The Turkish government reportedly told US officials on Thursday that it has audio and video recordings suggesting the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed during his visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week. Khashoggi, who was living in Virginia under self-imposed exile, is known as an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Earlier this week, The New York Times described a senior US official as saying Turkish authorities believe that Khashoggi was killed on orders from the "highest levels of the royal court." Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg last week, "We have nothing to hide." Few people had heard of Prince Mohammed before his father, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, became king in 2015. King Salman, 82, subsequently elevated his son Mohammed, 33, to crown prince in June 2017. And he has since been widely seen as the driving force behind an anti-corruption purge that has detained several leading Saudi government and business leaders. Here's the story behind Prince Mohammed's meteoric rise.<doc-sep>Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., long one of Saudi Arabia's most vocal defenders in Congress, said Tuesday that the kingdom's nearly all-powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has "got to go" and vowed never to return to the country as long as the young leader remains in power. Graham also pledged to impose sanctions. Later Tuesday, the influential member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said he favored suspending U.S. weapons sales to the country. "This guy is a wrecking ball. He had this guy murdered in a consulate in Turkey, and to expect me to ignore it — I feel used and abused," Graham, a close ally of President Donald Trump, said during an interview with "Fox & Friends." Graham added that "there is a difference between a country and an individual," but said that bin Salman is "toxic" and "can never be a world leader on the world stage." The senator's remarks come as Saudi Arabia faces down a global outcry amid accusations that it orchestrated the killing of a journalist critical of the crown prince. Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post, has not been seen since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. Trump has downplayed the accusations against the crown prince, and told reporters on Monday that the denial from King Salman was "very strong." The president dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to meet with top officials in the country, while floating the alternative theory that Khashoggi might have been murdered by "rogue killers." Graham's decision to continue his offensive against the country on a platform that Trump is known to watch is noteworthy.<doc-sep>This could be a chaotic week for U.S. policy in the Middle East and for oil. Responding in advance to expected comments by President Trump Donald TrumpTrump lashes out after grand jury seated for New York criminal probe Schumer tees up vote on Jan. 6 commission bill Senators struggle to save Jan. 6 commission MORE on “60 Minutes” last night, Saudi Arabia issued a statement of “total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it.” Al Arabiya News Channel wrote an editorial warning of 30 potential retaliatory measures against any U.S. sanctions, including “$100 oil, $200 oil, double that.” What President Trump actually said, half-buried in his responses to aggressive questioning about Russia, North Korea, China and other issues, was that the kingdom could face “severe punishment” if the U.S. confirms that exiled Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. ADVERTISEMENT The Saudi response suggests that it is not considering the option of blaming what Turkish officials claim was the torture, killing, dismembering and videoing of the whole ghastly affair on rogue elements in the Saudi security services. Nevertheless, President Trump spoke this morning with King Salman and later said “rogue killers” could be responsible for Khashoggi’s disappearance. In the absence of a body (or any body parts), there remains an element of uncertainty of what happened to Khashoggi, but many may consider the Saudi response an admission of guilt. The second-order conclusion by many critics of the kingdom is that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, known as MbS, is a brutal authoritarian — one who, though only 33 years old, soon will replace his father as monarch of the world’s largest oil exporter and, by virtue of the location of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the kingdom, the leader of the Islamic world. President Trump has dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Mike PompeoThe Memo: Media face hard questions on Trump, Wuhan lab Trump on Wuhan lab: Now everyone agrees 'I was right' With denuclearization stalled, Biden should focus on human rights reform in North Korea MORE to Riyadh, presumably with a list of policy recommendations. The odds of the Saudi side accepting any of them are debatable. It seems that we may be saying goodbye to at least the gloss, if not the substance, of the prince’s Vision 2030 plans for economic transformation of the kingdom. The attendance list for an investment conference, scheduled to be held Oct. 23 to 25 in Riyadh, is in tatters. JPMorgan CEO James Dimon pulled out over the weekend; U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s withdrawal is likely at any time. Social reforms such as cinemas and live entertainment may survive, as will women driving cars. But don’t forget that many of the women activists who campaigned for the latter are in jail. It is embarrassingly ironic that, notionally, Saudi Arabia is a leader of the global coalition against the Islamic State (ISIS), the extremists whose signature horror has been the videoed torture and execution of its prisoners. How could we all have been so wrong in our hopes for MbS? (Perhaps not all of us. I wrote last year, when he pushed his predecessor to one side by denying him sleep and diabetes medicine, that, “His greatest strength, or weakness, may be his ruthlessness.” I cited the example of the “bullet story,” in which he put a bullet on the desk of a government official who didn’t want to sign off on one of the young prince’s business deals.) Until two weeks ago, Western officials could, and did, excuse MbS’s domestic authoritarianism by citing his apparent reordering of a Saudi Islam as being moderate rather than the extremist version which produced, via irresponsible religious education and charitable giving, 9/11 and the Islamic State. But Khashoggi’s disappearance suggests that we have been seduced by the smooth words of his retinue and cohorts of echoing public relations firms. Even Muslim World League Secretary-General Muhammad al-Issa, who this month hosted a conference on “Cultural Rapprochement between the U.S. and the Muslim World” in New York City, yesterday issued a statement in support of MbS: “The animus campaign it now witnesses threatens all dimensions of international stability.” We will have to see whether the conference’s idea for a “peace caravan” of Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders going to Jerusalem gains any traction. Old hands will tell you that diplomacy is usually best done quietly, but we live in a world of Twitter, television-interview sound bites and public statements. Some statements are being shot from the hip, as happened yesterday when the kingdom declared an uncompromising defiance and hinted of measures that would hit the U.S. economy much harder than Saudi Arabia’s. Today there is a report that the Saudis will at last allow Turkish investigators into the Istanbul consulate. If Khashoggi died there, it will have been well-cleaned by now. It is probably too late for a declaration that the fate of Khashoggi is a mystery. This coming Thursday, the Saudi embassy in Washington planned to host its National Day celebrations. Would the host ambassador, Prince Khalid bin Salman, MbS’s brother, be there or would he still be in Riyadh, where the White House sent him to find answers to U.S. concerns? Curiously, I was invited but was not going, and I wondered how many of Washington’s great and good also would not show up — until the embassy canceled the event. Simon Henderson is the Baker Fellow and director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.<doc-sep>A general manager of Alarab TV, Jamal Khashoggi, looks on during a press conference in the Bahraini capital Manama, on December 15, 2014. The pan-Arab satellite news broadcaster owned by billionaire Saudi businessman Alwaleed bin Talal will go on air February 1, promising to "break the mould" in a crowded field.AFP PHOTO/ MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH (Photo credit should read MOHAMMED AL-SHAIKH/AFP/Getty Images) (CNN) — Political outrage sparked by the disappearance of a dissident Saudi journalist is not just damaging the reputation of a key US ally – it’s now threatening the authority of President Donald Trump himself. The possible murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul has unleashed forces in Washington that are putting Trump’s sharp turn away from traditional American foreign policy values to its most stark political test yet. And there are growing signs that the White House may be unable to thwart fast-building pressure in Congress for action to punish Saudi Arabia and rein in its ruthless de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, tapped by the White House as America’s anchor in the Middle East. The President, with his dealmaker’s instincts, has inserted Saudi Arabia into a foreign policy designed to leverage US power for material gain rather than for global moral leadership – and has argued the current crisis should not derail a commercial relationship worth billions of dollars. On Monday morning, Trump announced that he had spoken with King Salman and relayed the King’s denial of “any knowledge of whatever may have happened ‘to our Saudi Arabian citizen.’” Trump also said he was dispatching Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to meet with the King. But such is the anger in Congress over the US-based Khashoggi’s fate, that support is building for an effort to impose a change in Trump’s strategy, much as lawmakers did when enforcing sanctions on Russia against his will. “If they lured this man into that consulate, they went medieval on him, and he was killed and he was chopped up and they sent a death crew down there to kill him and do all this, that would be an outrage,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Just because they’re an ally in an important mission, which is containing Iranian expansion in the region, cannot allow us to overlook or walk away from that. It undermines our ability to stand for morality and human rights all over the world,” Rubio said on Sunday. Saudi Arabia has denied killing Khashoggi but has not provided evidence to explain his disappearance from the consulate. That being the case, Rubio called on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to cancel a trip to an investment conference in Saudi Arabia later this month. “I don’t think any of our government officials should be going and pretending it’s business as usual until we know exactly what’s happened here,” Rubio said. The White House has sought to slow a rush to judgment against the Saudi government amid demands for immediate sanctions. Trump’s ascent as a political leader in 2016 was a lesson in how the traditional foreign policy orthodoxy, in which moral values and a sense of America exceptionalism and democratic leadership – a strain of thought that Rubio represents – have been eclipsed in the Republican Party. But the Saudi drama appears to be becoming a rare case in which clamor for action is building across political divides that could threaten the President’s primacy in foreign policy and emerge as a genuine constraint on his power. Former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who is in many ways a political opposite of Rubio and is an independent senator from Vermont, also called for action on “State of the Union” Sunday. “I think one of the strong things that we can do is not only stop military sales, not only put sanctions on Saudi Arabia, but most importantly, get out of this terrible, terrible war in Yemen led by the Saudis,” Sanders said. There are signs that political pressure is beginning to tell, and that a President who has shown little concern for press freedom and repeatedly courted autocrats accused of gross human rights abuses, is becoming uncomfortable with repeated questioning on the issue. “Maybe especially so because this man was a reporter. You’ll be surprised to hear me say that, there’s something really terrible and disgusting about that if that was the case so we’re going to have to see,” Trump told Lesley Stahl in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast Sunday. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it and there will be severe punishment.” The White House has not specified the nature of the steps Saudi Arabia could face. But in the same interview the President also reiterated his concern that any action should not deflect from his own mercantilist instincts — a desire to use American power to maximize economic gains. “It depends on what the sanction is. I’ll give you an example, they are ordering military equipment. Everybody in the world wanted that order. Russia wanted it, China wanted it, we wanted it. We got it, and we got all of it, every bit of it,” Trump said. Asked by Stahl if he would cut off that order, the President said: “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that. And you know what, there are other ways of punishing, to use a word that’s a pretty harsh word, but it’s true.” The President’s reshaping of American foreign policy to prioritize job creation and financial might is a centerpiece of the case he is making to voters ahead of the midterm elections in three weeks. He argues that after decades of being ripped off by friends and foes, the United States is now driving hard bargains, and claims to have engineered huge victories in trade disputes with Canada, Mexico, China, South Korea and Europe — despite evidence he has only made moderate changes.<doc-sep>
Dubai (AFP) - Saudi King Salman has begun weighing in to try to defuse the growing crisis over missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as the kingdom goes on the offensive triggering a fierce online media campaign. In a phone call with US President Donald Trump on Monday, the king denied "any knowledge of whatever may have happened 'to our Saudi Arabian citizen'", the US leader said in a tweet. Trump added he was "immediately" sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh "to meet with the king" for talks on the crisis. The disappearance of Khashoggi, last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, has whipped up international concern, with new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman increasingly the focus of sharp criticism. Turkish officials have said they believe Khashoggi -- a Washington Post contributor who was critical of Prince Mohammed's policies -- was killed inside the mission, and lurid claims have even been leaked that he was tortured and even dismembered. After an initial silence, Riyadh said Khashoggi had left the consulate safely and then at the weekend denied as "baseless" claims that orders were given to have him killed. As western companies began to distance themselves from the oil-rich Gulf nation which is seeking outside investment to diversify its economy, the king also Sunday discussed the scandal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He reiterated Riyadh's "solid" relations with Ankara, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency. It is not the first time that King Salman has sought to ease tensions surrounding the 33-year-old Prince Mohammed, who has been cultivated by the US but whose reformist credentials are being quickly shredded by the mystery surrounding Khashoggi's fate. In an earlier phone call with Trump in April, King Salman reiterated Riyadh's position that Jerusalem must remain the capital of Palestine amid speculation that the kingdom had given up on the longstanding position. Story continues - 'A message to the US' - Aleksandar Mitreski, a security and defence analyst, said Saudi Arabia cannot control the international narrative but can try to alleviate the most damaging fallout. Saudi Arabia warned Sunday it would retaliate against any sanctions imposed over the Khashoggi's disappearance after Trump threatened "severe punishment" if the writer was found to be a victim of a state-sponsored killing. "The purpose of (Sunday's) message broadcasted by the Saudi national media is twofold: one goal is to satisfy the domestic public opinion that Saudi Arabia and its royal family will not be humiliated and the other goal is to send a message to the US," Mitreski, researcher at the University of Sydney, told AFP. The kingdom's warning was not only a response to Trump, but also targeted at US decision-makers amid rising calls for Congress to step in and put key arms sales on hold, he said. "It will be the task of political advisors and strategists to prevent Trump from causing damage to the US-Saudi relationship," he added. As the United States and Turkey have ratched up pressure on the kingdom, Saudi companies, officials and princes have also gone online in a wave of solidarity with the ruling family. - 'Kingdom always prevails' - Saudi flags, photos of the king and crown prince looking stern, and pro-Saudi hashtags were making the rounds on social media Monday with a common theme: Saudi Arabia and its ruling family are a "red line". Saudi Minister of Information Awwad al-Awwad tweeted on Sunday that the kingdom "always prevails against its enemies... under the wise leadership of the king and crown prince" using the Arabic hashtag #Saudis_In_Line_With_TheLeadership. Billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal -- who was among those temporarily detained as part of what Saudi authorities said was an anti-corruption crackdown -- tweeted an image of the Saudi flag Sunday in support of the ruling family, saying: "God, then the king, then the nation." One Twitter user said the Saudis "will not bow down and will not kneel, but only to God... We are all Salman, and we are all Mohammed". Some Saudis opted to remain silent for fear of consequences. "What is the use of discussing an issue that might throw you in a place you don't want to be?" a Saudi citizen, residing in Dubai, told AFP on condition of anonymity. "Let us wait quietly." James Dorsey, a fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said Saudi Arabia was stepping up moves against criticism.