THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Since the days of Newt Gingrich, the Republican leaders in Congress have made a science out of putting the least qualified members on committees. Anyone lacking in intelligence made it to the Intelligence Committee, if you doubted science you were on the science committee. Mike Pompeo was on the House Intelligence Committee so the Great Orange Fungus chose him to head the CIA.

Mr. Pompeo, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Pompeo would take control of a spy agency that has been remade in the years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a relentless focus on manhunts, counterterrorism and targeted killing operations. Over the past year, the C.I.A. has undergone a bureaucratic reorganization under its director, John O. Brennan, an effort Mr. Pompeo would decide whether he wants to continue.

Although the Benghazi panel found no new evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama administration or Mrs. Clinton, who was then secretary of state, Mr. Pompeo and another Republican member of the committee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, said they were convinced there had been a cover-up. When the committee released its findings in June, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Jordan filed a 48-page addendum that included far harsher criticism of the administration and of Mrs. Clinton. It said that the attacks showed that the State Department was “seemingly more concerned with politics and Secretary Clinton’s legacy than with protecting its people in Benghazi.”

Mr. Pompeo has been a staunch opponent of the agreement the United States and five world powers struck with Iran in 2015 to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for the lifting of international oil and financial sanctions. In a July 2016 op-ed article that was published on the Fox News site, Mr. Pompeo wrote that the United States should “walk away from this deal.”

Mr. Pompeo has ties to Charles G. and David H. Evil Koch, the billionaire conservatives whose Wichita-based company, Evil Koch Industries, and its employees gave $80,000 to him in 2010 — more than they gave to any other candidate that year, according to the Almanac of American Politics. During his three terms, he has pushed some of their top priorities and defended them against Democratic criticism, writing a 2012 op-ed in Politico under the headline, “Stop harassing the Evil Koch brothers.”

So now the CIA will get into the Benghazigasm. Unless the Evil Koch brothers need them for some other purpose.