Trump shifts tone on Saudis
President admits journalist is likely dead as kingdom weighs blaming intelligence chief
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he believes the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dead, and he expressed confidence in intelligence reports from multiple sources that strongly suggest a high-level Saudi role in Khashoggi’s assassination.
Trump stopped short of saying the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was responsible for Khashoggi’s death. But he acknowledged that the allegations that the prince ordered the killing raised hard questions about the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia and had ignited one of the most serious foreign policy crises of his presidency.
“This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately,” Trump said in a brief interview with the New York Times in the Oval Office. “It’s not a positive. Not a positive.”
The shift in the president’s tone came shortly after a briefing by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and it signaled that after trying to defend the Saudi rulers, Trump was coming to terms with the far-reaching implications of the Khashoggi case and the likelihood that his closest ally in the Arab world was guilty of the grisly killing of a Saudi-born columnist for the Washington Post.
“Unless the miracle of all miracles happens, I would acknowledge that he’s dead,” Trump said. “That’s based on everything — intelligence coming from every
side.” Later, before leaving on a trip to Montana, he was asked what the consequences would be if Saudi Arabia’s culpability was established.
“Well, it’ll have to be very severe,” he said. “I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff.”
But it is not at all clear what Trump has in mind, given the central role that Saudi Arabia plays in the president’s strategy for the Middle East and the web of ties that have developed between the prince and the White House, particularly with Trump’s son-in-law and senior aide, Jared Kushner.
Kushner, Trump’s Middle East adviser, has been urging the president to stand by Crown Prince Mohammed, according to a person close to the White House and a former official with knowledge of the discussions. Kushner has argued that the crown prince can survive the outrage just as he has weathered past criticism.
In conversations with allies, the president has begun to distance himself from the crown prince, 33, saying he barely knows him. And he has played down the relationship that Kushner has cultivated with the Saudi heir.
Trump also signed off on a decision by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to pull out of an investor conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, convened by the crown prince — the highest-level American cancellation from a conference meant to showcase the Saudi kingdom’s progressive future.
Mnuchin announced his withdrawal after an Oval Office meeting that included Pompeo, who had just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia and Turkey, where he pressed officials about the fate of Khashoggi, who vanished after walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
Turkish officials said he was brutally killed and his body dismembered by a team of operatives sent from Saudi Arabia. In phone calls with Trump, Pompeo and other top U.S. officials, Crown Prince Mohammed and other Saudi leaders have denied any involvement. Pompeo said on Thursday that the United States would give the Saudis a few more days to conduct their investigation. He told reporters at the White House that the Saudi report would be “transparent for everyone to see, to ask questions about and to acquire.”
The rulers of Saudi Arabia are considering blaming a top intelligence official close to Prince Mohammed for the killing of Khashoggi, three people with knowledge of the Saudi plans said Thursday.
The plan to assign blame to Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, would be an extraordinary recognition of the magnitude of international backlash to hit the kingdom since the death of Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident.
Assiri, who previously served as the spokesman for the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen, is close enough to the crown prince to have easy access to his ear and has considerable authority to enlist lower ranking personnel in a mission.
Blaming Assiri could also provide a plausible explanation for the killing and help deflect blame from the crown prince, who U.S. intelligence agencies are increasingly convinced was behind Khashoggi’s disappearance.
Turkish officials have said they possess evidence showing that 15 Saudi agents dismembered and assassinated Khashoggi in the consulate. After two weeks of blanket denials and mounting pressure from Turkey and Washington, Saudi Arabia said it would conduct its own investigation to determine who was responsible.
U.S. intelligence agencies, however, are divided on the degree of responsibility that can be pinned on the prince — which is complicating an appraisal that they are compiling to present to the White House, according to a former senior administration official.
The CIA, whose analysts draw on an array of hard facts and subjective judgments, are increasingly convinced that Prince Mohammed is culpable in Khashoggi’s death.
But other agencies have stopped short of that conclusion. The National Security Agency, for example, collected communications intercepts of Saudi officials discussing a plan to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to a former senior U.S. official. But the intercepts do not reveal whether Prince Mohammed directly ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
During his conversation with the Times, Trump was uncharacteristically guarded. He declined repeated requests to discuss the chain of events that led to Khashoggi’s disappearance or the crown prince’s role.
In part, Trump acknowledged, that caution reflected his recognition that the Khashoggi case now posed a bigger challenge to him than other issues “because it’s taken on a bigger life than it would normally take on.”
Still, Trump emphasized the value of the alliance with Saudi Arabia to U.S. military contractors and other firms. “They’ve been a very good ally, and they’ve bought massive amounts of various things and investments in this country, which I appreciate,” he said.