President Trump is leaving retribution for Jamal Khashoggi's murder up to Congress — just like the FBI investigation into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he says.
In a wide-ranging set of comments on Tuesday, Trump said an alleged Saudi operation to kill the U.S.-based Saudi journalist was "carried out poorly, and the cover-up was one of the worst in the history of cover-ups." But he says he still wants to "see the facts first" before deciding whether to believe Turkish claims that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was directly behind the murder.
Trump has been reluctant to criticize Saudi involvement in the Oct. 2 killing of Khashoggi in Turkey's Saudi consulate, though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did announce the revocation of visas from Saudi agents said to have killed Khashoggi on Tuesday. But "in terms of what we ultimately do," presumably meaning fuller consequences for the country, Trump says he's "going to leave it up to Congress." That's a "little bit" like what he did for senators who wanted an FBI investigation into Kavanaugh, Trump said.
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Trump went on to discuss the Honduran migrant caravan still 1,000 miles from the U.S. border. He previously — and baselessly — claimed "unknown Middle Easterners" were in the throngs marching through Mexico, but said Tuesday "there's no proof" of that being true. He also defended his repeated assertion that he is a "nationalist," claiming he'd "never heard" theories that his comments implied he was a white nationalist.
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