House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff wrote a letter to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell asking that he declassify part of a report on the killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
The Thursday letter seeks to make public further details of Khashoggi’s death and those who were responsible for it. Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, was killed after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.
Khashoggi was a fierce critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who the CIA determined ordered the killing, despite denials from Saudi Arabia.
In the letter to Grenell, the United States Ambassador to Germany who was appointed last week as acting spy chief, Schiff argued part of the classified report on Khashoggi’s death that was given to the House Intelligence Committee should be made public with redactions in order to “fulfill Congress’s requirement” to release an unclassified report on the matter, as laid out in the Intelligence Authorization Act and the National Defense Authorization Act.
“After reviewing the classified annex, the Committee believes that the annex could be declassified with appropriate redactions that should not alter or obscure in any way the Intelligence Community’s determinations, presentation of evidence, or identification of relevant persons, as required by law,” Schiff wrote.
The California Democrat said that failure to declassify the documents “could give rise to concerns that [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is using the classification process impermissibly in order to shield information of intense public interest from public release.”
The NDAA/IAA, passed in December, gave ODNI 30 days to produce an unclassified report on the individuals responsible for Khashoggi’s killing.
— Olivia Gazis (@Olivia_Gazis) February 27, 2020
Saudi authorities have said the dissident’s death was part of a “rogue” plot and sentenced five people, who have not been named, to death. Three others were sentenced to 24-year terms, and the two most senior officials allegedly involved were cleared because of “insufficient evidence.”
