When the coronavirus first took off, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo immediately suspected the virus might have come from a Wuhan lab instead of a wet market. The medical community, Democrats, and the media wrote him off as a kook.
"They didn't accept what we said, the data set that we laid out before them because they played politics," Pompeo tells CBN News. "They had a theory of the case that was based on, 'this was Mike Pompeo saying this and he works in the Trump administration, therefore, there's some other angle here.' It's a shiny object theory or whatever it is."
Now that it appears his suspicions have merit and that controversial "gain of function" research supported by the United States may have also played a part, Pompeo relays how bureaucrats kept putting up roadblocks as he tried to get to the truth.
"Inside the State Department there was lots of debate about the efforts we had underway, but I was just vicious about demanding that the team do everything they can to sort fact from fiction," says Pompeo. "If it leads to a conclusion that's not the one that we think it is, great. We just want to get to the conclusion. But there was enormous resistance to this…we ran over the resistance as best we could both from inside the State Department and from NIH and other places, people who didn't want to talk about the fact that there had been grants to the WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology)."
While that was then, the former secretary hasn't stopped trying to right wrongs. That includes tackling issues like the assault on religious freedom here at home.
"We saw it during the virus," Pompeo tells CBN News. "Churches that couldn't gather; pastors that couldn't bring their flock to a place while you had all kinds of other craziness going on; protests in the streets that were acceptable. That is a real black mark on religious freedom in America. It's deeply inconsistent with our constitutional right for the free exercise of religion, but more importantly, it strikes at the very moral foundation of our country."
Pompeo says a spiritual battle is striking our moral foundation as well. "There's no doubt there are folks here in the United States that are trying to place evil in front of us," Pompeo says. "This isn't new. For those of us who are Christian, those of us who are believers in the Bible, we know that evil always exists. We also know that we're all sinners, but we know this: we have to be strong in our faith."
That strong faith would likely play a role in a potential future decision: whether he might run for president. Recently, he has met with potential donors and visited certain early primary voting states.
"I must say, Susan and I pray every day about how to execute the mission we've been given by the Lord," Pompeo tells CBN News. "We're going to stay in this fight. I've been at this for decades. Today, 2022 is the marker. Whoever the president is in 2024 needs to have a Senate and a House, so that they can actually make the changes that America needs."
So is it safe to say that Pompeo is surveying the terrain and he'll see what happens after 2022? "It is fair to say we're going to stay in the fight. We'll see what role the Lord brings to us."
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