1. Donald Trump keeps saying that he wants more proof before condemning outright the Saudis for killing, beheading, and dismembering Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. But the president can’t hold that tenuous position for long.
2. For one thing, the US had been alerted, according to the Wall Street Journal. It reported Wednesday that Turkey had “shared evidence in recent days, including the details of an audio recording, with both the US and Saudi Arabia to support their conclusion.”
3. It said Khashoggi “wasn’t interrogated.” He was seized immediately on entering the building. The implication is that his murder was premeditated. wsj.com/articles/pompe…
4. All of this appears to have taken place before the president told the AP that:
“I think we have to find out what happened first.” apnews.com/6ef4045b710b41…
“I think we have to find out what happened first.” apnews.com/6ef4045b710b41…
5. For another, American spy agencies are increasingly convinced that the 15 killers, including the autopsy specialist who wore earphones to cover up the sound of his cutting Khashoggi to pieces, were linked to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The 33 year old runs the Kingdom.
6. US and European intelligence agencies have not found direct evidence of the prince’s involvement, nor have they found evidence that he ordered Khashoggi’s death. But they do have circumstantial evidence,
7. such as intercepts showing Saudi officials planning to detain Khashoggi. Then there’s this fact: "Officials have also said the prince’s complete control over the security services makes it highly unlikely that an operation would have been undertaken without his knowledge."
8. The Post reported yesterday that US and Saudi officials are trying to find a way for the kingdom to take some responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder without implicating directly the young prince who appears to have ordered it.
9. This isn’t the first time the US has been mired in the morally intolerable, but as Sean Illing noted, this might be the first time it’s been involved in “a high profile murder cover up.”
10. That matters, politically. War crimes and human rights atrocities tend to be too abstract to be coherent. While the war in Yemen is a textbook humanitarian disaster, it’s not getting attention here in the states.
11. But the US media is unlikely to let go of one man’s death, under a cloud of doubt, told in grisly detail. “The death of one man is a tragedy,” Josef Stalin is alleged to have said. “The death of millions is a statistic.”
12. It’s in this context that the intel community is preparing an assessment. Depending on its conclusions, the effort has the makings of what happened over the summer in Helsinki.
13. That’s when the president of the United States took the word of a foreign adversary over that of men and women dedicated to serving and protecting the US. James Comey, whom Trump fired, urged voters to vote for Democrats in the fall.
14. “All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall,” Comey said. “Policy differences don’t matter right now. History has its eyes on us.”
15. The president’s handlers are no doubt prepared to prevent as much as possible a repeat of Helsinki. For some time afterward that, the media was full of stories denouncing the president & asking whether he had committed treason. Republicans were backpedaling wildly for days.
16. As the midterms approach, this is something Republicans are keen to avoid, as some in the Senate are seeing some breathing room created by the confirmation Brett Kavanaugh (the House is a different matter) and
17. they do not want to spend their limited time dancing on the line between loyalty to the president and loyalty to the country. Trump has a habit of getting himself, & his party, in trouble when it comes to *any* foreign relations. That goes double for an internat'l crisis.
18. Will they succeed? Perhaps, but history isn’t on their side. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Moreover, as I argued yesterday, he’s deeply entangled in the kingdom, having been on the receiving end of tens of millions of dollars in deals.
19. We don’t know the extent to which Trump is tied up in Saudi interests. He did not ever release his tax returns. But as @JohnCassidy noted, the president’s go-to strategy, when he perceives that his interests are in peril, is to say something outrageous.
20. That could mean siding with premeditated murder right before the midterms.
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