Meat The Press, Con't

Over the weekend, Trump regime Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once again picked a fight with the CIA, declaring that there was "no direct evidence" of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doubled down Saturday on the United States' support for Saudi Arabia and declined to comment on a CIA assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was involved in journalist Jamal Khashoggi's murder. 

In an exclusive interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Pompeo again noted a lack of direct evidence linking bin Salman to Khashoggi's murder. 

"I have read every piece of intelligence that's in the possession of the United States government," Pompeo said. "And when it is done, when you complete that analysis, there's no direct evidence linking him to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. That is a accurate statement, it is an important statement, and it is a statement that we are making publicly today." 

When asked if the CIA has a high confidence of the de facto Saudi leader's involvement, Pompeo told CNN, "I can't comment on intelligence matters."

Today the CIA decided to make Pompeo look like the fool he is.

The C.I.A. has evidence that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, communicated repeatedly with a key aide around the time that a team believed to have been under the aide’s command assassinated Jamal Khashoggi, according to former officials familiar with the intelligence.

The adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, topped the list of Saudis who were targeted by American sanctions last month over their suspected involvement in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. American intelligence agencies have evidence that Prince Salman and Mr. Qahtani had 11 exchanges that roughly coincided with the hit team’s advance into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where Mr. Khashoggi was murdered.

The exchanges are a key piece of information that helped solidify the C.I.A.’s assessment that the crown prince ordered the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident who had been critical of the Saudi government.

“This is the smoking gun, or at least the smoking phone call,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. official now at the Brookings Institution. “There is only one thing they could possibly be talking about. This shows that the crown prince was witting of premeditated murder.”

Honestly, Pompeo should have known better.  The man was Trump's CIA Director in 2017 before taking over State for the departed and unmissed Rex Tillerson in April 2018.  If anyone in the Trump regime (besides current CIA head Gina "I love torture" Haspel) should be aware of what the CIA is capable of doing when it comes to backing up public analysis that something happened abroad, it's Pompeo, and he jumped directly on this land mine anyway.

I guess the guy's not that bright, because at this point pretty much every other foreign intelligence agency is 100% convinced that the Crown Prince ordered Khashoggi's murder too.  Pompeo must have known that the CIA would have leaked existence of a smoking gun to the press within a day or two, and that's exactly what happened.

This will not end well for the Saudis, or for Pompeo, frankly.