Trump and al-Saud Waiting for Khashoggi Affair to Go Away. It Won't.

The Khashoggi case appears to have settled into a waiting game. The Trump White House, after the "rogue killers" trial balloon deflated before it was airborne, is now waiting for the Saudis to complete their investigation.

Trump fancies himself a master of the news cycle. He cut his teeth on the New York City tabloid-dominated media market. He has treated the Khashoggi affair as he did the Kavanaugh nomination: at first non-committal, followed by fire-breathing partisanship.

Besides not having a majority of the U.S. Senate behind him on this one, Trump will be unable to wait out the Khashoggi affair because he's jousting with the wily Erdogan whose press organs are leaking salacious tidbits, which are then sucked up and regurgitated in the Western media, such as this first paragraph from "Audio Offers Gruesome Details of Jamal Khashoggi Killing, Turkish Official Says" by David Kirkpatrick and Carlotta Gall:

ISTANBUL — Saudi agents were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into their country’s consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. Mr. Khashoggi was dead within minutes, beheaded, dismembered, his fingers severed, and within two hours the killers were gone, according to details from audio recordings described by a senior Turkish official on Wednesday.

The U.S. national security state is not going to kowtow to Trump's wish to "wait it out." There was a good deal of chagrin over Pompeo's servile visit to Riyadh. Pompeo is denying that the Turks played him the audio of Khashoggi's butchering. But the Trump White House refuses to release any of the intelligence it has on the Khashoggi case to Congress.

Moon of Alabama posted a good write-up yesterday. He gets a few things wrong. For one, Turkey does have access to the Saudi consul's residence. There is a possibility that Khashoggi's body parts are buried in the garden.

Another critical article from yesterday is David Sanger's "Khashoggi Disappearance May Disrupt Trump Administration’s Plans to Squeeze Iran." The entire second half of Trump's first term was to be based on ginning up a conflict with Iran. That can't happen now.