The Killing in the Consulate by Jonathan Rugman

Author:Jonathan Rugman [Rugman, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

12

TRUMP AND THE HOUSE OF SAUD

‘He may be an SOB but he’s our SOB.’

– Attributed to President Roosevelt

After a week of furious Saudi denials, contradicted by Turkish intelligence leaks, pressure was mounting not just on Saudi Arabia to come up with an explanation for what had happened, but on a White House which had been lying low for days. It had taken six days for a usually loquacious Donald Trump to say anything.

The president had his reasons – commercial and political, even his own business interests – for biding his time. Notoriously transactional in his outlook and inclined to establish potential profit and loss before deciding on his response, Trump proceeded on the assumption that a damage-limitation exercise was required to preserve the relationship with Saudi Arabia, despite the death of a journalist who lived just 14 miles from the president’s home.

Complicating that task was Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who had taken to the pages of the Washington Post to implore the president and his wife Melania to help resolve the mystery of the journalist’s disappearance. She also urged King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his son the crown prince to release the closed-circuit television footage from the consulate, which could shed light on Saudi claims that Khashoggi had left the building.

The following day, President Trump told reporters he wanted to ‘bring her to the White House’, describing Cengiz as Khashoggi’s ‘wife’, after she had written him and the First Lady a ‘beautiful letter’.

Cengiz, however, would not be placated easily. Two weeks later, in an interview with a Turkish television channel, she turned down Donald Trump’s invitation.

‘The statements Trump made in the first days around his invitation and the statements he made afterwards opposed each other,’ she told a Turkish channel, Haberturk. ‘I do not think of going to the United States. Whether I will go or not will depend on the formation of conscience.’

Trump was also facing a rebellion in the US Senate. A bipartisan group of senators had invoked the Global Magnitsky Act, designed to punish those involved in human rights abuses worldwide. The act had evolved from a Russian cover-up of the death in prison custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for a US firm; now, remarkably, it was being invoked against Saudi Arabia, a key ally. The senators asked President Trump to report back in 120 days on whether sanctions on the Saudis should be imposed, if ‘a foreign person is responsible for an extrajudicial killing, torture, or other gross violation of internationally recognised human rights’.

On 10 October, President Trump was asked by Fox News whether it was likely the Saudis had killed Khashoggi. ‘I guess you would have to say so far it’s looking a little bit like that and we’re going to have to see,’ he said.

The president was being dragged towards a conclusion of culpability he didn’t want to reach.

‘Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised, but somehow I tend to doubt it,’ he told reporters earlier that day. ‘I have to find out who did it.

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