Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded cautiously when asked during a congressional hearing on Thursday about President Donald Trump’s tweet suggesting a delay to the presidential election in November. “I’m not going to enter a legal judgement on the fly this morning,” Pompeo told Sen. Tim Kaine during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, after the Virginia Democrat asked about Trump’s tweet. “In the end, the DOJ, others, will make that legal determination.” But Pompeo’s reference to the Department of Justice injected a new element into the proposal. The secretary of state, a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and later a lawyer for the elite Washington, D.C.-based firm Williams & Connolly, did not elaborate on what role the agency could play. He said only that the election should be carried out “lawfully.” “We want to have an election that everyone is confident in,” Pompeo said, declining to answer Kaine’s explicit question about how Trump could legally postpone the election. “It should happen lawfully.” Trump on Thursday pinned a tweet to the top of his account taking aim at proposals for greater mail-in voting to protect Americans against spreading the coronavirus. He did not offer evidence that mail-in voting leads to greater fraud, a claim he has frequently repeated “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” The Trump tweet and the Pompeo exchange come after Attorney General William Barr declined to answer a question about delaying the election following previous suggestions from Trump that he would do so. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Barr said he had not “studied” the question of whether a president could move the election date. “I’ve never been asked the question before, I’ve never looked into it,” Barr told the committee.ed.