Pompeo's RNC speech from Israel spurs Hatch Act investigation

A House panel said Tuesday it will investigate Pompeo’s actions to determine if he is breaking the law, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, announced. Castro, who chairs the oversight subcommittee in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, informed the State Department on Tuesday that he was launching an investigation.

At the same time, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filed a formal complaint with the State Department’s acting inspector general asking that the speech be investigated as a violation of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that generally prohibits political activism by federal employees…

His speech appears to flout his own recently issued guidelines. Last month Pompeo sent a memo to all State Department staff overseas, repeating a standard warning that they not engage in “any partisan political activity in concert with a partisan campaign, political party, or partisan political group, even on personal time and outside of the federal workplace.”