Saudi Arabian officials “reiterated their commitment” to punishing the individuals responsible for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said while traveling in the Arab state.
“Our expectations have been clear from early on: Every single person who has responsibility for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi needs to be held accountable,” Pompeo said following discussions with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “They both acknowledged that that accountability needed to take place.”
With members of Congress in both parties blaming the crown prince himself for the killing, Pompeo has faced domestic pressure to punish the Saudi scion, while trying to preserve the national security priorities that organize the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
“They still are working through their fact-finding process,” Pompeo said. “You should know that the United States continues to work through its fact-finding process as well. That is, our efforts to uncover the facts surrounding this. And then, consistent with the president’s commitment to hold everyone accountable, we continue inside the United States government to do that as well.”
Pompeo declined to comment on a CIA assessment that reportedly blamed the crown prince for Khashoggi’s death, although top senators have scoffed at the idea of the Saudi leader initiating “a fact-finding process” in response to the murder.
“You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MbS,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., using the acronym for the crown prince, said following a December briefing with the CIA.
The Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on 17 individuals involved in the murder, including the members of the kill team who ambushed Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi was a prominent international critic of the crown prince who was secretly communicating with other Saudi dissidents about how to form a “swarm of bees” on Twitter who could criticize the young leader.
“[Jamal] believed that MBS is the issue, is the problem and he said this kid should be stopped,” Khashoggi’s associate in Canada, Omar Abdulaziz, told CNN.
The murder sparked discussion in U.S. quarters of sanctioning the crown prince or even calling for his ouster. “Saudi Arabia, if you’re listening, there are a lot of good people you can choose, but MBS has tainted your country and tainted himself,” Graham put it during a “Fox & Friends” interview in October.
Pompeo has stressed throughout the process the need to protect common national security interests, particularly as the U.S. and Saudi Arabia partner to counteract an aggressive Iranian regime.
“And where we’re working closely together and being successful, we want to redouble our efforts, and where friends think the other one is falling short, I was very clear and candid about those things where America is not satisfied, where they’re not meeting our expectations,” he told reporters. “And they — and they appreciate that.”
