On Monday the Saudi’s floated the idea that Kashoggi was accidentally killed during an interrogation, after two weeks of denying that he was even dead. Trump spoke to reporters and floated the idea that “rogue killers” may be responsible.
In an interview with the AP, Trump said about Khashoggi’s death and Saudi Arabia: “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.” On his conversation with the Saudi king: “Yesterday, when I spoke with the father, not so much today, but when I spoke to the father, it just sounded to me like he felt like he did not do it. He did not know about it and it sounded like, you know, the concept of rogue killers.”
The Saudi released $100 million to the U.S. on Tuesday. The payment was promised in August for stabilization in Syria, but there was always a question to whether it would be paid in full and by what date. The fact that it was paid during the Khashoggi controversy, when Trump is currently giving rhetorical cover to the Saudi, leads experts to believe the “Saudis want Trump to know that his cooperation in covering for the Khashoggi affair is important to the Saudi monarch,” and that “Much of its financial promises to the U.S. will be contingent on this cooperation.”
On Wednesday Turkey leaked details of the audio recording of Khashoggi’s murder by Saudi agents.
“The New York Times has confirmed independently that at least nine of 15 suspects identified by Turkish authorities worked for the Saudi security services, military or other government ministries. One of them, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, was a diplomat assigned to the Saudi Embassy in London in 2007, according to a British diplomatic roster. He traveled extensively with the crown prince, perhaps as a bodyguard.”
By the end of the week Saudi Arabia changed their story and admitted that Khashoggi was killed by accident in a fistfight with his interrogators. They claim security guards places him in a chokehold and he died as a result. This story was not widely believed. Except by Trump, who says he believes the Saudi explanation is plausible. He is breaking with U.S intelligence, who believe “he was assassinated on high-level orders from the Saudi royal court.”
Trump boosters in the far right and in Congress, including Don Jr, are beginning to circulate and spread negative stories about Khashoggi in the hopes of protecting Trump from a political backlash for supporting Saudi Arabia.
The Washington Post published Khashoggi’s last column, which was submitted before he disappeared. In it he Arab states where people “are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative.”
ProPublica released an investigative report about the Trump organization during the early 2000s that documents how “post-millennium comeback and global expansion rested on the brilliant purity of a licensing strategy that paid him millions simply for the use of his name” is another Trump-crafted lie.
Immigration News:
In that same AP interview, Trump spoke an a range of subjects, including his child-separation policy, where he denied it ever happened: “As I just said, we’ve taken children who have no parents with them standing on the border. We’ve taken many children, and I’m not talking about a small percentage, I’m talking about a very large percentage where they have no people, no parents. In addition to that, we’re separating children who are just met by people that are using them coming into the border, not their parents. They are using them coming into the border. … The parents would sometimes come up with their kids, leave them at the border and go back. So we’re in this position where we have an innocent young child at the border; there are no parents. We take them in, we care for the child and then we get horrible publicity.”
Sara Sanders added: “I’ll send you guys the DHS report that has the numbers that show that, like, 75 percent of the kids were actually self-separated. Their parents chose to go back and signed the paperwork to leave their kids behind.”
After a record number of migrants arrived at the border in September–over 16,000–I.C.E is now putting families in budget motels in the Tuscan area because there is no where else to keep them.
In Russia News:
While the Muller team has been quiet this election season, they have been busy, still interviewing witnesses, convening the grand jury, and meeting with Manafort nine times in four weeks.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%