Administration cites emergency to sell arms to Saudis, UAE, others
WASHINGTON» Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified lawmakers Friday that President Donald Trump is invoking his emergency authority to sidestep Congress and complete 22 arms deals that would benefit Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries, despite lawmakers’ objections to the transactions.
Republicans and Democrats urged the Trump administration this week not to take the rare step of exploiting a legal window to push through deals, worth about $8 billion, according to congressional aides, that lawmakers have blocked from being finalized.
Pompeo’s notification letters effectively give the Trump administration a green light to conclude the sale and transfer of bombs, missile systems, semiautomatic rifles, drones, repair and maintenance services to aid the Saudi air fleet, and a controversial sale of precision-guided munitions that lawmakers fear Saudi Arabia may use against civilians in Yemen’s civil war.
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. — the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had been blocking the precision-guided munitions sale — said in a statement Friday that Trump had “failed once again to prioritize our long term national security interests or stand up for human rights, and instead is granting favors to authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia.”
In a statement, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. James Risch, RIdaho, said that he was “reviewing and analyzing the legal justification for this action and the associated implications.”
Traditionally, the administration must notify Congress when it contemplates a new arms sale, giving lawmakers the opportunity to review deals and block those they find objectionable. In each of his letters notifying lawmakers of the decision, Pompeo stated that he had “determined that an emergency exists which requires the proposed sale in the national security interest of the United States and thus, waives the congressional review requirements” — without noting the nature of the emergency or offering details about it. In his letters, he added that the government had “taken into account political, military, economic, human rights and arms control considerations.”
But lawmakers frequently have questioned the Trump administration’s approach to national security policy and its track record on human rights. In particular, Trump and Congress have long been at odds over his unapologetic embrace of Saudi leaders, despite U.S. intelligence showing that the crown prince was behind the October 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was also a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.