Bipartisan Hill anger with Saudis flares after Khashoggi

A defense contractor pressing for a U.S.-Saudi weapons sale visited Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker’s office recently. And as the Tennessee Republican tells it, he gave the man a stark warning: “Look. Do not push this.”

“If it came to a vote in the Senate, it would fail," Corker recalled telling the contractor about the chance that lawmakers would halt the Saudi arms deal he was pursuing. That was before journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Middle Eastern kingdom’s government, vanished after entering the Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Now Khashoggi’s disappearance and alleged murder is pushing Capitol Hill's long-simmering frustrations with Riyadh to a boiling point. Whether that fury manifests in a formal rejection of a U.S.-Saudi weapons sale remains to be seen. But interviews with more than a dozen senators reveal bipartisan pressure to hold the Saudis accountable — while the White House tries to keep a lukewarm distance from the case.

Weapons sales “are certainly going to be a huge concern if” the Saudis are proven responsible for Khashoggi’s vanishing, said Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, a member of GOP leadership.

“Saudi Arabia needs to clear this up immediately,” Gardner said. “Obviously, there’s a way that this can end very badly, and that is if Saudi is indeed responsible for this — as, at least reports I am seeing, would point to that direction.”

That aisle-crossing anger over Khashoggi is again testing GOP willingness to break from President Donald Trump, whose administration has urged an investigation by the Saudi government that’s believed to be culpable. Trump has shown little interest in punishing Saudi Arabia, saying that Khashoggi “is not a United States citizen” and “I don’t like the concept” of halting arms sales after vowing to “get to the bottom of” what happened to the journalist.

“We’ve got some people who are pretty animated by all of this. And some probably less so. We’ve got extremes,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican, who said he was waiting for more information before taking a firm position on arms sales.

“It’s important to have allies in that part of the world,” Thune added. “But I do think there are lines that get crossed from time to time that require a response.”

The last time the Senate took up a portion of Trump’s $110 billion Saudi arms deal, the sale survived on a 47-53 vote. Two of the five Democrats who voted against blocking that sale said in interviews this week that they could reexamine that stance based on the outcome of an investigation into Khashoggi’s apparent abduction.

“I certainly think if it’s determined that the leader of Saudi Arabia had this journalist murdered, that everything should be on the table in terms of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said.

One Republican senator who voted against blocking arms sales last year after wrestling with the decision also raised an alarm about Khashoggi, insisting on anonymity to be candid: “Something like this could be a tipping point for me and for others.”

Khashoggi, a vocal critic of the Saudi regime, was last seen entering the government’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2. Saudi officials have denied any improper behavior, claiming that he left the building later that day. But Turkish intelligence sources have alleged that Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate in a Saudi-government-approved assassination. khashoggi