LEVIN: “But you have sections of this book that are really quite remarkable. For instance, there is one section here, you wanted to meet with the governors, the Governors Association, and you had trouble getting into that meeting. And then finally you get there, they give you a little bit of time. Tell us about that meeting.”
POMPEO: “Mark, thanks for having me on and thanks for the kind words, as well. You’re right, I am not the greatest athlete, but I had this incredible privilege to serve for four years. Look, the Chinese Communist Party presents the singular great threat from outside of the country, and I had come to learn through some classified information that the Chinese Communist Party was tracking all 50 of our governors in great detail and evaluating them, Mark, if you can believe this, giving them a rating, you know, ‘on the team,’ ‘off the team’ or ‘we’re working on you,’ essentially. I’ve seen also that the Governors Association was going to have a meeting in Washington, D.C., I called then-Governor Larry Hogan and then-governor of New York Cuomo, the two leaders of the NGA, and asked for 20 minutes. I don’t think they figured out why the Secretary of State wanted to see the governors, but when I was there, and it was a sleepy Saturday afternoon, they were kind of paying attention to me, but when I told them I had in my hands a recently declassified report where the Chinese Communist Party had been tracking them, following them, measuring them, evaluating them, working on them, every one of them wanted to see what I had in my hands. And it says the lesson to us that this problem from the Chinese Communist Party isn’t somewhere over there, it is inside the gates. They are tracking lots and lots of Americans in the business world, senior leaders in government, not just at the federal level like we saw with Representative Swalwell, they are working to do both propaganda and collect secrets. We have to do better. That day I alerted the governors to that very risk.”
LEVIN: “You dealt with the leadership of that regime. What did you make of the leadership of that regime? Were they cold-hearted, bloodthirsty individuals? Are they power-hungry? What was your conclusion?”
POMPEO: “Goodness, all of the above: cold-hearted, power hungry, don’t give a whip about humanity, human dignity, basic rights. Political freedoms, religious freedoms — those are all nothing burgers to them. It is about power and making the nation of China the greatest hegemonic power in the history of civilization. Xi Jinping himself, he calls it the great struggle, trying to build what they call the Middle Kingdom, and the ‘middle’ means the middle of this earth. He has consolidated power in ways that no leader in 40 years has consolidated. His intentions with respect to the West, to the United States, are pretty clear. And they have lots of problems inside China and we need to exacerbate them and defend our own way of life here. If we don’t get this one right, Mark, our kids and grandkids will live in a country that looks a lot more like theirs than ours. That is just totally unacceptable.”
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