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In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi Killing

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Killing Khashoggi: How a Brutal Saudi Hit Job Unfolded

An autopsy expert. A lookalike. A black van. Our video investigation follows the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed and dismembered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

There were 15 of them. Most arrived in the dead of night, laid their trap and waited for the target to arrive. That target was Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi critic of his country’s government and its young crown prince. Since his killing in Istanbul, Turkish media has released a steady drip feed of evidence implicating Saudi officials. Weeks of investigation by The Times builds on that evidence and reconstructs what unfolded, hour-by-hour. Our timeline shows the ruthless efficiency of a hit team of experts that seemed specially chosen from Saudi government ministries. Some had links to the crown prince himself. After a series of shifting explanations, Saudi Arabia now denies that this brazen hit job was premeditated. But this reconstruction of the killing, and the botched cover-up, calls their story into serious question. It’s Friday morning, Sept. 28. Khashoggi and his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, are at the local marriage office in Istanbul. In order to marry, he’s told that he needs Saudi paperwork and goes straight to the consulate to arrange it. They tell him to return in a week. It all seems routine, but it’s not. Inside there’s a Saudi spy, Ahmed al-Muzaini, who’s working under diplomatic cover. That very day, he flies off to Riyadh and helps concoct a plan to intercept Khashoggi when he returns to the consulate. Fast-forward to Monday night into Tuesday morning. Saudi agents converge in Istanbul aboard separate flights. Muzaini, the spy, flies back from Riyadh. A commercial flight carries a three-man team that we believe flew from Cairo. Two of the men are security officers and they’ve previously traveled with the crown prince. A private jet flying from Riyadh lands around 3:30 a.m. That plane is often used by the Saudi government, and it’s carrying nine Saudi officials, some who played key roles in Khashoggi’s death. We’ll get to Team 3 later on, and for now focus on these men from Team 2. This is Salah al-Tubaigy, a high-ranking forensics and autopsy expert in the Saudi interior ministry. Turkish officials will later say his role was to dismember Khashoggi’s body. Another is Mustafa al-Madani, a 57-year-old engineer. As we’ll see, it’s no accident that he looks like Khashoggi. And this is Maher Mutreb, the leader of the operation. Our investigation into his past reveals a direct link between Mutreb and the Saudi crown prince. When bin Salman toured a Houston neighborhood earlier this year, we discovered that Mutreb was with him, a glowering figure in the background. We found him again in Boston, at a U.N. meeting in New York, in Madrid and Paris, too. This global tour was all part of a charm offensive by the prince to paint himself as a moderate reformer. Back then, Mutreb was in the royal guard. Now, he would orchestrate Khashoggi’s killing. And his close ties to the crown prince beg the question, just how high up the Saudi chain of command did the plot to kill go? Early Tuesday morning, Khashoggi flies back from a weekend trip to London. He and the Saudis nearly cross paths at the airport. The Saudi teams check into two hotels, which give quick access to the consulate. Khashoggi heads home with his fiancée. He’d just bought an apartment for their new life together. By mid-morning, the Saudis are on the move. Mutreb leaves his hotel three hours before Khashoggi is due at the consulate. The rest of the team isn’t far behind. The building is only a few minutes away on foot, and soon, they’re spotted at this entrance. Mutreb arrives first. Next, we see al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert. And now al-Madani, the lookalike. The stage is almost set. A diplomatic car pulls out of the consulate driveway and switches places with a van, which backs in. Turkish officials say this van would eventually carry away Khashoggi’s remains. From above, we can see the driveway is covered, hiding any activity around the van from public view. Meanwhile, Khashoggi and his fiancée set out for the consulate, walking hand-in-hand. In their final hour together, they chat about dinner plans and new furniture for their home. At 1:13 p.m., they arrive at the consulate. Khashoggi gives her his cellphones before he enters. He walks into the consulate. It’s the last time we see him. Inside, Khashoggi is brought to the consul general’s office on the second floor. The hit team is waiting in a nearby room. Sources briefed on the evidence, told us Khashoggi quickly comes under attack. He’s dragged to another room and is killed within minutes. Then al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert, dismembers his body while listening to music. Maher Mutreb makes a phone call to a superior. He says, “Tell your boss,” and “The deed was done.” Outside, the van reportedly carrying Khashoggi’s body pulls out of the side entrance and drives away. At the same time, the Saudis begin trying to cover their tracks. While Khashoggi’s fiancée waits here where she left him, two figures leave from the opposite side. One of them is wearing his clothes. Later, the Saudis would claim that this was Khashoggi. But it’s al-Madani, the engineer, now a body double pretending that the missing journalist left the consulate alive. Yet there’s one glaring flaw: The clothes are the same, but he’s wearing his own sneakers, the ones he walked in with. Meanwhile, the van that’s allegedly carrying Khashoggi’s body makes the two-minute drive from the consulate to the Saudi consul’s residence. There’s several minutes of deliberations but the van eventually pulls into the building’s driveway. Again, it’s hidden from public view. It’s now three hours since Khashoggi was last seen. The body double hails this taxi and continues weaving a false trail through the city. He heads to a popular tourist area and then changes back into his own clothes. Later, we see him joking around in surveillance footage. Over at the airport, more Saudi officials arrive on another flight from Riyadh. They spend just five hours in Istanbul, but we’re not sure where they go. Now we pick up Maher Mutreb again, exiting from the consul’s house. It’s time for them to go. Mutreb and others check out of their hotel and move through airport security. Al-Muzaini, the spy, heads to the airport too. But as they’re leaving Istanbul, Khashoggi’s fiancée is still outside the consulate, pacing in circles. She’ll soon raise the alarm that Khashoggi is missing and she’ll wait for him until midnight. The alarm spreads around the world. Nine days later, the Saudis send another team to Istanbul. They say it’s to investigate what happened. But among them are a toxicologist and a chemist, who also has ties to the hit team. He and Tubaigy attended a forensics graduation days before Khashoggi was killed. Turkish officials later say that this team’s mission was not to investigate, but to cover up the killing. Now the Saudi story has changed, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for several suspects in Khashoggi’s killing. But that doesn’t include Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who many Western government officials are convinced authorized the killing. Khashoggi’s remains still haven’t been found.

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An autopsy expert. A lookalike. A black van. Our video investigation follows the movements of the 15-man Saudi hit team that killed and dismembered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

WASHINGTON — President Trump defied the nation’s intelligence agencies and a growing body of evidence on Tuesday to declare his unswerving loyalty to Saudi Arabia, asserting that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s culpability for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi might never be known.

In a remarkable statement that appeared calculated to end the debate over the American response to the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, the president said, “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi,” Mr. Trump added. “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

His statement, which aides said Mr. Trump dictated himself and reflected his deeply held views, came only days after the C.I.A. concluded that the crown prince, a close ally of the White House, had authorized the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and columnist for The Washington Post.

In 633 words, punctuated by eight exclamation points and written in an impolitic style that sounded like Mr. Trump’s off-the-cuff observations, the statement was a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.

In a world of malefactors, Mr. Trump argued, Iran’s crimes exceeded anything Saudi Arabia had done. His words seemed certain to alienate Turkey, a NATO ally that has raised the pressure on Saudi Arabia to offer a full accounting of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

They also drew outrage from members of Congress and human rights activists, for whom the grisly killing has become a test of America’s willingness to overlook the crimes of a strategically valuable ally. Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.

“The behavior of the crown prince — in multiple ways — has shown disrespect for the relationship and made him, in my view, beyond toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee, and the ranking Democrat, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, sent Mr. Trump a letter demanding that the administration determine whether Prince Mohammed was responsible for the death of Mr. Khashoggi.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said he expected Congress to take some kind of action but declined to be more specific. “There are not only Democrats but Republicans upset,” he said in an interview.

Far from criticizing Prince Mohammed or other Saudi leaders, the president came close to embracing the narrative of Mr. Khashoggi’s critics in the kingdom: that he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an “enemy of the state” bent on undermining the House of Saud.

“My decision is in no way based on that,” Mr. Trump insisted. “This is an unacceptable and horrible crime. King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.”

Punishing Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump said, would put at risk $110 billion in military sales to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other military contractors, as well as $340 billion in other investments, which the Saudis have agreed to make since he became president.

Economists and military analysts said those numbers were so exaggerated as to be fanciful.

“The world is a very dangerous place!” Mr. Trump began his statement, before seguing into a critique of Iran’s malign behavior in the Middle East. He blamed it for killing Americans, sponsoring terrorist organizations and conducting a “bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”

As if to illustrate his point, the Treasury Department on Tuesday morning announced sanctions against nine targets in what officials said was an Iranian-Russian plot to sell oil to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and use the proceeds to finance Iranian-backed militant groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Mr. Trump left open the possibility that Prince Mohammed was aware of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing — in effect conceding that the prince could have lied to him in multiple phone conversations.

In exchanges with aides, Mr. Trump has rolled his eyes when asked whether he believes the prince could not have been aware of the complex operation to kill Mr. Khashoggi. It involved multiple teams of operatives — some of whom had close ties to the prince — flying to Istanbul on private jets and turning a diplomatic compound into a slaughterhouse.

Yet none of that outweighs what Mr. Trump views as the benefits of an alliance with the Saudis that dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The president denied he was motivated by personal gain. “I don’t make deals with Saudi Arabia,” he told reporters as he left the White House for Palm Beach, Fla., where he is spending Thanksgiving. “I don’t have money from Saudi Arabia.”

Mr. Trump’s defense of Prince Mohammed has hardened as the evidence implicating him has mounted. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he acknowledged the likelihood of a high-level Saudi role in the killing and said it would demand a “very severe” response.

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Backing Saudi Arabia Is an ‘America First’ Policy, Trump Says

President Trump suggested that he would not rebuke Saudi Arabia for the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, saying that U.S.-Saudi ties were crucial to the American economy.

And I’m not going to tell a country that’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars and has helped me do one thing very importantly — keep oil prices down, so that they’re not going to $100 and $150 a barrel. Right now, we have oil prices in great shape. I’m not going to destroy the world economy. And I’m not going to destroy the economy for our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia. So, I think this statement — wait a minute. I think the statement was pretty obvious what I said: It’s about America first. The C.I.A. has looked at it. They’ve studied it a lot. They have nothing definitive. And the fact is maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

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President Trump suggested that he would not rebuke Saudi Arabia for the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, saying that U.S.-Saudi ties were crucial to the American economy.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

“I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately.”

A week later, after the Saudi explanation of the killing shifted yet again, he accused the Saudis of the “worst cover-up ever” and promised that the United States would find out what happened to Mr. Khashoggi, a resident of Virginia.

But then the Turkish government shared an audio recording with the United States and other Western countries, which intelligence officials said pointed to a more direct role by Prince Mohammed. Mr. Trump gave up any pretense that he would follow the facts wherever they led.

He said he would not listen to the recording because “it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape.” And he played down the likelihood that a report prepared by his own administration would establish definitively whether Prince Mohammed was responsible for the crime.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the investigation had clarified many details about the crime. But he made clear that the trail ended with 17 Saudis that the administration imposed sanctions against last week — a list that included some close aides to Prince Mohammed, but not the prince himself.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would continue to assess new information in the case. “Facts will, obviously, still continue to come to light,” he told reporters. “It’s the way the world works.”

But he made clear that Mr. Trump would weigh any further action against the nation’s interests, which the president has said lie with the Saudis, not with Mr. Khashoggi.

“An innocent man, brutally slain, deserves better, as does the cause of truth and justice and human rights,” The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, said in a statement.

Even before he took office, Mr. Trump singled out Prince Mohammed as his preferred partner in the Middle East. His son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, began cultivating the 33-year-old prince, who was then jockeying to be the designated heir to King Salman.

Mr. Kushner saw Prince Mohammed as critical to advancing a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians that has been a major focus of his time in the White House. Mr. Trump’s hawkish aides, encouraged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, saw the prince as critical in marshaling a coalition to isolate Iran.

Iran reacted scornfully to Mr. Trump’s statement. Its foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, alluded to the president’s unfounded assertion that California could have avoided its calamitous wildfires if he had adopted Finland’s practice of clearing debris from the forest floor.

“Mr. Trump bizarrely devotes the FIRST paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse IRAN of every sort of malfeasance he can think of,” Mr. Zarif said in a tweet. “Perhaps we’re also responsible for the California fires, because we didn’t help rake the forests — just like the Finns do?”

Mr. Trump’s economic argument for the Saudi alliance is suspect on several grounds. He argued, for example, that if the United States canceled its military contracts, they would be quickly filled by Russia or China.

“It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!” he said.

But military analysts said the Saudi military was so deeply reliant on American equipment — F-15 fighter jets, armed with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles — that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for it to switch to an alternative supplier. That is even truer right now, in the midst of its air campaign in Yemen.

Of the $110 billion in weapons sales claimed by Mr. Trump, defense analysts have calculated only $14.5 billion in booked sales, and the real number might actually be lower than that. The Saudis have not concluded a single major new arms deal since Mr. Trump took office.

The president also contended that Saudi Arabia was critical to keeping a lid on oil prices.

“If you want to see oil prices go to $150 a barrel,” he told reporters, “all you have to do is break up our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

The Saudis did agree to boost production to offset the loss of oil from Iran after Mr. Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran’s energy industry this month. But now, after the United States eased the pressure on the market by granting waivers to several countries that import Iranian oil, Saudi Arabia is again considering cutting production.

Perhaps the biggest consequence of Mr. Trump’s statement is that it complicates the efforts of his own advisers to hasten an end to the war in Yemen.

In recent weeks, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have called on all parties for a swift end to the fighting, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians and caused a ruinous famine. But Mr. Trump placed the onus entirely on Iran, saying that “Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave.”

Bruce O. Riedel, a longtime expert on Saudi Arabia now at the Brookings Institution, said, “The adult advisers in the room — Pompeo and Mattis — tried to steer this debate so it would move away from Istanbul and toward Yemen.”

“But the president is not really on board. He’s all-in on M.B.S.” he said, referring to Mohammed bin Salman by his initials.

“It’s going to undermine the nascent effort to get a settlement in Yemen,” Mr. Riedel said.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York, and Carl Hulse and Catie Edmondson from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Stands With Saudis Over Murder of Khashoggi. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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