Trump backs Saudi crown prince

President shuns CIA finding that killing order came from top

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, under pressure from lawmakers to punish Saudi Arabia in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, sided Sunday with the kingdom’s de facto ruler, distancing himself from reported U.S. intelligence assessments that the crown prince had ordered the assassination.

In an interview aired on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump also said he had decided to skip listening to a “very vicious and terrible” audio recording of the Oct. 2 slaying of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

He told Fox interviewer Chris Wallace, “It’s a suffering tape. It’s a terrible tape. I’ve been fully briefed on it. There’s no reason for me to hear it,” he said.

Saudi Arabia has acknowledged that its agents killed Khashoggi, and officials there have said they will seek the death penalty against five Saudis involved. But they have denied that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had any advance knowledge of the plan.

Those denials have been discounted by U.S. officials as well as by other Western governments. The CIA has concluded with “high confidence” that the crown prince authorized last month’s premeditated killing of the 59-year-old writer, according to multiple news reports.

The president previously accused the Saudis of “one of the worst cover-ups” in the death of Khashoggi, a Virginia resident who wrote opinion columns for The Washington Post. But in recent days, he has swung back to defending the kingdom’s rulers, suggesting that the evidence did not definitely establish the crown prince’s culpability.

“Will anybody really know?” Trump asked in the Fox News interview. He said the crown prince had told him “maybe five times … as recently as a few days ago” that he had played no role in the killing and that “many people now say that he had no knowledge.”