I can’t imagine the anguish of Jamal Khashoggi’s children hearing the callous comment from John Bolton, the national-security adviser, about the audiotape of the Saudi journalist’s murder, last month, in Istanbul. “No, I haven’t listened to it, and I guess I should ask you, why do you think I should?” Bolton told reporters, on Tuesday. “Unless you speak Arabic, what are you going to get from it, really?”
Turkish intelligence captured the recording in apparently routine electronic monitoring of conversations inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It reportedly includes Khashoggi’s anguished struggle against a hit squad dispatched from Riyadh, his subsequent execution, the sounds of dismembering his body, and comments by his executioners as they did it all. It is the most vivid proof of a travesty that has captivated the world since October 2nd. After the international uproar erupted, the Trump Administration flew Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, to Turkey to hear it. Bolton, who is closest to President Trump on foreign policy, was asked if he had access to an interpreter to explain the words accompanying the obvious sounds. “I mean, if they were speaking Korean, I wouldn’t learn any more from it, either,” he said.
Congress has been outraged over the Administration’s response to the Khashoggi murder, especially Trump’s willingness to give the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a pass. “I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted recently. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the Hill to explain U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia—in the context of the Khashoggi murder—and U.S. military support propping up the kingdom’s brutal four-year war in Yemen. Moves to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder by curtailing its war have rapidly gained momentum in recent weeks. Mysteriously missing from the briefing, however, was Haspel.
A day earlier, Bolton had been asked if the White House was blocking Haspel from sharing information with Congress on what happened to Khashoggi. “No,” Bolton countered on Tuesday. “Certainly not.”
Several senators—Republicans and Democrats—challenged his claim. It got worse on Wednesday. Behind closed doors, Pompeo and Mattis reportedly told the assembled senators that the decision about who should brief was made by others. “We were told during this briefing that it was at the direction of the White House that she not attend,” Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, told reporters afterward. “I cannot recall a briefing on such a sensitive nature where we have been denied access to the intelligence agencies of the United States.”
The C.I.A. later issued a statement denying that Haspel had been blocked from the briefing. “The notion that anyone told Director Haspel not to attend today’s briefing is false,” a spokesman, Timothy Barrett, said. The C.I.A. response kind of fudged the issue. The White House may not have told Haspel not to go, but it also didn’t invite her to accompany Pompeo and Mattis, even though she has, by far, the most firsthand intelligence about the Saudi killing.
For many on the Hill, the Administration’s failure to come clean looks increasingly like a U.S. coverup of Saudi Arabia’s already clumsy coverup about who was ultimately responsible for Khashoggi’s assassination. “Not having Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, at this briefing is a coverup to a critical question that the members of the Senate have as to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “It’s outrageous that the Senate can be stonewalled from hearing from the C.I.A. director.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was furious. He vowed not to vote on any key legislation pushed by the White House—including government-funding bills and judicial nominations—until Haspel fully and candidly briefs Congress on the Khashoggi assassination. “I’m not going to blow past this,” he told reporters. “I’m talking about any key vote. Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the C.I.A.” His threat is real. A government-funding bill is due to be voted on next week; without its passage, the government could be shut down.
The briefing by Pompeo and Mattis only deepened congressional skepticism about a coverup. It also exposed a gap within the Administration over the truth about why Khashoggi was murdered.
Earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that the crown prince, who is the kingdom’s de-facto ruler, orchestrated the killing. Several members of the hit squad worked closely with M.B.S., as he is known. The Turkish government leaked, then confirmed, so many specifics that the Saudi government finally had to abandon the claim that Khashoggi had walked out of the consulate soon after he entered. It admitted he was missing. It later admitted he had died inside the consulate. And, finally, they admitted the murder had been carried out by Saudi-government employees, although purportedly not under the crown prince’s orders. (Eight weeks after the Washington Post columnist’s murder, the Saudis still feign ignorance about where Khashoggi’s body, or the bits of it, was dumped.)
But on Wednesday, Pompeo, who was Haspel’s predecessor at the C.I.A., never even mentioned Khashoggi’s name in his opening remarks. He instead digressed from the event that has galvanized Congress to frame Riyadh’s importance in terms of countering Tehran. “Degrading ties with Saudi Arabia would be a grave mistake for U.S. national security,” he said. U.S. military exports help the kingdom deter regional rivals. He even dismissed the impact of U.S. bombs, warplanes, and intelligence on the Saudis’ four-year war in Yemen, which has produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the twenty-first century. “The suffering in Yemen grieves me,” Pompeo said, “but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot worse.”
After the briefing, he denied that the United States had concluded M.B.S. had orchestrated the Khashoggi execution. “I do believe I’ve read every piece of intelligence,” he told reporters. “Unless it’s come in in the last few hours, I think I have read it all. There is no direct reporting connecting the crown prince to the order to murder Jamal Khashoggi. And that’s all I can say in an unclassified setting.”
Separately, Mattis concurred. “We have no smoking gun that the crown prince was involved,” he told reporters at the Pentagon. “Not the intelligence community or anyone else. There is no smoking gun.”
The U.S. response to Khashoggi’s death—and all the issues it has put on the table—is now the one issue on which the majority of Republicans and Democrats in deeply divided Washington come together. Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post columnist, posed the pivotal question: “If the evidence is not definitive, why not let Haspel go to Capitol Hill?” She charged that Trump “is lying about the evidence and the senators know it. Allowing him to wish away facts is a terrible precedent to set when it comes to a president whose relationship with both evidence and reality is slight.” She urged Haspel to resign “to preserve what dignity and integrity she has.”
In a stunning rebuke after the Hill briefing, almost two-thirds of the Senate voted to forward legislation ending U.S. military support for the Saudi war in Yemen. It was only the first step. But the measure is likely to sustain support. And there may now be others. “I found their briefing today to be lacking,” Corker said in a floor speech. “I found that in substance we’re not doing those things that we should be doing to appropriately balance our relationship with Saudi Arabia between our American interests and our American values.”
Graham was blunter. “I’m pissed,” he told reporters. “The way the Administration has handled it is not acceptable.” Among Senate Republicans, this is only the second time they have defied the President on foreign-policy matters. The other was imposing sanctions on Russia.
The Khashoggi saga has mobilized momentum on issues of war and peace, individual rights and justice, and U.S. foreign policy that the Saudi killers—and their backers—almost certainly never envisioned. Perhaps the prospect that his death will have consequences is some small comfort to Khashoggi’s children.
