Trump will speak To Cia, pompeo abouT khashoggi
Donald Trump and top officials of his administration have said Saudi Arabia must be held to account for any involvement in Khashoggi’s death.
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would speak with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the CIA about Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October, Bloomberg said on Twitter.
The CIA believes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday, complicating President Donald Trump’s efforts to preserve ties with a key US ally.
The sources said the CIA had briefed other parts of the US government, including Congress, on its assessment, which contradicts Saudi government assertions that Prince Mohammed was not involved.
The CIA’s finding, first reported by the Washington Post, is the most definitive US assessment to date tying Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler directly to the killing.
The Saudi Embassy in Washington rejected the CIA assessment.
“The claims in this purported assessment is false,” a spokeswoman for the embassy said in a statement. “We have and continue to hear various theories without seeing the primary basis for these speculations.”
US Vice President Mike Pence, on a visit to Papua New Guinea, told reporters traveling with him that he could not comment on classified information.
“The murder of Jamal Khashoggi was an atrocity. It was also an affront to a free and independent press and the United States is determined to hold all of those accountable who are responsible for that murder,” he said, but added that Washington wanted to preserve its relationship with Saudi Arabia. The State Department declined to comment. Trump and top officials of his administration have said Saudi Arabia must be held to account for any involvement in Khashoggi’s death, but they have also stressed the importance of the alliance. US officials have said Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier, plays an important part in countering what they see as Iran’s malign role in the region, and Trump has repeatedly said he does not want to imperil US arms sales to the kingdom. While the Trump administration on Thursday imposed sanctions on 17 Saudis for their role in Khashoggi’s killing, many lawmakers think the United States should take a tougher stance, and the CIA’s findings are likely to embolden that view. Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government and a columnist for the Washington Post, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October when he went there to pick up documents he needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman.
Khashoggi had resisted pressure from Riyadh for him to return home. Saudi officials have said a team of 15 Saudi nationals were sent to confront Khashoggi at the consulate and that he was accidentally killed in a chokehold by men who were trying to force him to return to the kingdom. Turkish officials have said the killing was intentional and have been pressuring Saudi Arabia to extradite those responsible to stand trial. An adviser to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday accused Saudi Arabia of trying to cover up the murder. Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor said on Thursday that he was seeking the death penalty for five suspects charged in the killing. The prosecutor, Shalaan al-Shalaan, told reporters the crown prince knew nothing of the operation, in which Khashoggi’s body was dismembered and removed from the consulate. US officials have been skeptical that Prince Mohammed would not have known about plans to kill Khashoggi, given his control over Saudi Arabia.
The Post, citing people familiar with the matter, said the CIA’s assessment was based in part on a phone call the crown prince’s brother, Prince Khaled bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi. The fight over President Donald Trump’s appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general has reached the US Supreme Court, with lawyers in a pending gun rights case asking the justices on Friday to decide if the action was lawful. Critics have said the Republican president’s appointment of Whitaker, who now will oversee Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 US election, on 7 November to replace the ousted Jeff Sessions as the chief US law enforcement official violated the Constitution and federal law.
Lawyers for Barry Michaels, who filed a lawsuit in Nevada challenging a US law that bars him from buying a firearm due to prior non-violent criminal convictions, decided to make Whitaker’s appointment an issue in their pending appeal before the high court because Sessions was named as a defendant in the case.
The lawyers told the justices that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be the acting attorney general.
“There is a significant national interest in avoiding the prospect that every district and immigration judge in the nation could, in relatively short order, be presented with the controversy over which person to substitute as Acting Attorney General,” the lawyers, led by prominent Supreme Court advocate Thomas Goldstein, wrote in a court filing.
The court is not required to decide one way or another and could simply ignore or reject the motion.
Michaels’ lawyers argued that Rosenstein, the department’s No. 2 official, should have succeeded Sessions under a federal law that vests full authority in the deputy attorney general should the office of attorney general become vacant.
Some of the same lawyers behind Friday’s motion also are involved in a similar effort brought before a federal judge on Tuesday. In that case, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh asked a federal judge to bar Whitaker from appearing in an official capacity as acting attorney general in the state’s ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over the Affordable Care Act healthcare law.