NPR host Mary Louise Kelly reported on Friday that, after she conducted an incisive and revealing interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that exposed his lies about the Ukraine scandal, he privately berated her.

“I was taken to the Secretary’s private living room where he was waiting and where he shouted at me for about same amount of time as the interview itself,” Kelly told Ari Shapiro, the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” “He was not happy to have been questioned about Ukraine.”

She said that he asked her “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”

Pompeo “used the F-word in that sentence and many others,” she said.

After that, she said Pompeo challenged whether she could find Ukraine on a map, and his aides brought out a world map with no names on it.

She said she pointed to Ukraine, and Pompeo put the map away.

“People will hear about this,” he reportedly told her.

“Pompeo is seen as a leading presidential candidate for 2024,” noted Maggie Haberman of the New York Times on Twitter. “There will likely be many such questions during that campaign.”

During the interview itself, Pompeo was rude and dismissive. As I wrote about earlier, Kelly expertly grilled him over his failure to defend his own department employees, which clearly irritated him.

But even just by bringing up the Ukraine matter — he seemed only to want to discuss Iran — she had clearly irritated him (though she said she had told his staff beforehand that she’d discuss Ukraine):

Kelly: Can you point me toward your remarks where you have defended [fired U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine] Marie Yovanovitch?

Pompeo: I’ve said all I’m going to say today. Thank you. Thanks for the repeated opportunity to do so. I appreciate that.

Kelly: One further question on this.

Pompeo: I’m not going to — I appreciate that. I appreciate that you want to continue to talk about this. I agreed to come on your show today to talk about Iran.

Kelly: And you appreciate [crosstalk] that the American public wants to know as a shadow foreign policy, as a back channel policy on Ukraine was being developed, did you try to block it?

Pompeo: The Ukraine policy has been run from the Department of State for the entire time that I have been here, and our policy was very clear.

Kelly: Marie Yovanovitch [crosstalk] testified under oath that Ukraine policy was hijacked.

Pompeo: I’ve been clear about that. I know exactly what we were doing. I know precisely what the direction that the State Department gave to our officials around the world about how to manage our Ukraine policy.

The exchange with Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of All Things Considered, follows the release by House Democrats last week of messages suggesting that Yovanovitch may have been under surveillance in the days before she was told to return to Washington from her posting in Kyiv last year.

Immediately after the questions on Ukraine, the interview concluded. Pompeo stood, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for several seconds before leaving the room.

A few moments later, an aide asked Kelly to follow her into Pompeo's private living room at the State Department without a recorder. The aide did not say the ensuing exchange would be off the record.

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The messages were sent between Robert Hyde, a Republican congressional candidate and fervent Trump supporter, and Lev Parnas, an associate of President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. He was indicted in October on campaign finance charges.

The State Department itself is now investigating the possible surveillance of Yovanovitch, who during testimony before House impeachment investigators in November said she had felt threatened by Trump. Before her recall, Yovanovitch had been accused of disloyalty by allies of the White House, and during his now-infamous July 25 call with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump said of Yovanovitch, "She's going to go through some things."

In an interview last week with the conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, Pompeo said he "never heard" that Yovanovitch may have been under surveillance. In her testimony before the House, Yovanovitch said she was told by the State Department that she was being recalled because of concerns about her "security."

Pompeo has come under criticism — including, at times, from career diplomats in his own department — for failing to more forcefully defend Yovanovitch in the face of political attacks. During testimony before impeachment investigators, for example, Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo, said he resigned from the department in part over what he interpreted to be a "lack of public support for Department employees."