Exxon Mobil Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson is Donald Trump’s choice as secretary of state, NBC reported on Saturday, a move that would hand top diplomatic powers to a man whose ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin go back almost two decades.
The report couldn’t be immediately confirmed. NBC said its sources, people close to the president-elect’s transition, cautioned that nothing is final until the president-elect makes an announcement. Trump has said he’ll announce his decision next week.
Tillerson, who reaches Exxon’s mandatory retirement age of 65 in March, has become the leading candidate for the post of top U.S. diplomat over the past few days, two people familiar with the matter said late Friday. If confirmed by the Senate, Tillerson would be the first oil executive and only the second Texan to lead the State Department.
BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty ImagesThis file photo taken on October 07, 2015 shows Chairman and CEO of US oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, speaking during the 2015 Oil and Money conference in central London.
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president and a critic of Trump during this year’s campaign, remains on the short list of candidates, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.
Tillerson has ties to Putin that go back almost two decades. The pair met in 1999 on remote Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East. He was awarded Russia’s Order of Friendship and as recently as 2015 visited with officials in Putin’s inner circle. That connection could make him a useful bridge between the Russian leader and Trump, who has repeatedly said he’d seek a more cooperative relationship with Moscow.
Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, said Friday on Fox News that the list currently includes “a very diverse group.” In addition to Tillerson and Romney, she mentioned Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford Motor Co., former CIA Director David Petraeus, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican.
Drew Angerer / Getty ImagesPresident-elect Donald Trump and Mitt Romney dine at Jean Georges restaurant, November 29, 2016 in New York City
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that Tillerson was the leading candidate. NBC reported Saturday that Bolton may be tapped as Tillerson’s deputy.
Tillerson would probably face stiff opposition from Democratic and some Republican senators for both his foreign business ventures and an escalating legal tussle over how much Exxon knew about climate change and when. The world’s largest oil explorer by market value has said a probe by state attorneys general in New York, Massachusetts and elsewhere of whether it misled investors about climate risks is politically motivated. Exxon has also been questioned on whether it’s correctly written down the value of its reserves following a global collapse in crude prices.
With the selection, Trump would sidestep a feud that had broken out among his advisers and supporters over the two men seen as the front-runners for the spot: former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Romney. Giuliani, who had fervently supported Trump for president, campaigned openly for the job. By contrast, Romney sought to mobilize opposition to Trump during the presidential campaign, calling him “a con man, a fake.”
ERIC PIERMONT/AFP/Getty Images
But Tillerson’s selection will also fuel critics who say U.S. foreign policy has long been driven by the country’s demand for oil and that naming an oil executive is the last straw. During the campaign, Trump said the U.S. should have seized Iraq’s oil fields after the U.S. invasion in 2003, a move which he says would have prevented the rise and spread of the Islamic State terror group.
“I’ve always said — shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil,” Trump said in September. “It used to be, to the victor belong the spoils. Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: Take the oil.”
Exxon pumps oil and natural gas from about 36,000 wells worldwide and holds drilling rights to more than 110 million acres in more than two dozen countries. Tillerson’s resume included stints representing the world’s largest oil explorer by market value in places as far afield as Yemen and Russia.
An Exxon lifer and University of Texas-trained engineer, Tillerson would be the first native-born Texan to lead the State Department since James A. Baker’s tenure ended in 1992.
He’d also add to a Cabinet increasingly full of millionaires and billionaires, including Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross, whose fortune is estimated at about $2.9 billion. Tillerson was paid $27.3 million in salary, bonus, stock awards and other compensation in 2015; his 2.6 million shares of Exxon common stock had a value of about $228 million as of early December.
TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty ImagesUS president-elect Donald Trump speaks in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Dec. 6, 2016.
After becoming CEO in 2006, Tillerson led Exxon through more than a decade of ups and downs that included the late Hugo Chavez’ seizure of Venezuelan oil fields, annual profits that set U.S. corporate records, and a 2010 shale acquisition that turned into a $35 billion wrong-way bet on natural gas.
Outside work, Tillerson used his cachet as a past president of the Boy Scouts of America to help end a long-standing ban on gay scouts in 2013. He also trains rodeo horses on his ranch north of Fort Worth, Texas, and is a former competitive rider himself.
Tillerson and his wife Renda contributed $493,000 to federal candidates and committees over the last decade. The largest chunk, $159,000, went to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He contributed the maximum $2,700 allowed under law to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential primaries and $5,000 to the Right to Rise USA, the pro-Bush super-PAC, but didn’t contribute to Trump. Renda Tillerson sat out the presidential race entirely.
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As he closes in on retirement, Tillerson is grappling with international sanctions against Russia that froze a $1 billion investment and billion-barrel oil discovery in the Arctic Ocean.
Under Tillerson’s leadership, Russia became Exxon’s single biggest exploration theater as the company amassed drilling rights across tens of millions of acres, dwarfing its holdings in its home country, formerly its largest drilling opportunity, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. When the Putin regime forced Royal Dutch Shell Plc and other foreign investors to cede control of a massive gas export project on Sakhalin Island in 2007, Exxon’s holdings in the same region remained intact and untouched by the government.