President Donald Trump brushed aside a reporter’s question to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the 2018 killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, saying the crown prince “knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that.” But Trump’s claim is at odds with a CIA assessment.
U.S. intelligence assessments — leaked to reporters in 2018 and later released in a declassified report in early 2021 — concluded the crown prince “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
Trump’s comments came during a state visit by Crown Prince Mohammed on Nov. 18 in the Oval Office. A reporter from ABC News posed a question to the crown prince, noting that “the US intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist.”
“You’re mentioning somebody [Khashoggi] that was extremely controversial,” Trump replied. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him things happened, but he [Crown Prince Mohammed] knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
Crown Prince Mohammed later addressed the question, saying, “About the journalist, it’s really painful to hear, you know, anyone that been losing his life for, you know, no real purpose or nothing illegal … and it’s been painful for us in Saudi Arabia. We did all the right steps of investigation, etc. in Saudi Arabia and we’ve improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that, and it’s painful and it’s a huge mistake and we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”
Khashoggi, who had become a prominent critic of the crown prince and in 2017 went into a self-imposed exile from Saudi Arabia, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. In the immediate aftermath, Saudi officials provided conflicting explanations of what happened, at first claiming Khashoggi — who had become a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist in 2017 — left the consulate alive through a back entrance. Later, the narrative was that Khashoggi died during the course of a brawl at the consulate, before Saudi officials later that month acknowledged — relying on information they said was provided by Turkey — that Khashoggi’s killing was premeditated.
The following month, the Washington Post reported — based on anonymous officials “familiar with the matter” — that a CIA assessment concluded with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the assassination of Khashoggi. According to the Post, “A team of 15 Saudi agents flew to Istanbul on government aircraft in October and killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate, where he had gone to pick up documents that he needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman.”
The Post’s sources said the CIA relied on intelligence that included a phone call intercepted by U.S. intelligence from the crown prince’s brother to Khashoggi encouraging the journalist to retrieve the documents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and assuring him “that it would be safe to do so.”
During a teleconference on Nov. 22, 2018, when a reporter asked Trump, who was in his first term as president, about the CIA assessment, Trump said the CIA “did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways, but they didn’t have the report. … Nobody has concluded. I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.”
“They said he might have done it. That’s a big difference,” Trump said, adding that Saudi officials “have vehemently denied it. The CIA points it both ways. You know, it’s — as I said, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But I will say very strongly that it’s a very important ally.”
CIA Briefing with Senior Senators
On Dec. 4, 2018, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel held a closed-door, classified briefing with a bipartisan group of senior senators on the agency’s intelligence related to Khashoggi’s murder. Afterward, several senators told the media they left convinced that Crown Prince Mohammed was responsible for Khashoggi’s death.
“I went into the briefing believing it was virtually impossible for an operation like this to be carried out without the Crown Prince’s knowledge,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said to the press at the time. “I left the briefing with high confidence that my initial assessment of the situation is correct.”
“The Crown Prince is a wrecking ball,” Graham said. “I think he’s complicit in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi to the highest level possible. I think the behavior before the Khashoggi murder was beyond disturbing, and I cannot see him being a reliable partner to the United States.”
“There’s not a smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw,” Graham said, referring to allegations from Turkish officials that a bone saw was used to dismember Khashoggi in order to sneak his remains out of the Saudi Consulate. “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 [Crown Prince Mohammed], and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi. Open Source reports show that he [the crown prince] had been focusing on Mr. Khashoggi for a very long time. It is zero chance, zero, that this happened in such an organized fashion without the crown prince.”
“I would really question somebody’s judgment if they couldn’t figure this out. It is there to be figured out,” Graham said. “And I think the reason they [some in the Trump administration] don’t draw the conclusion that he’s complicit is because the administration doesn’t want to go down that road, not because there’s not evidence to suggest he’s complicit.”
In his own press statement, Republican Sen. Bob Corker, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “I have zero question in my mind that the Crown Prince MBS ordered the killing, monitored the killing, knew exactly what was happening, planned it in advance. If he was in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes, guilty.”
“This has got to be strongly condemned by the administration, strongly condemned, and then there’s got to be a price to pay for what has happened,” Corker added. “I know that they have to have exactly the same intelligence that we have, and there’s no way that anybody with a straight face could say there’s any question about what has happened.”
“It would be really easy for the president to walk out into the press room today and just state that MBS killed a journalist,” Corker said. “We know he killed a journalist. We know he ordered it.”
UN Investigation
On June 19, 2019, after a six-month investigation, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings — Agnes Callamard — issued a 100-page report that concluded, “Mr. Khashoggi’s killing constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the State of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible.”
The report determined that there “is credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi Officials’ individual liability, including the Crown Prince,” but the report stopped short of directly implicating the crown prince. The U.N. report also did not render a decision about whether Khashoggi was ordered to be killed or that the Saudi state “ordered a kidnapping that was botched and then became an accidental killing.”
“Various explanations and accusations have been offered on the circumstances of Mr. Khashoggi’s death, but none alters State responsibility,” the report said. “It is legally irrelevant to State responsibility which high level officials actually ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s death, or whether one or all of them ordered a kidnapping that was botched with an accidental killing, or whether the officers acted on their own initiative to render Mr. Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and killed him in the process, or whether the officers acted ultra vires (the so-called rogue state agents theory) and killed him intentionally.”
The U.N. investigation concluded, “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr. Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances” and “every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the Crown Prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”
Among other evidence cited in the report was that nine of the people implicated in the attack on Khashoggi “flew into Turkey on a private jet with diplomatic clearance,” two of them had diplomatic passports, and “[s]tate security agency officials arranged for all travel, including the private jets and accommodations.”
“High level officers planned, supervised and thus authorised the mission, exhorted the team members about the importance of the mission to national security, and expected the team to report back to headquarters,” the report said.
National Intelligence Report
Although Congress passed legislation in 2019 seeking the public release of U.S. intelligence related to who was responsible for Khashoggi’s killing, the Trump administration never declassified it. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, his incoming director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, vowed during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 19, 2021, that she would.
On Feb. 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of its report, “Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”
According to the document’s executive summary, “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decisionmaking in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the report states. “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
In addition, the report said, “The 15-member Saudi team that arrived in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 included officials who worked for, or were associated with, the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) at the Royal Court. At the time of the operation, CSMARC was led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of Muhammad bin Salman, who claimed publicly in mid-2018 that he did not make decisions without the Crown Prince’s approval.”
“The team also included seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s elite personal protective detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force (RIF). The RIF–a subset of the Saudi Royal Guard–exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations in the Kingdom and abroad at the Crown Prince’s direction,” the report said. “We judge that members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval.”
Finally, the report concluded, “The Crown Prince viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the Kingdom and broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.”
The State Department’s “2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” — released in March 2019 — stated that “government agents” carried out Khashoggi’s killing that year. The report also cited the Saudi government’s changing explanations, noting: “The government initially claimed he had left the consulate in good health but changed its story as facts came to light.”
The Crown Prince’s Response
For his part, Crown Prince Mohammed has maintained that he had nothing to do with Khashoggi’s murder.
In a PBS interview two months after the killing (released in September 2019), Crown Prince Mohammed accepted responsibility for the killing, “because it happened under my watch,” but denied he had any prior knowledge of the attack.
Asked how members of the team that attacked Khashoggi flew to and from Istanbul on planes owned by the Saudi government, he responded, “I have officials, ministers to follow things, and they’re responsible, they have the authority to do that.”
Crown Prince Mohammed gave a similar response to “60 Minutes” in September 2019 when he was asked directly, “Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?”
“Absolutely not,” the crown prince responded. “This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government. … This was a mistake, and I must take all actions to avoid such a thing in the future.”
In December 2019, Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor announced that five people were sentenced to death for the killing of Khashoggi, and three others were given prison sentences. Sky News reported that the trials were carried out “in near total secrecy.” In May 2020, Khashoggi’s children, citing Ramadan and Allah’s call for reconciliation, pardoned the five men sentenced to death.
Callamard, who led the United Nations investigation into Khashoggi’s death, called the pardon the “latest act in a parody of justice.”
In September 2020, a spokesperson for Saudi Arabia’s public prosecution bureau announced that final verdicts were delivered related to Khashoggi’s murder and eight people received prison sentences ranging from seven to 20 years.
Responding to the announcement, Callamard wrote on X that “these verdicts carry no legal or moral legitimacy. They came at the end of a process which was neither fair, nor just, or transparent.”
“As for the individual responsibility of the person on top of the State, the Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, he has remained well protected against any kind of meaningful scrutiny in his country,” Callamard wrote.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.