Former Trump Administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday that the country will have a “peaceful transition of power” on January 6, 2021, and continued to push back on claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
During the interview, Sky News reporter Rigby pointed out that Pompeo’s new book barely mentions the January 6 uprising or former President Donald Trump’s attempt to cancel the election.
“I was the secretary of state and the director of the CIA,” Pompeo said. “So the book focuses on how to deliver security overseas.”
He said the country had a “peaceful transition of power” that day, despite the violence. Pompeo blamed the violent incident on the building’s security officials.
“It was a bad day at the Capitol. The security team there failed to stop these people from rioting there,” he said, adding that those who committed violent acts should be prosecuted.
“But make no mistake, that night America also showed its strength. Vice President [Mike] Pence finished the election. We are going through a peaceful transition of power,” he said.
Pompeo also accused Rigby of taking the words “out of context” when he made a statement after Joe Biden won in November 2020. to reporters: “There will be a smooth transition to the second Trump administration.”
“I speak politely about the United States,” he told Sky News. “We’ve had a difficult election. We’ve had incidents in the election that weren’t right.
Pompeo’s 2020 comments were in response to reporters’ questions about whether the State Department was ready to engage with Biden’s transition team and whether failure to do so could jeopardize U.S. national security.
He has repeatedly suggested that there were electoral irregularities in the election.
“We didn’t have a sufficiently transparent election,” he told Sky News. “And I don’t describe it as stolen, but there are many anomalies in our elections and we cannot have them in the United States.”
Pompeo’s claims cannot be scrutinized.
An Associated Press investigation published in December 2021 found fewer than 475 cases of electoral fraud, which would not be enough to overturn Biden’s victory.
“The case could not be in question even if all the votes were misconceived for Biden, which they were not, and even if the ballots were actually counted, which most of them were not,” the report said.
Pompeo, widely seen as a potential front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, said he expected Trump to face competition in his bid to return to office.
“I am confident that there will be many others from both parties who will also believe that they should be the next leaders,” he said. “I have great faith in the American people that they will get everything done.”
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the UN, is likely to be the first Republican to open a challenge to Trump this month.
Pompeo accused Haley of trying to oust Pence as vice president in order to take a role on the 2020 ticket, in another excerpt from his book.
Haley has denied that happened.