Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, is scheduled to appear Friday at the Values Voter Summit, an event affiliated with the deeply conservative Family Research Council. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo foreign policy Pompeo raises eyebrows with appearance at politically charged event Secretaries of state have historically avoided such partisan affairs, say former and current U.S. officials.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to speak later this week to a gathering of American conservative activists, an unusual appearance for the top U.S. diplomat, whose role generally requires avoiding partisan affairs.

Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, is scheduled to appear Friday at the Values Voter Summit, an event affiliated with the deeply conservative Family Research Council. The summit’s speakers include a host of prominent Republicans and others on the political right.


While the schedule indicates that Pompeo will be part of a discussion on international religious liberty — an issue that Congress has mandated the State Department champion — Pompeo is still walking a fine line just by showing up, former and current U.S. officials say. The situation is also potentially fraught given the event is likely to help galvanize Republicans ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

“It’s sort of a given when you become secretary of state that you are representing the United States, and it’s particularly important to represent a unified country,” said Philippe Reines, who served as a top aide to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state.

A former official in the George W. Bush administration agreed that “it’s unusual for a secretary of state to be at an event with ‘voter’ in the title.” The former official argued, however, that what “saves” Pompeo “is that the discussion is on international religious freedom.”

Indeed, the Trump administration has touted its support of religious freedom with gusto, much to the joy of conservative Christians worried about their brethren in the Middle East.

Still, for a host of legal and other reasons, secretaries of state, like secretaries of defense, generally avoid gatherings that smack of partisanship, or that otherwise may deal with U.S. elections.

And while officials and experts did not rule out the possibility that past secretaries of state had attended events similar to the Values Voter Summit — either on the right or left of the political spectrum — none reached by POLITICO could recall a directly analogous case of a secretary having done so.

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As of late afternoon Tuesday, the summit’s online schedule listed Pompeo as a confirmed speaker. But during a press briefing after POLITICO published this story, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert noted that Pompeo’s office had not yet released his final schedule for the week, suggesting his appearance is not guaranteed.

“If the secretary chooses to participate in that, he would be speaking about an issue that he’s very passionate about: religious freedom, and the importance of human dignity around the globe,” Nauert said. Pompeo’s message, she added, is “not political. It’s not a Republican or … Democratic message to speak about the importance of those issues.”

Other former officials also pointed out that secretaries of state often speak about foreign policy at conservative or left-leaning institutions — a think tank, for example. Secretaries of state of both parties have also spoken before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group.

Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at least once attended “The Wednesday Meeting,” a gathering of broad center-right figures, where she spoke about the Bush team’s foreign policy, said Grover Norquist, the anti-tax increase evangelist who organizes the meetings.

Still, the Values Voter Summit is more explicit than most such events about its goals. Its website describes the gathering as “a forum to help inform and mobilize citizens across America to preserve the bedrock values of traditional marriage, religious liberty, sanctity of life and limited government that make our nation strong.”

“It is a little unusual to find a secretary of state, in such proximity to an election, participating at what is clearly a political event,” a Democratic Capitol Hill aide said, adding that it is “unseemly and inappropriate.”

As a GOP congressman from Kansas, Pompeo cultivated a reputation as highly partisan. And as a Cabinet member, he has struggled somewhat to shed that image. The New York Times reported that, as President Donald Trump’s CIA director, Pompeo “made little secret of his own opinions” on issues, raising concerns that his views could affect officers’ intelligence gathering and analyses. Pompeo left the CIA for State in April.

Critics of Pompeo said that even if his official goal is to lay out the administration’s approach to promoting religious freedom, he’ll still have the side benefit of motivating conservatives to support the administration just ahead of the midterm elections.

Reines, the former Clinton State Department aide, argued that Pompeo could use less politically loaded venues to discuss religious liberty. Just earlier this year, the State Department hosted a major conference on the subject.

Reines said that Clinton, a lightning rod for Republican criticism long before she became secretary of state, took pains to adhere to rules and norms about where she could go as America’s top diplomat. For instance, he noted, Clinton skipped the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., the first such gathering she’d missed in decades. She also avoided commenting on domestic political fights and turned down requests to attend or host certain gatherings and fundraisers, he added.

“We hewed to it religiously,” Reines said.

Late Tuesday, some Clinton critics pointed to her decision to accept an award and speak at a Planned Parenthood function in March 2009, early in her tenure at the State Department, as an example of a questionable appearance. Reines said Clinton had accepted the invitation in 2008 before getting the secretary of state job offer.

David Wade, who was chief of staff for John Kerry, Clinton’s Democratic successor at Foggy Bottom, said his team also steered clear of any events that might seem attached to elections or partisanship.

“It's not dissimilar from the military,” Wade said. “You work hard to keep the secretary of state in a nonpartisan category, because the public and Capitol Hill needs to trust that they're speaking for the administration and the facts, not politics or partisan purposes.”

Norquist, however, defended Pompeo as doing what he must to trumpet the administration’s work.

He pointed out that by speaking at the Values Voter Summit, Pompeo is more likely to get out the administration’s message on religious liberty because so many conservative media outlets cover the event.

Pompeo is due to appear at 2 p.m. on Friday at the summit, which is being held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. POLITICO’s attempts to reach summit organizers were not immediately successful.

Another Trump Cabinet member is also appearing at the summit during the same time bloc as Pompeo: Ben Carson, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But Carson is specifically listed as appearing in his “personal capacity,” and he is identified on the schedule as the “former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.”

Vice President Mike Pence will also speak at the gathering — the first time a sitting vice president has addressed the summit, according to its planners. Last year, Trump became the first sitting president to speak at the event.