President Donald Trump has removed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and said he plans to replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will likely be replaced by current CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
President Donald Trump has removed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State and plans to replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
“Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State,” Trump said in a tweet Tuesday morning. “He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!”
According to reports from media outlets like the Washington Post, Trump and Tillerson “have often appeared at odds over policies such as the nuclear deal with Iran and the tone of U.S. diplomacy.”
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday he had been considering axing Tillerson for “a long time.”
“We disagreed on things…the Iran deal,” he said. “So we were not thinking the same. With Mike Pompeo, we have a similar thought process.”
The move to oust the country’s top diplomat comes amid new tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum to the United States, as well as the recent addition of five more North Korean shipping companies to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) growing sanctions list.
Trump has been reaching out to North Korea in recent weeks in an attempt to broker a face-to-face talk with dictator Kim Jong Un.