Castro: Pompeo's speech an example of corruption

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs' Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee says he expects hearings to be scheduled on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's speech during the Republican National Convention.

"I'm concerned that there may have been not only violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents this kind of activity, but also there was a clear violation of Senator Pompeo's own guidance to his State Department employees. In his own guidance, he broke his own rules. He told them that they should not engage in any kind of political partisan activity, especially at a convention, a political convention. And that's exactly what he did this week," Texas Democrat Rep. Joaquin Castro said.

Casting aside his own advice to American diplomats and bulldozing a long tradition of secretary of state non-partisanship, Mike Pompeo plunged into the heart of the 2020 presidential race with a speech supporting President Donald Trump's reelection at the Republican National Convention.

The address was roundly condemned by Democrats and others as an inappropriate breach of decades of diplomatic precedent and a possible violation of federal law prohibiting executive branch employees from overt political activism while on duty. Indeed, Pompeo himself had reminded State Department staffers of those restrictions only last month.

The speech was recorded in Jerusalem during an official visit to the Middle East. Castro says he wants to know if Pompeo made the decision to travel to Jerusalem to make a political speech before he made the decision to visit for official business.

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