Senators: Crown prince complicit
Briefing with director of CIA solidifies lawmakers’ thoughts on Khashoggi death
WASHINGTON — Senators emerged from a closeddoor briefing with the CIA director Tuesday and accused the Saudi crown prince of complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In some of their strongest statements to date, lawmakers said evidence presented by the U.S. spy agency overwhelmingly pointed to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the assassination.
“There’s not a smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., referring to the bone saw that investigators believe was used to dismember Khashoggi after he was killed by a team of Saudi agents inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul in October.
Graham made clear that the crown prince’s involvement in the killing had caused a breach in the U.S.Saudi relationship, and said the United States should come down on the government in Riyadh like “a ton of bricks.”
He said he could no longer support arms sales to the Saudis as long as Mohammed was in charge.
“Saudi Arabia’s a strategic ally, and the relationship is worth saving — but not at all costs,” Graham said.
The Senate overwhelmingly voted last week to move forward on a resolution curtailing U.S. backing for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
It’s unclear whether or how that resolution will move forward. The vote last week allowed the Senate to debate the measure, which could happen as soon as next week, but senators are still in negotiations on whether to amend it and what it should say.
The accusations by Graham and other lawmakers were all the more striking because they followed a briefing from CIA Director Gina Haspel, who had come to lay out the agency’s classified assessment, based on multiple sources of intelligence, that Mohammed likely ordered the killing of Khashoggi, whowas a Washington Post contributing columnist.
“This just confirmed what I thought all along: This all leads up to the crown prince,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. “It would defy logic to think” someone other than Mohammed was responsible, Shelby said, noting that members of the prince’s own royal guard are believed to have been part of the team that killed Khashoggi.
President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, have insisted that no single piece of evidence irrefutably links Mohammed to the killing.
But the senators, in effect, said that doesn’t matter, because the evidence they heard convinced them beyond the shadow of a doubt.
“If the crown prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes,” said Sen. Bob Corker, RTenn., the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations.
Graham leveled sharp criticism at Pompeo and Mattis.
“I think Secretary Pompeo and Mattis are following the lead of the president,” Graham said, adding that one would “have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion” that Mohammed was “intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi.”
“It is zero chance, zero, that this happened in such an organized fashion without the crown prince,” Graham continued, echoing one of the CIA’s central conclusions that no operation so brazen as the killing of a prominent critic of the royal family on foreign soil could have happened without the knowledge of the crown prince, whois a micromanager and exercises total control over the government.
“The reason they don’t draw the conclusion that he’s complicit is because the administration doesn’t want to go down that road — not because there’s not evidence to suggest it,” Graham said.
“I would imagine if they were in a Democratic administration I would be all over them for being in the pocket of Saudi Arabia,” Grahamsaid of the secretaries, “but since I have such respect for them, I am going to assume that they are being good soldiers. ... I would really question somebody’s judgment if they couldn’t figure this out.”
Trump has said the potential value of arms sales to the Saudis, as well as the coun- try’s strategic check on Iran, are too important to jeopardize over the killing of a journalist, an act that he has condemned.
Haspel, who was absent last week from an all-senators briefing with Pompeo andMattis, hadfaced mounting pressure to speak to lawmakers and more fully explain the CIA’s findings. Lawmakers complained that the Trump administration was depriving Congress of key information about the killing by refusing to order Haspel to go to Capitol Hill and explain the CIA’s assessment.
Her closed-door appearance Tuesday was for a select number of senior lawmakers, including Senate leaders and the heads of national security committees with an interest in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which the United States supports, andtheintelligence on Khashoggi’s killing, according to multiple people familiar with the plans.
Associated Press contributed.