P. Michael McKinley

Peter Michael McKinley (born January 1954) is an American diplomat. A career Foreign Service Officer, McKinley served as U.S. Ambassador to Peru (2007–2010), Colombia (2010–2013), Afghanistan (2015–2016), and Brazil (2017–2018), and then as Senior Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State (2018–2019).

Early life and education McKinley was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and grew up in Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. McKinley earned a B.A. from Southampton University and an M.Phil. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He was a member of Linacre College, Oxford.

Career McKinley joined the Foreign Service in 1982. He was based in Bolivia from 1983 until 1985 and had three tours of duty at the State Department's headquarters in Washington from 1985 until 1990. He then served in the U.S. Embassy in London from 1990 until 1994 and as deputy chief of mission and chargé d'affaires at U.S. Embassies in Mozambique, Uganda, and Belgium from 1994 until 2001.

From 2001 until 2004, McKinley served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. He then was deputy chief of mission and chargé d' affaires at the U.S. Mission to the European Union in Brussels from 2004 to 2007. As ambassador to Colombia, McKinley demanded the release of an American man who had been abducted by the militant group FARC; the man was later released. McKinley was U.S. Deputy Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2013 to 2014. He presented his credentials in Kabul on January 6, 2015. As U.S. Ambassador, McKinley called upon the Afghan government to conduct a full, transparent investigation into the allegations of Ahmad Ishchi of Jowzjan Province, who in 2016 accused General Abdul Rashid Dostum of abducting and torturing him.

McKinley served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan until December 18, 2016, upon being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Brazil. He presented his credentials on January 20, 2017 and served until November 3, 2018, when he took up the post of Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State.

On October 10, 2019, McKinley resigned from the State Department in protest of the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to support department employees, including U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, in connection with the Trump–Ukraine scandal. On October 16, 2019, McKinley gave deposition testimony to the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees in the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. McKinley's testimony was publicly released on November 4, 2019. Kent provided a memo to McKinley detailing his concerns, which McKinley forwarded to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, acting legal adviser Marik String, and Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan, but received no response.

In 2020, McKinley, along with over 130 other former Republican national security officials, signed a statement that asserted that President Trump was unfit to serve another term, and "To that end, we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States, and we will vote for him."

Published works McKinley's Pre-revolutionary Caracas: Politics, Economy and Society 1777-1811 (1985), a history of colonial Venezuela, was published by Cambridge University Press and also appeared in a Spanish edition. In addition to English, McKinley speaks Spanish, French, and Portuguese.