Throughout various levels of establishment Washington, people are shaking their heads at the president’s equivocation and amelioration. “Certainly from where I sit, it is discouraging to see the administration seemingly subordinate our values to other interests in such an egregious case,” one State Department official lamented.
Pompeo photographed leaving Riyadh after meeting with Crown Prince bin Salman and Saudi officals in an attempt to investigate the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 17, 2018.
By Leah Millis/AFP/Getty Images.
It was, to be sure, a discomfiting scene: there was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo amiably clutching the hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an ornate meeting room in Riyadh a mere fortnight after Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi had gone missing. The steady drumbeat of revelations had been perplexing and damning and almost inconceivable: the video evidence of Khashoggi entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; the reports of a 15-person Saudi “kill” team landing in the city, including a so-called bone-saw expert; and Donald Trump’s myriad equivocations. Yet as evidence increasingly suggested a connection between M.B.S. and the presumed murder, Pompeo’s visit seemed like the latest assault to diplomacy. Despite what should have been a somber, mordant affair, he looked like Ed McMahon about to present an oversize check before the camera. (On Friday night, the Saudis conceded what everyone had long known: Khashoggi was dead.)
Back in Washington, members of the diplomatic and intelligence community that I spoke with were gobsmacked. While Axios has reported that Pompeo uttered harsh words beneath his avuncular civility, many found the optics insurmountable. “The grip and grin sort of stunned people who saw it,” a congressional aide told me. “There is a lack of confidence that he is doing everything in his power to actually get the truth in this case.” Among diplomatic veterans, Pompeo’s affable demeanor was a real misstep. “Pompeo did not handle this well,” a former high-ranking State Department official sighed. “I don’t think it would have been difficult to be more somber in meetings and more nuanced in comments afterward.” As one State department official lamented to me, “Certainly from where I sit, it is discouraging to see the administration seemingly subordinate our values to other interests in such an egregious case.”
Since reports of Khashoggi’s disappearance first began to circulate, Trump has signaled that the death of one journalist—a citizen of Saudi Arabia, not the United States—was not worth rupturing the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Last week, the president said it would be a “very tough pill to swallow for our country” if the kingdom was found to be responsible for the assumed killing of Khashoggi, and a $110 billion U.S. arms sales deal with Saudi Arabia was correspondingly imperiled. And despite mounting evidence that M.B.S. was involved, Trump suggested as recently as Monday that “rogue killers” could have been behind the hit. “I have never seen anything quite like that, with the president playing the role of defense lawyer to someone who appears to have murdered a U.S. resident overseas in flagrant violation of every diplomatic norm,” Daniel Benaim, who served as a Middle East adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, told me. “Not to even pretend to have an interest in the rule of law, and to jump straight to the part where you whitewash others’ crimes, is a gross abdication of American values.”
“The president was making excuses for the Saudis. The president, normally, would never do that,” said another former high-ranking State Department official, who served in the Middle East. Instead, this source explained, a typical president would stress the seriousness of the situation, praise Khashoggi and the free press, call for an investigation—possibly by the United Nations—and rally U.S. allies to consolidate intelligence. By no means would he or she have expressed concerns that the arms agreement could become collateral. “There would be no indication one way or the other of what we were going to be doing,” they said.
It’s not hyperbole to suggest that the Trump administration’s handling of the M.B.S. matter could well define the second half of the president’s term. The U.S.-Saudi relationship impacts everything, on a meta level, from oil prices to the Middle East peace puzzle. More specifically, Saudi Arabia has used its vast sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, to intertwine itself with the American financial community—Saudi money flows through Uber, JPMorgan Chase, Blackstone, Snap, and, until recently, William Morris Endeavor. It’s also a bulwark against a nuclear Iran, a sort of inelegant centerpiece of Israel’s defense.
More so than during the early crises of his presidency, Trump appears to comprehend the complexity of it all, which may be what has rendered his administration’s response so limp. Earlier this month, Trump harangued on Twitter that M.B.S. was innocent until proven guilty, a similar refrain he had used to protect Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. In the end, he seems to be hoping that the whole thing will blow over.
This defensiveness largely falls flat among his fellow lawmakers. “Across the Hill, there is just absolute disgust at what seems to have taken place, and bewilderment over the way the administration has reacted. And I think that runs the gamut from people whose baseline position would be deeply skeptical of the U.S.-Saudi relationship to people who have been traditionally strong supporters of the U.S.-Saudi relationship,” the congressional staffer told me. “By and large, the reaction on the Hill is outrage, and an insistence that we get ourselves a full, clear accounting and a deep skepticism that the Saudis are investigating this on their own—despite Secretary Pompeo’s assurances—are really going to provide clarity.”
Benaim distilled the dissonance. “Other administrations would certainly have struggled with how to balance America’s values and interests, given the way a case like this impacts both,” he told me. “But Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have that struggle.” Instead, Trump says the quiet part out loud. “In a funny way, what you see is Donald Trump basically adopting the left-wing critique of the U.S.-Saudi relationship—which reduces a very complex situation with a lot of different variables—to basically ‘they can get away with murder because they are going to buy our weapons.’ He is actually taking the leftist critique of the relationship—and embracing it.”
As the Khashoggi drama has unfolded, the close relationship between M.B.S. and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has come under renewed scrutiny. (The New York Times reported this week that Kushner was advocating on M.B.S.’s behalf within the White House.) Their relationship dates back to the early days of Trump’s presidency, when Rex Tillerson was still running the State Department. As Dexter Filkins has noted in The New Yorker, Kushner identified M.B.S. as a “change agent” in the region, and developed a relationship that effectively sidelined Tillerson. According to one former administration official, Kushner’s communications with M.B.S. over the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp were a point of contention within the administration, one that was partly assuaged when Kushner began providing screenshots of his conversations with the National Security Council. But, this person added, “It was still an after-the-fact thing.”
In recent days, a number of sources I have spoken with have raised the possibility that M.B.S.’s ties to Kushner may have instilled in the crown prince a belief that America would, indeed, turn a blind eye to the murder of Khashoggi. “I think there is a lot to be said [about how] M.B.S. thought he could get away with it, because Jared Kushner was in his pocket, and so was the president for that matter,” the former State Department official who worked in the Middle East said. And after all, the Trump administration has largely ignored the war in Yemen; the strange sojourn of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Saudi Arabia; the ill-fated boycott of Qatar; and M.B.S.’s spats with Canada and Germany. “The Trump administration made it clear that he had a blank check, and so what do you do when you have a blank check? You write in the craziest sum imaginable and take it to the bank, and that is what he did,” Benaim told me. “Only it seems that the blank check has bounced, at least with Congress, if not with the president.” (The White House did not respond to a request from comment.)
Whether Trump will yield to the pressure from Capitol Hill and the international community, or side with his son-in-law and his buddy, remains an open question. But if evidence indeed shows that M.B.S. was behind the death of Khashoggi, the crown prince will join the ranks of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, all of whom have engaged in extraterritorial murders to send a clear message to dissidents. Meanwhile, any remaining hope that M.B.S. is the idealist he’s claimed to be has rapidly dissipated. “I think there was legitimate hope when M.B.S. came on the scene that he was going to be a reformer, and he was going to change course,” the congressional aide told me. “And despite initial appearances and words to that effect, it is pretty clear that is not the case.”
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