James Clapper: Khashoggi Murder Shows Trump Will ‘Accept the Words of Autocrats’
CNN analyst and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Saudi Arabia’s assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi shows that President Donald Trump is willing to “accept the words of autocrats” — like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
“It’s completely infeasible to me at least that an operation like this as complex as it was mounted in another country to kill somebody would not have gone down without the knowledge, acquiescence, and I believe direction of Mohammad bin Salman,” Clapper said while on CNN today. “So the president, in this case, using his very elastic evidentiary bar — he is going to raise the bar very.”
He went on to bash Trump– who has threatened to revoke Clapper’s security clearance in the past, like he did ton former CIA Director John Brennan — for his defense of the Saudi regime amid investigations into Khashoggi’s killing.
“It does concern me though that apparently [Trump] is willing to accept the words of autocrats like Putin and now Mohammad bin Salman over what his own intelligence community says, which I think overtime, does so at the peril of the nation,” Clapper noted.
He went on to say that he does not believe “the notion that Mohammad bin Salman is synonymous with Saudi Arabia.”
“We can maintain a relationship over the long-term with Saudi Arabia which everybody knows is quite important, but at the same time I think there needs to be unequivocal condemn nation of what obviously happened here.”
Watch above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
