Trump says responsibility for Khashoggi killing may never be known
President’s comments come after reports CIA concluded crown prince gave the order
President Donald Trump said he had seen no evidence that the killing of Jamal Khashoggi had been ordered by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, opening up the prospect of a new rift with his intelligence services.
The US president’s comments came amid media reports that the CIA had concluded responsibility for the killing lay with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.
“Who can really know?” Mr Trump said on Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox.
Prince Mohammed had told him as many as five times — including as recently as a few days ago — that he had not been involved, the president said, and he suggested there was no recourse to finding out whether the crown prince was lying.
“He told me that he had nothing to do with it,” Mr Trump said, adding that “many people” also said the crown prince had no knowledge of the killing. “Will anybody really know?”
The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN have reported the CIA’s findings, citing unnamed officials.
The agency’s conclusion was based on Prince Mohammed’s leadership role in the country and the belief that no operation against Khashoggi, a veteran journalist, could have been authorised without the heir apparent’s consent. The assessment is the first to explicitly link the 33-year-old royal to the killing, which has triggered Riyadh’s biggest diplomatic crisis since the September 11 attacks of 2001 on the US.
But the US State Department said this weekend that it had not reached a final conclusion on who was responsible for the Khashoggi killing in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.
In a statement that emphasised the important strategic relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, the State Department on Saturday said the administration was determined to hold those responsible for the killing of the journalist responsible, but “recent reports indicating that the US government has made a final conclusion are inaccurate”.
Mr Trump said afterwards that he expected to get “a very full report” by Tuesday.
In the Fox interview on Sunday, the president reiterated that he wanted to maintain Saudi Arabia as an ally. “We do have an ally and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good.”
Mr Trump acknowledged for the first time that his White House had the tape capturing the sounds of Khashoggi’s murder, but that he himself had chosen not to listen to it.
“I don’t want to hear the tape,” Mr Trump said. “It’s a suffering tape. It’s a terrible tape . . . It was very violent, very vicious and terrible.”
Mr Trump was heavily criticised earlier this year for his refusal, during a joint press conference with the Russian president Vladimir Putin, to back US intelligence services’ conclusion that Moscow had worked to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent ally of the president, dismissed the notion that the crown prince was somehow not involved in Khashoggi’s death.
“If you know anything about Saudi Arabia, anything about MbS, the fact that he didn’t know about it is impossible for me to believe . . .[Saudi Arabia] is an important ally, but when it comes to the crown prince, he’s irrational, he’s unhinged, and I think he’s done a lot of damage to the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia,” Mr Graham told Meet the Press.
The media reports about the CIA’s information in the Khashoggi case said there was no direct evidence linking Prince Mohammed, who has consolidated his power over the kingdom since being appointed crown prince last year, to the killing. But its conclusions are likely to increase scrutiny of the Trump administration’s response to the October 2 murder of Khashoggi, who was one of the Middle East’s most prominent journalists and was living in self-exile in the US.
Prince Mohammed has denied any knowledge of Khashoggi’s killing and Riyadh has blamed the journalist’s death on a rogue operation. Khashoggi was forcibly restrained, drugged and his body dismembered in the consulate in Istanbul after a 15-man team flew into Turkey to negotiate his return to the kingdom, according to a Saudi investigation.
He died of an overdose of a sedative, Saudi authorities said on Thursday. They added that Prince Mohammed was not aware of the operation and was given a misleading report about what happened in the consulate.
The Washington Post said the CIA examined multiple intelligence sources, including an alleged phone call between Prince Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince’s brother who is Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington, and Khashoggi. The paper said Prince Khalid told Khashoggi he should go to the consulate, where the journalist was picking up documents to enable him to marry his Turkish fiancée, and assured him of his safety.
There was no suggestion that Prince Khalid knew the journalist would be killed in the diplomatic mission.
Prince Khalid said on Twitter that the last contact he had with Khashoggi was via text on October 26 2017.
“I never talked to him by phone and certainly never suggested he go to Turkey for any reason. I ask the US government to release any information regarding this claim,” he said.
The Saudi embassy in Washington said of the CIA claims that the “purported assessment is false”.
“We have and continue to hear various theories without seeing the primary basis for these speculations,” it said.
Prince Mohammed has developed strong ties to the White House over the past two years and was considered a key partner in the region, particularly in relation to efforts to counter Iran’s influence in the Middle East.
Washington this week imposed sanctions on 17 Saudis, including Saud al-Qahtani, one of Prince Mohammed’s closest advisers, over the murder, but did not refer to the crown prince.
Turkey has said it was a pre-meditated killing ordered by the highest levels of the Saudi government. It has provided western governments, including the US, with audio recordings connected to the murder.
Mike Pence, the US vice-president, told reporters on a trip to Papua New Guinea, that he could not comment on classified information.
“The murder of Jamal Khashoggi was an atrocity. It was also an affront to a free and independent press and the United States is determined to hold all of those accountable who are responsible for that murder,” he said.
But he added that Washington wanted to preserve its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter and Washington’s most important Arab ally, Reuters reported.
Saudi authorities said this week they were seeking the death penalty for five of 11 suspects charged with the killing. The Saudi state prosecutor did not name those involved in the killing, but said the operation had been ordered by the deputy intelligence chief, Ahmed Assiri.
He and Mr Qahtani, both close confidantes of the crown prince, were sacked last month in relation to the killing.
When it announced the sanctions last week, the US Treasury said Mr Qahtani “was part of the planning and execution of the operation that led to the killing”. It said the murder was “co-ordinated and executed by his subordinate Maher Mutreb and involved participation of at least 14 other Saudi government officials”.