The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Fires Tillerson, Taps Pompeo As Secretary Of State

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

After months of on-again, off-again speculation, President Trump announced on Twitter Tuesday morning that he had fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. He also said that he is nominating CIA Director Mike Pompeo as his next Secretary of State. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Callie and Eric at Rogue Farm in Independence, Oregon. We are here hanging out with the Voo and Doo, the Rogue Farm Pigs. This podcast was recorded at 2.31 p.m. on, uh, is it only Tuesday? The 13th of March. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on Up First, the NPR One app, or on your local NPR radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson after months of on-again, off-again speculation that Tillerson would be fired or quit

any day. Trump made the announcement this morning on, where else, Twitter. He also said in the same tweet that CIA Director Mike Pompeo is his pick for Secretary of State. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Michelle Kellerman. I cover the State Department. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. It was an unceremonious end for Rex Tillerson after his tumultuous one year, one month and 12 days as Secretary of State. He was, by some accounts at least, fired by tweet. At 844 this morning, President Trump posted, quote, Mike Pompeo, director of the CIA, will become our new secretary of state. He will do a fantastic job, exclamation point. Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service, exclamation point. Gina Haspel will become

the new director of the CIA and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all! Exclamation point. And we've talked about this possibility of President Trump getting rid of Rex Tillerson off and on for months, so much so that there was a term for it, Rexit. But still, somehow this felt very abrupt. Abrupt and also really confusing. We heard that Tillerson didn't know about it until the tweet. But, Tam, you were talking to people at the White House today. They told a slightly different story.

Right. I am there now. I spoke with a senior administration official who says that Chief of Staff John Kelly called Rex Tillerson on Friday and notified him. There was a follow up conversation on Saturday. Now, what was he notified of? That he was being asked to step down, that his departure would be imminent. But Tillerson then never did step down. He never said he was leaving. And then this tweet happens and a spokesman for the State Department,

who has since been fired for disputing the White House account, said that Tillerson hadn't spoken to the president himself and did not know why he was being fired. Tillerson actually only finally spoke to the president around noon today. I received a call today from the president of the United States at a little after noontime from Air Force One. And I've also spoken to White House Chief of Staff Kelly to ensure we have clarity as to the days ahead. What is most important is to ensure an orderly and smooth transition during a time that the country continues to face significant policy and national security

challenges. Just remember, you know, I mean, these kinds of rumors come all the time. And Tillerson's the kind of guy who brushes them off all the time as this, you know, Washington game. He's not from here. He doesn't play this game. So it's possible that he just didn't take the hint. You know, he didn't come out and talk to us until he heard directly from the president on this. Right. And so let's go to tape from the president. What the president said this morning around 915 a.m. That would be before he spoke to Rex Tillerson. In fact, a reporter shouted to him, President Trump, what did you say to Tillerson? What did you say to Rex Tillerson? Rex and I have been talking about

this for a long time. We got along actually quite well, but we disagreed on things. When you look at the Iran deal, I think it's terrible. I guess it was okay. I wanted to either break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently. So we were not really thinking the same. With Mike, Mike Pompeo, we have a very similar thought process. I think it's going to go very well. Rex is a very good man. I like Rex a lot. I really appreciate his commitment to this service. And I'll be speaking to Rex over a long period of time. Though not as Secretary of State. So, Michelle, you're over at the State Department. Tillerson came out and made a statement.

Yeah, he did. And he was kind of shaken. He sounded quite upset, quite tired. I mean, he did just come back on this trip from Africa. He only mentioned the president that one time, saying that he got this call from him. Otherwise, the rest of the statement didn't mention the president at all, talked mostly about how he was honored to serve, like the diplomats who work in this building, who represent America around the world. They all took an oath to the Constitution. So he talked a lot about the Constitution. He talked about his relationship with the Defense Department, with Defense Secretary Mattis. You know, these two guys were seen kind of as the adults in the room, if you will, in this administration. And he definitely kind of banked on that relationship for keeping him in the loop. And this, in some ways, Mara, seems to be about relationships that President Trump,

in talking to reporters, talked about the chemistry between himself and Tillerson. And it's not just chemistry. Mike and I, he said, have a similar, very similar thought process. In other words, what Trump seems to be doing is shedding the shackles of all those people, sometimes they were called the adults in the room, they were there to hem him in, to push back against Trump's more warlike or isolationist or whatever you have at tendencies. But I think Trump now thinks he's going to be surrounded by more like-minded advisors. When you think about the people who've left, Gary Cohn, the top economic advisor who was against tariffs, Rex Tillerson, who also pushed back against some of Trump's more isolationist and hardline instincts. But now Trump is creating an administration in his

own image more than he did when he first came into office, as he likes to put it. He's his own best advisor. I alone can fix it. And more and more, I think Trump is a one man band. And he seems to think that the kind of advice he's going to get is very self-affirming, affirming of his own instincts. Which is interesting because, you know, part of the role of the Secretary of State is also to meet with other countries and to deal with allies and, you know, take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, one of the things that Tillerson always had to bring back was, look, the Europeans aren't going to go along with this. If you rip up the deal, you're going to be blamed for it, right? So he not only has to advise the president on what he thinks should be done,

but he also has to bring the concerns of the Europeans here. And, Tam, I should note this week Tillerson's top aide, Brian Hook, is heading to Europe to talk to the Europeans about how to fix the Iran deal or do some kind of supplemental agreement, something that's more to the liking of President Trump. I'm told that that meeting is going to go ahead. But with the way things are going around here and the way heads are rolling around here, I'm not really sure. Well, and Trump was very clear. He said, I thought the Iran deal was terrible. I guess

he thought it was OK. I wanted to either break it or do something. So we know that at least when Mike Pompeo was a member of Congress, he agreed with Trump about the Iran deal. What kind of advice he's going to give him now, we don't know. Tillerson had such a weak position within the administration. He certainly didn't have Trump's ear from what we could tell. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that, Michelle. But I'm not sure how much losing Tillerson at the State Department really loses a voice of moderation in this administration if that voice wasn't listened to to begin with. And perhaps if you have somebody at the State Department like Pompeo, who is a trusted advisor of the president, we don't know what Pompeo thinks now of the Iran deal.

We know what he thought when he was an elected official. That may have changed over the course of his time at CIA and seeing the intelligence in full on a daily basis and also not having to worry about running for re-election in a conservative district. So how much this may change what Trump is hearing from the State Department, I don't know, but it certainly gives a voice at State that has more clout with the president. And that is something that people over here at Foggy Bottom are talking about. Foggy Bottom being the location of the State Department. Exactly. I think folks here at the State Department are, you know, they're not quite sure what Mike Pompeo brings. There is some concern among some here that he might bring

very hawkish views. But on the other hand, he has a close relationship with President Trump and maybe their viewpoints will matter more. Well, and there have been so many occasions where it just wasn't clear whether Rex Tillerson was actually speaking for the president of the United States. And I don't know how that works when you're secretary of state and you're supposed to be, you know, the person out in the world speaking for the president, speaking for the United States of America. And on any number of occasions, Trump either sort of preemptively contradicted Tillerson or Tillerson contradicted Trump, sometimes seemingly, you know, unintentionally and had to sort of clean it up afterwards. But on my list of areas where they were not always on the same page, we have the Paris Climate Accord, of course, the Iran nuclear deal, whether to negotiate and how with North Korea, the timing of the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. I mean, it's kind of a long list.

Steel tariffs. Right. And don't forget Morongate. Rex Tillerson was reported to have called the president a moron and he famously never denied it, even though he had many, many opportunities to do so. Yeah. And reportedly it was expletive moron. That's right. Expletive moron. And then on the day that story came out, Tillerson had to hold a press conference or he chose to hold a press conference that the president watched while on Air Force One, where he came out and said that he wasn't quitting and that he likes his job. And and then he and the president is very smart. Yes. Yes. Praise the president.

But but he never would answer the question of whether he called him a moron. He dismissed those questions as being beneath him. They were Washington games. But that was the most important thing. He never denied the reports that he called the president an expletive moron. Which is remarkable that the president didn't just fire him then. But, you know, what Ryan says is really true. You want to have a secretary of state who has Which is remarkable that the president didn't just fire him then. In other words, even if you have a good relationship with him, it's hard to be on the same page with him because he's so impulsive, makes things up, decides on the spur of the moment, and announces things like he's going to talk to the leader of North Korea without any other agency knowing it, regardless of how good a relationship or rapport that cabinet secretary might have. And Tam, just to pick up on what you were saying earlier about how other countries view it. I mean, I talked to a lot of ambassadors and they come and they make their appointments here at the State Department, but they know that this isn't the place that matters. You know, they go to the White House if they need real answers on where things are headed.

And that says a lot about how state has fallen. And also just the whole view of the role of diplomacy. I mean, President Trump talks all the time about my generals. He doesn't talk about my diplomats. You know, he does take a view of the world where America is a powerful military power. He's downplayed soft power, never talks about American values. And that might not change regardless of who's running the State Department. And, you know, those were big themes in Tillerson's departure statement here. He talked about his relationships with the Defense Department, how the men and women of the State

Department serve often in very dangerous places abroad, how patriotic they are, how the Defense Department knows that diplomacy should come first. He did stress all of that, but that's certainly not the way that President Trump talks about the State Department. Well, that brings up another question, Michelle, and I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about this. Rex Tillerson was famously accused of hollowing out the State Department, and either through inertia or because he didn't think it was important, the State Department has lost a whole generation of foreign service officers because of Rex Tillerson. Now, is that going to change,

do you think, under Mike Pompeo? Or does Mike Pompeo inherit a hollowed out State Department? At the moment, I mean, it's definitely inherits a hollowed out State Department? At the moment, I mean, it's definitely inherits a hollowed out State Department. I mean, a lot of people have left the, you know, the 30 plus year careers in different regions. You know, you have a lot of people leaving, retiring out of the State Department and not much movement upwards. You know, there's been a hold on promotions. There's been a hold on hiring. Whether or not Pompeo is willing or able to change that, I'm not so sure. That's certainly a hope that people over here have, in addition to hoping that the State Department will matter a little bit more with this president if he likes the person running it. Ryan, we know that the Senate has scheduled a

confirmation hearing in April for Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. What can you tell us about him? Well, Pompeo was a congressman from Kansas, conservative district in Kansas, basically a Tea Party Republican. He went to West Point, finished first in his class, I believe, served as a tank commander in Germany towards the end of the Cold War, then went into private business, held very kind of partisan views when he got into the House. He served two terms on the House Intelligence Committee and famously served on the Benghazi Special Select Committee that looked into the whole Benghazi events and was so partisan in that effort that he actually drew up his own report along with another lawmaker, not just the Republican report, but his own report, because he didn't think that the Republican report went far enough.

Far enough in criticizing Hillary Clinton. Exactly, exactly. And I recall talking to folks who worked on the House Intelligence Committee with him when he was nominated to be CIA director. And they said that he was he's very smart. He's very capable. Their main concern was that he was too partisan. They wondered whether he would be able to set his political views aside and assess the intelligence and present it in an unbiased, unvarnished manner to the White House. But even Adam Schiff, who's been a very critical Democrat when it comes to partisan matters, and many Republicans and folks within this administration, gave Pompeo the benefit of the doubt and says that, you know, if he sidesteps his worst intentions, he could be

a very good CIA director. And I think that he has been very successful as CIA director in doing what the agency wants, which is getting its voice heard within the White House. And that was one of the concerns that they had when you have a congressman coming over, one, that they don't understand the agency, don't want to understand the agency. And Pompeo went a long ways to try to earn the trust of the CIA and get its voice heard within the White House, which the fact that he's now being appointed Secretary of State, within the White House, which the fact that he's

now being appointed Secretary of State, I think, speaks volumes to the fact that he did win the president's trust. I have a question also just for Ryan and Michelle. You know, this is happening at a very high stakes moment, a kind of fraught moment when the president is getting ready to hold talks or negotiations, whatever you want to call it, with the leader of North Korea. And we know what the history of this was when Rex Tillerson thought it was a good idea to explore talking, the president undercut him. Now he's more or less adopted Rex Tillerson's policy. But it's going to be Mike Pompeo who helps him carry it out. What do you think the difference is going to be with Pompeo in there towards North Korea? We know what he thought about the Iran deal in the past. Right. I had an interesting conversation today with the former Assistant Secretary of State for

Asia, Danny Russell. And he said, you know, it could actually work better with Pompeo. He said North Koreans understand the job of a spy chief. Even the South Koreans sent their spy chief to Pyongyang and to Washington. So they understand that. They understand kind of the way that Donald Trump runs this, you know, that's the president that matters. They've been dying to have a meeting with the president of the United States for three generations of North Korean leaders, as he said. So in that sense, it could be a plus to have somebody like Pompeo, someone who obviously knows all the intelligence that we have about this place. The downside, of course, not related to Pompeo or Tillerson specifically, is that the administration does not have a number of very senior level positions

related to the North Korea portfolio filled at the moment. That's right, isn't it? No South Korean ambassador. Yeah, there's a lot of openings. Yeah, the envoy Joseph Yoon, who's one of the few American officials who has been talking to the North Koreans, at least, who went to Pyongyang last year to bring back Otto Warmbier, who sadly died a few days later, an American student who was in prison there. He retired just a few weeks ago. But again, it wasn't as if there were talks going on at the moment. And there wasn't as if President Trump really listens to the State Department. So there is a feeling that, you know, what is he going to do, someone like that? Can we talk about Gina Haspel? She is the person that President Trump wants to be the new CIA director. She's currently number two there at the CIA.

And she has sort of an interesting history because she's been at the CIA for a very long time. She's been there for more than 30 years. She is a career CIA officer. And she has a bit of a checkered past. Yeah, the post 9-11 world has led to a number of CIA officials who engaged in things that are not looked back upon with a lot of pride by the American political establishment. But there are people within the CIA who hold a very different view of that. What I'm referring to, of course, is the fact that Haspel was involved in a CIA black site. She ran a black site in Thailand with terrorism suspects. So wait, explain what a black site is. So a black site is a secret CIA detention facility where terrorism suspects were brought

and subjected to what is euphemistically referred to as enhanced interrogation techniques, more commonly referred to by a lot of people as torture. This would be waterboarding, putting people in cramped boxes, sometimes with what was termed harmless insects. Boo. Yeah. And didn't she also help destroy some of the video evidence of that abuse? At least that's what human rights groups are talking about now.

She did. She took part in the effort to destroy some of the tapes of the interrogations. These are interrogations specifically of a suspect by the name of Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded repeatedly at that black site in Thailand that was run by Haspel. And this came up when Haspel was nominated as the deputy director of the CIA after the election. Now, Haspel, as the number two official at CIA, doesn't need Senate confirmation. As CIA director, she is going to have to be confirmed by the Senate. And this is going to be a difficult process for her. Her confirmation hearings are going to be brutal. I spoke with people on the Hill today who say that

she's going to have to explain a lot of what she did over the past 15 years to members of Congress, members of the Senate, and assure them that there is not going to be any backsliding on the issue of torture and that the CIA is not going to engage in those sorts of things again. That is going to be interesting. So I think what we're saying is that her confirmation process could be a little more bumpy than Mike Pompeo's confirmation process. Absolutely. Although, although I will say that people that I spoke to today said that they suspect that she will get through, but that it's going to be, it's going to be rough. Mara, I have been going back through history and the level of turnover in this White House,

actually the level of turnover just in this cabinet is pretty impressive for this point in a president's term. And President Trump said something today out on the White House lawn with helicopter sound behind him that seems to indicate that he may not be done. So I've gotten to know a lot of people very well over the last year. And I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the cabinet and other things that I want. Other things? We don't know what he means. Well, there are any number of people who are still on the watch list. Yes, well, McMaster, there's lots of talk about getting General McMaster a new job with a fourth star at the Pentagon. There's always talk about John Kelly being pushed out. But Donald Trump has said he likes conflict. He likes it when his

advisors fight it out. He says, I think that's the best way to go. He said he was going to run the government like his business. And people thought they meant his real estate business. But I think he meant his reality TV business business because that's really how he's running the government, more like The Apprentice and less like the Trump Hotels. And so my feeling is we haven't seen the last of it and we probably never will. I think there will be more White House personnel changes. I think that this kind of chaos and uncertainty and Donald Trump deciding policy on an impulse is going to be a feature, not a bug, of his administration. And I think it's why you see the markets rattled repeatedly. It's why you see other countries trying to band together, create their own free trade agreements, like in Asia, which

just got signed the other day, because they are trying to fill the vacuum that has been created by the United States of America removing itself from its traditional role. And that is the way Donald Trump wants it. Before we leave you, there is one more big story that popped in the last 24 hours. The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said they have completed their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and have found no collusion with the Trump campaign. Ryan, you have been following this. We haven't actually seen the report yet, right? But no, we're talking about it. We're talking about it, just as we talked about the memos before we had seen the memos.

Yes, the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have come to the end of their investigation. They have formally tied the bow on it. They said they're done. And as you said, the conclusions that they come to, the headlines are they found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign in Russia or between the Clinton campaign in Russia. They were happy to point out. They also said that, yes, the Russians did interfere in the election, but they said that they found no indication that Russia preferred Trump over Hillary, that Russia acted to help Trump win. That, of course, lies in the face of the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. And, you know, Democrats said that, one, it's a shame that Republicans are shutting this investigation down, they said prematurely. They accuse Republicans of never really taking this investigation seriously, of hamstringing it from the start and trying to ensure that it never really did the sort of digging that it needed to

in order to get a full understanding of what the Russian interference looked like and whether there was indeed any sort of coordination between Trump associates and Russia. The top Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, pointed to the fact that there were a number of subpoenas that Democrats wanted that Republicans did not sign off on, that Republicans did not compel witnesses such as White House communications director Hope Hicks or former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon to compel testimony from them because they often kind of dodged questions, according to Democrats. But the thought that the Republicans would come up with anything, I mean, do you think it's reasonable to expect

the Republicans to have actually pursued an investigation into the avenues that Donald Trump really didn't want? Here's the thing. The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting a very similar investigation. That investigation is bipartisan. Republicans have gone places that the president may not exactly like, but they're taking the investigation seriously and they're going where the facts kind of take them. Sometimes Democrats will say that Republicans do so, that they drag their feet a bit, that they're not quite as quick on their toes as they would like them to be, but they get there. They do eventually look at these various avenues. And the Senate Intelligence Committee has managed to do that with a bipartisan spirit.

A lot of that is because of the close relationship between Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat, and the chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina. But that's a lot of very difficult work. And that committee continues its work. They have a number of witnesses scheduled that they still have to talk to. As they go through more documents, they found more people that they want to talk to. That investigation is not anywhere close to wrapping up. The fact that the House investigation is done, I think, speaks volumes about how partisan that had become. And we'd seen that for a long time. All right. I think that we are probably going to talk about this many more times, not necessarily the House Intelligence Committee investigation, but all the others. So we will leave it here for now.

And we will be back in your feed tomorrow with results from today's special election to fill a House seat in Pennsylvania. And, you know, any other news that breaks out between now and then. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Michelle Kellerman. I cover the State Department. And I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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