- In a Saturday statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused an NPR host and veteran reporter of lying, being an example of the “unhinged” media, and misidentifying Bangladesh as Ukraine on a map.
- On Friday, NPR’s “All Things Considered” host Mary Louise Kelly interviewed Pompeo, and asked him questions about the United States’ support for Ukraine and the ouster of former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
- But Kelly said that after the interview, Pompeo yelled at her for asking the questions on Ukraine in his office, cursed her out, and asked her if she could identify the country of Ukraine on a map.
- In his Saturday statement, Pompeo said that Kelly “lied to me, twice” last month and on Friday in “agreeing to have the post-interview conversation off the record,” but did not deny that he cursed and yelled at her.
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In a Saturday statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused an NPR host and veteran reporter of lying, being an example of the “unhinged” media, and misidentifying Bangladesh as Ukraine on a map.
On Friday, NPR’s “All Things Considered” host Mary Louise Kelly interviewed Pompeo, and asked him questions about the United States’ support for Ukraine and the ouster of former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, both of which are currently at the center of the ongoing impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
But Kelly said that after the interview, Pompeo yelled at her for asking the questions on Ukraine in his office, cursed her out, and asked her if she could identify the country of Ukraine on a map.
“I was taken to the Secretary’s private living room where he was waiting and where he shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself,” Kelly recounted after the interview. “He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.”
“He asked, ‘Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?'” she added. “He used the F-word in that sentence and many others.”
Kelly added that Pompeo asked his aides to bring a blank map into his office and told her to point to Ukraine, saying, “people will hear about this.”
In his Saturday statement, Pompeo said that Kelly “lied to me, twice” last month and on Friday in “agreeing to have the post-interview conversation off the record,” but did not deny that he cursed and yelled at her and said that Americans didn’t care about Ukraine, which he is set to visit on January 30.
—Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) January 25, 2020
His statement continued, “it is shameful that this reporter chose to violate the basic rules of journalism and decency. This is another example of how unhinged the media has become in its quest to hurt President Trump and this administration.”
As NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik noted, however, the State Department’s own transcript of the interview both shows that Pompeo “did not contradict” Kelly when she confirmed that she would ask him about Ukraine.
And while he asked to talk to her without a recorder on after the interview, he did not specify that their conversation would be off the record and thus un-reportable, a key distinction from simply asking her not to record it.
Pompeo ended his statement by saying: “It is worth noting that Bangladesh is NOT Ukraine,” seemingly implying that Kelly misidentified Bangladesh as Ukraine on the map he brought into the office.
Kelly, a highly-respected veteran foreign correspondent and national security reporter who has reported from Russia, Iraq, and North Korea, additionally holds a master’s degree in European studies from Cambridge University, making it highly unlikely that she would confuse Ukraine and Bangladesh, located in southeast Asia.
Folkenflik added: “if he wants to accuse distinguished NPR host and correspondent of lying, he should produce additional evidence. This administration often has estranged relationship with fact and truth.”
—IanShapira (@ianshapira) January 25, 2020
In a statement to Insider, NPR’s senior vice president for news Nancy Barnes defended Kelly, saying, “Mary Louise Kelly has always conducted herself with the utmost integrity, and we stand behind this report.”
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