State IG Did Not Clear Pompeo About The Wrongful Arms Sales To Saudi Arabia

Tonight, an anonymous State Department spokesman says the Acting Inspector General cleared Secretary Pompeo over the dicey $8 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. For seven reasons, to start, the IG could not do so.

First, we have seen the script before that the Trump Administration describes an investigative report, in a brief word to the press, as clearing Trump, when in fact the investigator did not. We saw Attorney General Bill Barr does his best to cut the legs out from under the Mueller Report by a short mendacious characterization of the Report before it was made public some time later. 

Whatever can be said by a press spokesman bent on manipulating the story, it does not contain all the crucial details of who said what when to whom. The press tonight is being rushed to judgment, expecting that the true details in the IG report will catch up too late, if at all. 

Second, the miserable IG office has been clubbed by Trump and Pompeo over and over to make it follow the party line. First, Inspector General Steve Linick was terminated. 

Obviously, there was no need to terminate him if he were gearing up to exonerate Pompeo about the $8 billion Saudi arms sale. Linick was too honorable to play the obedient apologist and had to be chucked overboard.

Third, as if Linick’s defenestration were not enough, his successor took off quite recently. Transparently, he did not want to be associated with this fiasco. Trump tersely commented that he was from Indiana and he “went back home.” If you believe that he left a couple of months after taking the post, just happening to leave before this report, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Third, the Inspector General investigation occurred against a background that cried out that Pompeo gave a highly compromised OK to the arms sale. Congress had barred such a sale, in the wake of the torture and killing, with a false and sleazy cover-up, of Jamal Khashoggi, American writer for the Washington Post.

But, Congress left room for an emergency waiver. Pompeo found the most specious of emergencies, which was what the State IG looked into.

Fourth, the asserted reason in the emergency declaration was fear of Iran. What kind of an emergency, unforeseen by Congress when it enacted the ban, was that? The Saudis and Iran have been at odds for years now. It has been trumpeted to the skies. Congress has been through that many times. It still does not want Trump to go to war over that, a stance that annoys Trump but resonates very deeply with an American public fed up with having been sucked into a terrible war next door in Iraq. The Trump Administration had argued that same rationale to Congress with missionary zeal, and Congress had not considered it worth standing back from the arms sale ban. Congress had weighed the awful treatment meted out to a writer of the Washington Post, clearly authorized from the highest Saudi levels – Mohammed bin Salman himself – against Iran, and figured these particular $8 billion could wait.

Fifth, Pompeo displayed contempt for the law, setting himself up for breaking the law. The Saudis still had the money, Trump could legally have dipped into the defense industry’s overflowing arsenal and complied with the law by selling them something else a little later.  But, Trump feels about Mohammed bin Salman almost like he does about Russian President Putin. Having Pompeo break the law expressed both his devotion to the Saudi leader and his contempt for Congress inconveniently getting in his way.

Sixth, Congress itself has been investigating the matter. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, subpoenaed the key State Department figures. He pieced the facts together. The so-called “emergency” waiver had been loudly opposed by high-level officials at State, at the Defense Department, and at the intelligence community. The Inspector General staff would have gathered wheelbarrows full of papers, e-mails, comments, meetings and so on as everyone in the government would opposed this fiasco and stated in writing their positions.

Seventh, Pompeo reportedly went about clearing the way for his emergency declaration by bypassing and subverting the State Department’s own processes. Rather than have the regular orderly consideration of the matter, he met separately and furtively with the State Department’s experts. That way he could manufacture the “new Iranian threat” bogus justification and confront the whole government with a fait accompli.

To paraphrase Macbeth, the whole Arabian sea would not wash this black mark from Pompeo’s hands. The State Department IG report would not do so.