Retiring lame duck Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a tweet on Saturday that “Everything points to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, MBs, ordering @washingtonpost journalist Jamal #Khashoggi’s killing.”
Everything points to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, MbS, ordering @washingtonpost journalist Jamal #Khashoggi‘s killing. The Trump administration should make a credible determination of responsibility before MbS executes the men who apparently carried out his orders.
— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) November 17, 2018
“The Trump administration should make a credible determination of responsibility before MbS executes the men who apparently carried out his orders,” Corker continued.
The murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey last month has created a difficult foreign policy problem for the Trump administration, which has relied upon strengthened relationships with Saudi Arabia to hold the threat posed by Iran to stability in the Middle East in check.
Corker’s tweet on Saturday expressed a view similar to the one taken by the Washington Post editorial board, which opined on Saturday that “Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is brazenly seeking to lie his way out of accountability for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — and the Trump administration is helping him do so.” the Washington Post editorial board opined on Saturday:
On Thursday, a state prosecutor in Riyadh advanced an account of the killing blatantly at odds with established facts, excusing the crown prince from all blame. Rather than reject this contemptible coverup, President Trump, who had pledged to “get to the bottom” of the case, went along with it. The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on 17 mostly low-level suspects already implicated by the Saudis, while excusing both Mohammed bin Salman and top intelligence officials.
Now we learn that Mr. Trump backed the Saudi leader despite a conclusion by the CIA that the prince was, in fact, responsible for ordering Khashoggi’s assassination. The Post reports that intelligence officials have “high confidence” in their assessment and have briefed the president on their evidence, which includes an audio recording of the killing and phone calls by the leader of the kill team as well as the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Mr. Trump nevertheless has refused to accept Mohammed bin Salman’s responsibility, perhaps because that would mean acknowledging that the White House’s outsize bet on the 33-year-old prince as a strategic ally was badly mistaken.
In an exclusive interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday President Trump said “that the crown prince, known informally as “MbS,” had told him “maybe five times” that he had no involvement in Khashoggi’s death.”
When Wallace asked what Trump would do if he determines that the crown prince has lied to him, Trump said: “Will anybody really know?”
He did have, certainly, people that were reasonably close to him and close to him that were probably involved,” the president added. “You saw we put on very heavy sanctions, massive sanctions on a large group of people from Saudi Arabia. But at the same time, we do have an ally and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.”
This past week, the administration penalized 17 Saudi officials for their alleged role in the killing. However, lawmakers have called on the administration to curtail arms sales to Saudi Arabia or take other harsher punitive measures.
Intelligence officials have been providing information to Trump for weeks about the death, and he was briefed again by phone Saturday by CIA Director Gina Haspel and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as he flew to California to survey damage from wildfires in that state. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders provided no details of his call but said the president has confidence in the CIA.
Corker has been a frequent critic of President Trump, and has not ruled out challenging him in the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.
Bob, it’s over. The sooner you go home the sooner the state can get to healing from your disastrous stay in the Senate. You are done. Stop. Go home.
My imitation of liddle bobby:”LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME–REALLY, I’M IMPORTANT, PLEASE LOOK”…go away
Please stop, Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi, not a journalist. He was a truly bad guy. What we have here is bad guys killing bad guys. This is not a story and nothing the US should be remotely involved in.
Hey Bob, how about you shed some light on who’s to blame for the four Americans killed in Benghazi? This is just another smoke show by the left, looking to entangle Trump in minutia and keep him from “draining the swamp, and locking up the true criminals!
Bob Corker, wrong again—I think that Corker is just trying to curry favor with the WaPo and other leftist U.S. media which knows better (i.e., more really, really ‘big’ FAKE news). To try to simplify what needs to be said, see FRONTPAGE MAG, an article by Daniel Greenfield, dated 10-15-18, entitled Jamal Khashoggi: The Media Fights for a Muslim Brotherhood Pal of Osama Bin Laden—The Terrorist Truth Behind the Media Lies.
Khashoggi was a WaPo ‘journalist’ who himself was a Saudi who opposed the Saudi Royal Family and the Saudi Regime. Khashoggi was an apologist and a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, a friend from boyhood of Osama Bin Laden, a supporter of (i.e., a jihadi propagandist for) the Taliban and other Islamist terrorists. Khashoggi knew that he was ‘playing with fire’ when he sided with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against the Saudi Regime. Nevertheless, Khashoggi ‘rolled the dice’ but ‘came up short.’ His failure cost him his life. This is way that politics is ‘played’ in the Middle East. Muslims there have been happily slaughtering each other for centuries. And the WaPo knew all of this, and has omitted much of it from its reporting of the story (i.e., dare anyone say the term, FAKE news). Again, for starters, read the article referenced above.