Bipartisan Senate group wants to formally blame Saudi prince for journalist’s killing
Washington — A bipartisan group of senators filed a resolution Wednesday to condemn Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, directly challenging President Donald Trump to do the same.
“This resolution — without equivocation — definitively states that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was complicit in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi and has been a wrecking ball to the region jeopardizing our national security interests on multiple fronts,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement accompanying the release of the resolution. “It will be up to Saudi Arabia as to how to deal with this matter. But it is up to the United States to firmly stand for who we are and what we believe.”
The resolution put forward by Graham and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who are expected to lead the Judiciary Committee together next year, comes just one day after CIA Director Gina Haspel briefed leading senators about the details of the agency’s assessment that Mohammed ordered and monitored the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Senators emerged from that closed-door briefing furious not only with Saudi Arabia, but Trump as well, for dismissing the heft of the CIA’s findings.
“You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MBS and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi,” Graham said following the briefing, referring to Mohammed by his initials. He added that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who briefed senators last week, were at best being “good soldiers” and at worst were “in the pocket of Saudi Arabia” for presenting the evidence of Mohammed’s involvement as inconclusive.
The release of the resolution condemning Mohammed also comes as the Senate is preparing to move ahead with debate on a resolution to curtail U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. Though the Yemen resolution does not directly address Khashoggi’s murder, its popularity is a sign of how strained the United States’ patience with Saudi Arabia is on multiple fronts, including its role in worsening the civilian cost of the war in Yemen.