Pompeo to meet with Biden nominee Antony Blinken: reports

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to meet with President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for the position, Antony Blinken, sources told The Associated Press and CNN on Tuesday.

Blinken is tentatively scheduled to meet Pompeo face to face on Thursday for the first time since Biden won the election, according to the AP, which cited two sources, and CNN, which cited three. 

A State Department spokesperson told The Hill in a statement that “there is no meeting planned or confirmed.”

Such a meeting would represent one of the first in-person sit downs between a member of President Trump’s Cabinet and one of Biden’s Cabinet nominees, as well as Pompeo’s first formal recognition that Trump will not be president after Jan. 20. 

Pompeo’s meeting with Blinken is reportedly scheduled to last 15 minutes, but one of CNN’s sources said the State Department views the meeting as a positive step forward. 

The Biden transition team deferred comment to the State Department. 

The closed-door meeting would come a few days after the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory, despite the president’s refusal to concede. Biden has widely been considered the president-elect since Nov. 7.

Pompeo previously received backlash for saying that he was getting ready for “a second Trump administration” after every major network and the AP projected Biden as the next president.

The meeting signals the increasing acknowledgement among Republicans and the administration that Biden won and Trump’s election challenges in the courts are unlikely to reverse that. 

The secretary of State has said “we’ll make this work” in reference to the Biden transition and expressed an openness to meeting Biden’s team, according to CNN.

The president-elect officially announced Blinken as his nominee for secretary of State late last month. A source familiar with Blinken’s recent preparation told CNN that the nominee, who requires Senate confirmation to serve, has not waited for a meeting with Pompeo to begin getting ready to take on the role. 

“It is a good thing that the Pompeo meeting is expected to happen this week, but Blinken was not waiting around. He couldn’t. The Biden team didn’t know if Pompeo would even agree to meet Blinken, and they thought he may do it in the eleventh hour if he did it at all,” the source said.

Updated at 11:48 a.m.