And while Pompeo and his staff insist he did not spend taxpayer resources to deliver the actual speech, ethics experts say that using an official trip to do partisan campaign work is, at the very least, a violation of ethics guidelines and could even be a violation of the law.
But for Pompeo, an ambitious former House member who has made no secret of his desire to run for president in 2024, the criticism is worth it in order to address the nation from the roof of the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with the panorama of Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious sites in the old city as a backdrop.
“For Pompeo, I think this is much more about 2024 than it is about right now,” said Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “If he wants to run for president in 2024, he obviously wants to lock up the evangelical bloc, and giving a speech in the old city of Jerusalem is one way in which he can appeal to them.”
In a different administration, perhaps, one might expect the president to discourage such a use of taxpayer funds by his secretary of state. But not in the Trump administration, said Heather Hurlburt, a former State Department speechwriter and a policy director at the left-leaning New America Foundation.
“Trump is just not at all interested in differentiating between national power and personal power,” Hurlburt told CNBC. “And he doesn’t draw the line between what’s good for the government and what’s good for Donald Trump.”
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/25/rnc-tonight-what-to-watch.html