WASHINGTON (Reuters) - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told three prominent Republicans on Monday he plans to resign from the White House to run for Congress, a Time magazine report said. Pompeo had planned to stay in the current administration until the beginning of spring 2020, but he feels his relationship with President Donald Trump, particularly during the investigation to try the president, is damaging to his reputation, according to a Time report.
The three Republicans are a former Trump administration employee, another still in government, and a third in a number of prominent positions. Pompeo's resignation from the White House will be timed in such a way as to allow him "the easiest exit" from the administration, the report said.
But State Department officials said Pompeo dismissed the story as "totally false." He said he was "100 percent focused on being Trump's secretary of state." He believes the president has not yet been informed of Pompeo's exit plans.
Pompeo has been criticized for refusing to defend US officials and witnesses investigating the president's trial against Trump's public attacks. He said on Monday at a news conference that he was proud of what the United States had done in Ukraine, but did not defend the former US ambassador to Ukraine Mary Jovanovich.
Asked about Trump's public attacks on Jovanovic on Twitter when he testified in the president's investigation, Pompeo said: "I agree with all the statements from the White House."
Jovanovic told the investigation of the president's trial that she believed Trump's tweets were "very threatening," and Pompeo declined to answer whether he trusted the current US ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, who testified in the investigation.
But it seems that the secretary of state will no longer be able to stay away from the investigation of the president's trial for longer than that. A senior State Department official, David Haley, told investigators that Secretary Pompeo knew about the smear campaign against Ambassador Jovanovic, and that he summoned a senior anchor on Fox News and demanded evidence of the charges against her. According to Halley, although the State Department was unable to find credible evidence against Jovanovic, it did not issue any statement of support for the former ambassador.