Ex-Pompeo adviser contradicts former boss in impeachment inquiry testimony

Washington (CNN)Former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Michael McKinley, directly contradicted public comments made by the top US diplomat when he testified under oath last month as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

While Pompeo told ABC News last month that McKinley never raised the idea of issuing a statement of support for Yovonovitch, McKinley directly contradicted that statement while under oath, telling lawmakers he mentioned it on three separate occasions.

McKinley’s testimony contradicts public comments that Pompeo made in an interview last month with ABC News after McKinley’s testimony.

Officials from the nation’s oldest Cabinet agency have been central to the inquiry into Trump’s alleged attempts to exchange aid to Ukraine for an investigation into his political foes. As the inquiry unfolds, the department itself and some individual officials have become the target of intensifying White House vitriol.

The State Department has been catapulted into a “strange parallel universe,” one Washington-based official previously told CNN, groping for a way to describe the way staff feel about the situation: The administration they serve is attacking them, career diplomats are having to hire lawyers simply for having done their jobs and anger is growing about the silence on the seventh floor, where the secretary’s offices are housed.

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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/04/politics/pompeo-mckinley-contradiction/index.html