A Time magazine story claiming that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon resign isn’t true, said the State Department in a report.
Axios reporter Johnathan Swan said he spoke to officials in the Department of State, who told him that it’s false.
“I just spoke to the secretary and he said this story is completely false,” State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus told Swan. “We just landed in Brussels for meetings with NATO— [Pompeo] is 100% focused on being President Trump’s Secretary of State.“
Pompeo is in Brussels on Wednesday to attend a NATO foreign ministers meeting, reported The Associated Press.
“On November 20, Secretary Pompeo will lead the U.S. delegation to the NATO Foreign Ministerial. There, he will meet with NATO Allies and the Secretary General ahead of the December NATO Leaders’ Meeting in London to discuss important deliverables, including burden sharing and collective defense. The delegation will also discuss continued cooperation among NATO members to face emerging security challenges and threats such as terrorism and energy security,” the State Department wrote in a statement.
According to the apparently debunked Time report, Pompeo wanted to resign as secretary and run for the Senate in Kansas during the 2020 election. It cited “three Republicans” who were not named, saying that the current impeachment inquiry has hurt him politically.
“So Pompeo is rethinking his calendar, say the top Republicans, one who served in the Trump Administration, another who remains in government, and a third who served in several high-ranking posts and is active in GOP politics. The timing of Pompeo’s resignation now will be decided by his ability to navigate the smoothest possible exit from the administration, the three Republicans say,” the article claimed.
Time magazine in recent years has been accused of publishing false stories, including a July 2018 story that featured a crying migrant girl. Time claimed that she was separated from her mother, but later reports said that she wasn’t.
Time dramatized the incident, showing the crying child looking in the direction of President Trump behind a red backdrop. “Welcome to America” is what it read.
Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, the father of the girl, was quoted by USA Today that she wasn’t separated by U.S. officials at the Southern Border.
“It appears that the iconic image of the separations policy didn’t involve a separation—all too typical of how a hysterical, advocacy-driven media covers immigration,” Rich Lowry, and editor of magazine National Review, wrote on Twitter.
After the backlash over the cover, Time said it stood by it, CNN reported.
