During his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Pompeo, who currently leads the Central Intelligence Agency, repeatedly endorsed tough U.S. policies to counter Russian aggression abroad. “We need to push back in each place that we confront them and by every vector,” including not just military force but cyber and economic power, he said. Yet he refused to comment on the Russia probes at home, explaining that he wished to avoid that “minefield” since as CIA director he cooperated with Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate inquiries. He declined to answer questions about whether Trump had asked him to interfere with then-FBI Director James Comey’s investigation and whether Trump would be abusing his power by firing Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as speculation this week suggests he might do now that the special counsel’s probe is moving closer to the president.

Perhaps the most revealing exchange came when the Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked Pompeo if he agreed with Trump that the “Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation” is the source of the bad blood between America and Russia. “The historic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, now Russia, is caused by Russian bad behavior,” he responded, breaking with his boss.

When Pompeo then deflected questions about Trump’s hostility to the Russia investigations, noting that “I came here today to talk about my qualifications to be the secretary of state,” Shaheen argued that that’s precisely what she was asking him to do. She cited Pompeo’s observation in his prepared statement to the committee that Russia constitutes “a danger” to the United States and that “years of soft policy toward” Russia are “now over.” And yet, Shaheen said, “the president tweets out his opinion that the problem with Russia is Bob Mueller. ... It’s hard for me to understand how we can have a secretary of state who is able to go to Russia and come to Congress and talk about the challenges and the threats that Russia [poses] to our democracy when we have this conflicting position from the president of the United States, who you would work for.”

Pompeo acknowledged that the Trump administration has yet to fully implement congressionally mandated sanctions to punish Russia for its intervention in the 2016 election. “Vladimir Putin has not yet received the message sufficiently, and we need to continue to work at that,” he said. Still, he pointed out, the Trump administration is countering Russia not just with sanctions but also by investing in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, battling Russian mercenaries in Syria, and expelling unprecedented numbers of Russian diplomats and intelligence officers from the United States.

Those actions, Shaheen retorted, “get undermined by a president who consistently refuses to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for what Russia has done to the United States. That presents a challenge as we go into the 2018 elections, and it presents a challenge as we work with other democracies around the world.”