President Donald Trump said he is passing responsibility to Congress for responding to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and he criticized the conflicting accounts from Saudi Arabia afterward as “one of the worst” cover-ups in history.
“In terms of what we ultimately do I’m going to leave it very much — in conjunction with me — up to Congress,” Trump told reporters Tuesday in the Oval Office. He added that he wants to receive a bipartisan recommendation on penalties.
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo later said the US is moving against individuals it suspects were involved in the killing, without identifying their names or nationalities.
The US is revoking or blocking visas for 21 suspects in the incident, according to State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert.
Pompeo said the US is also reviewing the possibility of sanctions against those people.
“These penalties will not be the last word,” Pompeo told reporters at the State Department Tuesday.
“We’ve learned a lot over the past few days” and hope to learn a great deal more over next 2-3 days, Pompeo added.
The crisis over the Khashoggi killing continued for a third week as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan laid out his case Tuesday for why he believes Khashoggi’s death was premeditated and not the result of an interrogation or interview gone awry.
The same day, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman showed up at a global investment summit in Riyadh that has seen its luster diminished as details of the killing — and Saudi responsibility — prompted a number of high profile leaders to skip the gathering.
Trump on Tuesday offered some additional criticism of the Oct. 2 killing and Saudi Arabia’s response to it, saying that it was “a very bad original concept.”
“It was carried out poorly,” Trump added. “And the cover-up was one of the worst in the history of cover-ups.”
Trump said of the attack on the journalist that “whoever thought of that idea, I think, is in big trouble.”
And in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Tuesday evening, the president, asked about Prince Mohammed’s possible involvement in the killing, said, “he’s running things and so if anybody were going to be, it would be him.”
Trump also told the newspaper that he didn’t think the Saudi ruler, King Salman, knew that Khashoggi was a target.
Source: Bloomberg
