ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish authorities say they have explicit audio recordings as well as video footage showing that Saudi agents killed the dissident Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, according to two people the Turks have briefed on their findings.
Such material, if made public, could transform the unfolding standoff between Turkey and Saudi Arabia over the disappearance of Mr. Khashoggi, a legal resident of the United States and a Washington Post columnist well known among Western journalists and diplomats.
A former chief of a semiofficial Turkish news agency who is still close to the government, Kemal Ozturk, spoke publicly about a video earlier this week.
The Post, citing United States and Turkish government officials, reported late Thursday night that the Turks have briefed their counterparts in the American government about those materials.How does Saudi Arabia and its U.S. patron get control of this narrative? I don't see it. Turkey would have to do all the heavy lifting, and in order for Erdogan to do that he is going to want Trump and Mohammed bin Salman to pay a heavy price.
And even if Erdogan takes the lead and collapses the murder-and-dismemberment narrative he has been constructing over the last ten days, no one is going to believe him. Governments, already buckling from a lack of credibility, will be under that much more strain.
Enter Congress. Trump now is facing a market correction and the public spectacle of his obeisance to a foreign power, and it is not Russia -- it's the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He doesn't have much time for things to settle down. A Blue Wave fills the horizon.
In "Trump Calls Relations With Saudi Arabia ‘Excellent,’ While Congress Is Incensed" Edward Wong, Eric Schmitt and Eileen Sullivan assess the growing restlessness on Capitol Hill:
The pressure from Congress could force the White House and the State Department to change important aspects of foreign policy — including, possibly, withdrawing support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen’s civil war. In June, a key vote on arms sales to the Saudis narrowly passed, and future munitions sales have been held up.
On Wednesday, the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a bipartisan letter to Mr. Trump demanding an investigation of whether “the highest ranking officials in the government of Saudi Arabia” were responsible for human rights abuses in Mr. Khashoggi’s case.
The letter invoked a statute that Congress enacted in December 2016 that says the executive branch, upon receipt of such a letter, has 120 days to decide whether to sanction foreign officials.
It is not clear, however, whether the Trump administration will consider itself bound to comply if the president does not want to tangle with the Saudis. When President Barack Obama signed the legislation creating that law, he issued a signing statement challenging it as an unconstitutional intrusion on executive power.
The Trump administration was widely criticized for its relative silence on Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance until Monday, six days after he entered the Saudi Consulate. Critics said the slow reaction could embolden leaders of Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian nations to carry out human rights abuses.
[snip]
Congress has have grown increasingly angry over the conduct of the bombing campaign, which is part of a proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran. An Aug. 9 airstrike that hit a school bus, killing more than 40 children, was particularly shocking — even for a war in which children have been the primary victims, suffering through one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The war in Yemen had killed more than 10,000 people before the United Nations stopped updating the death toll two years ago.
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, has held up a proposed sale by Raytheon of 60,000 laser-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia, a deal worth about $1 billion. (Mr. Menendez is also holding up a similar deal to sell the same weapons to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi’s main partner in the war.
The case of Mr. Khashoggi “only strengthens the need for the administration to answer his questions on the need to approve the proposed sales,” said Juan Pachon, a spokesman for Mr. Menendez. The senator met Mr. Khashoggi on a congressional delegation trip to Saudi Arabia in 2014.
The Trump administration certified last month that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were doing enough to minimize the deadly consequences of their aerial campaign in Yemen.
Ahead of the certification, however, international aid groups in Yemen compiled a list of 37 instances between June and September of civilians killed or injured in coalition strikes, and provided it to American officials, according to two officials briefed on the casualty figures.
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