Back in November 2018, about six weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump issued a statement defending Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, even though the CIA concluded he ordered Khashoggi's assassination a few days earlier.
Now, former National Security Adviser John Bolton alleges in his forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened, that Trump's enthusiastic rhetoric wasn't really about the possibility that the crown prince had nothing to do with the incident. Instead, Bolton said the statement was mainly part of an effort to draw media attention away from Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, who was under fire following a story about her using her personal email for government business. "This will divert from Ivanka," Trump said, per Bolton's account. "If I read the statement in person, that will take over the Ivanka thing."
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