Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Thursday with the Saudi Arabian prince who lied to senators about his role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
According to the CIA, Prince Khalid bin Salman helped persuade Khashoggi to visit the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where an elaborate operation was in place to have him killed and dismembered.
Pompeo, a former CIA director, hosted Prince Khalid in his headquarters at Foggy Bottom to discuss plans for “countering the Iranian regime’s destabilizing activities” in the Middle East. The meeting confirmed Prince Khalid’s return to the center of the alliance as deputy defense minister, just months after the former ambassador to the United States gave top lawmakers a transparently false explanation for Khashoggi’s disappearance in a Saudi diplomatic facility.
“The secretary congratulated the minister on his new role and looked forward to continuing to work together to advance the U.S.-Saudi partnership,” the State Department said.
Khashoggi, 59, a dissident journalist who lived in Virginia, regarded Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a tyrant and was working to organize a social media campaign within the country to criticize the young ruler’s human rights record. He was murdered by a kill team assembled by a close adviser of the crown prince.
Prince Khalid encouraged Khashoggi to go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a CIA assessment, to retrieve documents required for his intended marriage. When Khashoggi failed to rejoin his fiancee, who was waiting outside the facility, the prince insisted that Khashoggi’s “safety and security is a top priority for the Kingdom” and described himself as a “friend” of the columnist. Faced with demands that Saudi Arabia prove Khashoggi had left their custody alive, Prince Khalid told a top senator they had no video confirmation because their security cameras at the consulate would “only livestream” due to a technical malfunction.
“That was pretty hard for me to believe, and I shared that with him,” then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who retired at the end of 2018, told reporters at the time. “It feels very much like some nefarious activity has occurred by them.”
Prince Khalid, the crown prince’s younger brother, left Washington for Riyadh in the midst of the crisis, denying up until his departure the Saudi government played any role in Khashoggi’s disappearance. He returned to the United States in December when he sought to attend former President George H.W. Bush’s funeral. He missed the event due to a delay that left him “unable to comply with the protocol scheduling” that governs when diplomats arrive at a state funeral, according to Saudi officials, and went back home the following week.
Prince Khalid has denied any involvement in Khashoggi’s decision to make the fateful visit. But his obfuscations left him “zero credibility” with Corker and other senators, some of whom called for his expulsion from the United States and proposed that he should not be allowed back into the country after he departed voluntarily.
The murder threw a wrench in the U.S.-Saudi alliance just as President Trump’s administration has been trying to broker an Israeli-Arab partnership against Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has drawn sharp criticism from Capitol Hill for declining to sanction the crown prince for the killing, although the Saudi government maintains that Prince Mohammed did not know of the operation.
“Is there ever a time when we’re going to, as a country, insist, ‘You know what, we’re not going to do business as normal, and we are going to hold you to account’?” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., asked Pompeo at a hearing Wednesday.
The top U.S. diplomat replied by touting the sanctions imposed on some of the individuals who planned and carried out the execution and maintained that the administration is trying “to learn more facts” about the case.
“President Trump has made very clear that we will continue to work to identify those who are responsible for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and hold them accountable,” he told Connolly. “I stand by that today.”
