduate of West Point, a Calvary Officer in the United States Army, in the business private sector, now in the United States congress where he is one of the country’s real leaders on matters involving national security and in particular, intelligence and on energy issues as well. Michael Pompeo, welcome back, its good to have you with us sir.

Rep. Mike Pompeo: Frank its great to be with you

FG: Let me ask you, if I may, first and foremost Congressman about the efforts you’ve been making on the ground as it were to prevent something we talked about with your colleague congresswoman Vicky Hartzler earlier in the program, namely the hijra if I may use that expression – the movement, the transfer of jihadists, known jihadists, from Guantanamo Bay where they’ve been detained, into places like perhaps Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

MP: Right, Frank we’ve been working hard all across America especially in Kansas to make everyone’s voice heard about what a bad idea it would be to transfer known jihadists, folks who real blood has been shed to capture. Last week I along with Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins held a town hall meeting at the gates of Fort Leavenworth, just listening to the committee to what it would mean to them, what that would look like not just about ‘not in my back yard’. They’ve certainly don’t want it there, but they have a deep understanding of the risks associated to national security to bring folks to US territory where every plaintiff lawyer in the world will work to set them free, and jihadists will begin to find a target here as well. There are lots of domestic reasons its bad, in addition to all of the horrible foreign policy reasons to close down Guantanamo Bay.

FG: You’ve also written a bipartisan letter opposing this, I congratulate you for that Mike Pompeo. But let me ask you. In our conversation with Vicky Hartzler, she described an investigation she’s just conducted on the release of five particularly dangerous detainees, namely the folks called the Taliban Five in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl a few years ago. And the fact that the President violated the law in doing that in numerous ways, you now have several other laws on the books that will prohibit him from bringing these people to the United States. Do you expect him to violate that law as well, and what can Congress do to prevent such a thing.

MP: Frank, we talked a lot about that at the town hall. We had a hundred plus people show up in the middle of a day on a Friday to talk about just that. They were confounded they’d say ‘you all made it unlawful, and we said ‘we did in multiple ways’, and we’ll do it again this week, we’ll vote on another provision to make it unlawful again. And yet we’ve watched a president behave in this way consistently over my five years in Congress who just says ‘well you write something down, I’m going to ignore it’. Look there are few folks who are bigger believers in the power of a president in Article Two, but this crosses the boundary that is. I can’t imagine that there be any lawyer’s support. So we are concerned in spite of the fact that the President’s own Attorney General said that it would be illegal to close Guantanamo Bay and bring detainees to the United States, this President will go fulfill his campaign promise, one of the last ones left on his list to tick off over the next year and bring them back to the United States. It would present enormous risks to the country.

FG: Well it would and I want also to salute you, Mike Pompeo, for your leadership in another area. You’ve enlisted a number of your colleagues who, like you, have served in uniform to really put a marker down with the United States military that this could constitute an unlawful order. I hope that will be another break on the president’s action in this regard

MP: We do too, its unconscionable to put our military leaders in this position. Where the commander in chief asks of them something that is clearly unlawful, and my intention was not to put pressure on those amazing soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, but rather to inform everyone that you can’t ask folks in the military to execute an unlawful order, and I hope that they understand there’re members of congress who have their back in the event that they choose to make a decision that comports with their duty.

FG: Lets turn to another topic on which you’ve been very importantly engaged Congressman Pompeo, you and your colleague Senator Tom Cotton really led in the debate about this so-called Iran deal becoming less and less of a deal all the time bad deal to being with, now not even a deal according to the State Department, but you were warning about the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and side deals and the like. Talk if you would about what the latest shenanigan has been out of the IAEA with the respect to the so-called Nuclear Program File of Iran.

MP: Frank, I’ve tried to make it hallmark of my life to not say ‘I told you so’, but what happened just yesterday is exactly what I feared back last summer when we were trying to convince this administration not to move forward with giving the Ayatollah the capacity for a nuclear weapons program. Yesterday the IAEA essentially looked the other way. It conducted an investigation, the history of the Iranian nuclear weaponization program, it found that they lied, that they deceived that they in fact had a program. Iran continues to deny that they had a weaponization program, and in spite of that deceit, the fraud that the Iranians committed during that verification component of the deal, the IAEA voted unanimously to let them off the hook and close the file and begin the process that allows the president to relieve sanctions on this terror regime. But having said that, we now saw what this watchdog did, it became it lap dog. The president said himself that we can’t trust the Iranians, we have to verify. And the verification actors have now shown their complete unwillingness to hold the Iranians accountable.

FG: That’s for sure, and as you say, Mike, the real concern here is the president also said that when we do have issues like this arise, we’ll catch them, and then we will force this sanctions to snap back, and I can only take from your point that there was a unanimous vote of the IAEA, that the American representative was among those supporting this kind of rollover.

MP: You got that right, I wrote (inaudible), who’s our representative to the IAEA, imploring him to acknowledge what the IAEA wrote, which was that the Iranians did not comport with their obligation about the possible military implications of their program and was dually ignored. Its not a personal affront, it’s an enormous deterioration in American capacity to do nuclear proliferation verification around the world. I assure you, other countries are watching this.

FG: Just in the closing couple of minutes, Mike, I would like to ask you about, this past week the terrific outside group Judicial Watch came up with a letter that I gather the committee actually had in its files that makes it pretty darn clear that we’ve been lied to by Leon Panetta and I think Hillary Clinton, certainly others, that there was nothing that could be possible done by the United States military to help those poor folks on the ground in Benghazi on September 11^th, 2012. We now know that in fact that there were options that they were quote “spinning up to engage”. What happened? Where did that letter go in the opportunities that you’ve had to interview Hillary Clinton and others, and have we in fact been lied to?

MP: Frank, we’ll get a chance. We did in fact have that email; the committees had it for a period of time. We’ve had a chance to ask a handful of witnesses about it. We still have a number of witnesses including some of the most senior leaders in the CIA and the Department of Defense to come before our committee, after the first of the year. And we will get all of the answers about that. It is very clear, from that email and others that we’ve spoken to, that the military did have resources and there’s lots of disagreement, even within those military folks, with how quickly they could have gotten their precisely, what the restrictions might have been, I mean real restrictions, just can’t physically cover the ground. But what we now know I think without a doubt is we didn’t accomplish the most important mission. When you have a man down, you move heaven and earth to go get that man or woman back to safety. And that means moving everything as quickly as you can, as fast as you can, regardless of the risks associated with that. We didn’t do that. It was simply the case that the administration appears to have failed to take on that most fundamental task, which is if you send someone into harms way, you have an obligation to do all that you can to assure they are brought back safely.

FG: Just very quickly, yes or now answer, I gather from what you have said that the committee will not finish its work by the end of the year, it will continue into next year

MP: That’s correct, I’m hoping we’re wrapped up by this spring, but were not going to quit until we’ve done all that our duty requires.

FG: We expect nothing less needless to say of you Congressman Michael Pompeo, member of the house select committee on intelligence and select committee on Benghazi.