It is not known if the minister received it or not
The US government is investigating the disappearance of the 'wine bottle' that Japan gave to Pompeo
The US State Department has not commented on the matter yet.
AFP
It is not known whether Pompeo received the bottle in question or not.
AFP
picture
A US document, revealed the day before yesterday, showed that the State Department is looking for a bottle of whiskey, worth $5,800, that the Japanese government gifted to former Secretary Mike Pompeo.
A notice to the State Department's Office of the Chief of Protocol dated July 22, including gifts to US federal employees from foreign governments in 2019, said the government of Japan gifted Pompeo the whiskey on June 24, 2019.
In the notice published in the Federal Register yesterday, the gift was listed as "its fate unknown."
"The ministry is investigating the matter and has opened an investigation," it said in a margin.
The New York Times was the first to report on the investigation, noting that US officials are allowed to keep gifts under $390, and that they must buy more than that if they want to keep them.
He doesn't remember.. he doesn't know
Pompeo's attorney, William Burke, was asked to comment: "Mr. Pompeo has no recollection of getting the whiskey bottle, he has no knowledge of what happened to it, and neither does any investigation into her whereabouts.
He has no idea what will happen to that bottle of whiskey.”
The State Department did not respond to a request for further details.
The New York Times quoted two unnamed people familiar with the matter as saying that the US government never paid for the bottle, and that the State Department asked its inspector general to determine what happened to it.
The newspaper report said that it was not yet clear whether Pompeo had received the gift in the first place, as he was heading to Saudi Arabia on June 24, 2019, when Japanese officials presented it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Not the first accusation
And in April, Pompeo, who worked in the administration of former President Donald Trump, was accused in a government watchdog report of violating federal ethical rules governing the use of taxpayer-funded resources when he and his wife asked State Department employees to perform personal tasks more than 100 times.
Pompeo denied the report, saying it was politically motivated and full of fallacies.
Pompeo is seen as among a handful of Republicans with presidential ambitions in the 2024 election, though he has not confirmed this.
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