Mike Pompeo Had State Department Employees Do Personal Tasks, Report Says

Last year, when he was still secretary of state, Mike Pompeo dismissed accusations that he or his wife, Susan, had asked State Department staff to walk his dog or perform other personal tasks as “patently false” and “crazy stuff.”

On Friday, a State Department inspector general’s report concluded that the Pompeos had deployed government employees not just to take care of their dog, but to make restaurant reservations and hair salon appointments, deliver jewelry to their home, prepare their personal Christmas cards, order flowers for some friends, pick up others at hotels and, in one case, buy ingredients for what appeared to be a chocolaty mixed drink for a charity auction.

The most significant violation found in a yearlong inquiry into whether Mr. Pompeo misused State Department resources, according to the report, was that his son was given a much-reduced rate for a hotel room at the United States Military Academy at West Point on a football weekend in September 2019 that was deemed official travel. Investigators said that could constitute a improper gift.

Since Mr. Pompeo is no longer in office, he “is not subject to the disciplinary or other corrective actions applicable to federal employees,” the report concluded. Instead, it provided guidelines “to mitigate the risk of future senior leaders committing similar violations.”

The inspector general’s conclusions were reported earlier on Friday by Politico.

In an interview with investigators in December, according to the report, Mr. Pompeo dismissed the violations as small and insignificant tasks that did not improperly use department funds.

His lawyer, William A. Burck, criticized the report as politically motivated and said that incidents had been “cherry-picked by the drafters in an effort to twist innocent, routine and even praiseworthy behavior into something nefarious.”

But investigators said that the tasks “had no apparent connection” to official department business, and that they had been requested while employees were both on and off duty without compensating the employees for their time.

Many of the odd jobs were carried out by Toni Porter, a longtime Pompeo family friend who worked for Mr. Pompeo when he was a congressman from Kansas and director of the C.I.A. Ms. Porter’s name was redacted in the State Department report but included in documents provided by Mr. Burck.

Asked about Ms. Porter’s role, Mr. Pompeo told investigators that it was “perfectly fine for friends to help each other.” But Ms. Porter, who has previously declined to comment on the accusations, told investigators that she had believed the tasks were part of her official duties, in part because Mrs. Pompeo had requested them through State Department email channels.

The requests included using a discretionary State Department spending account to buy gold nut bowls for the Pompeos to give as hostess gifts at private dinners in their honor. Ms. Porter also arranged tours of museums, the Capitol and the Library of Congress for a Kansas group that had helped raise money for Mr. Pompeo when he was in the House.

Inspectors “found no connection between the organization’s visit and official business of the department,” the report said.