Trump: Prince’s role in death a mystery
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denied to him perhaps five times any role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the U.S. may never know whether he was involved.
“Well, will anybody really know? All right, will anybody really know?” Mr. Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Several news organizations including The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that the CIA concluded that the crown prince ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s assassination in Istanbul last month, contradicting the Saudi government’s claim that he wasn’t involved. CIA officials have high confidence in their conclusion, which is based on multiple sources of intelligence, the Post reported.
Mr. Trump said Saturday that the U.S. will issue a “very full report” on the killing by Tuesday. But Mr. Trump denied that the CIA has made a judgment, saying Saturday that the intelligence agency hasn’t “assessed anything yet. It’s too early. That was a very premature report.”
Still, Mr. Trump said, Mohammed “did certainly have people that were reasonably close to him that were probably involved.”
Mr. Trump said he has been briefed on a recording of the killing that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave the U.S. government, but he didn’t want to listen to it “because it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape.”
“I know everything that went on in the tape without having to hear it,” Mr. Trump said. “It was very violent, very vicious and terrible.”
Some U.S. lawmakers have demanded tougher action against Saudi Arabia for Mr. Khashoggi’s death. The Trump administration last week announced sanctions against 17 Saudi officials implicated in the killing, though not the crown prince. Critics in Congress called the sanctions insufficient.
Mr. Trump defended the U.S. response as “very heavy sanctions, massive sanctions on a large group of people from Saudi Arabia.”
But he suggested he was wary of damaging the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
“We do have an ally, and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good,” Mr. Trump said.