Sweet, Cuddly Despot SHOCKED To Find Killers In His Retinue

Yeah, we're fainting.

NO BONE SAW! NO BONE SAW! YOU ARE THE BONE SAW! Last night, Donald Trump sat down with three AP reporters to shout nonsense about poor innocent Mohammad bin Salman being stoned to death like Brett Kavanaugh on the cross.

You know, 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. So I was unconcerned. So we have to find out what happened and they are doing a very major investigation. So is Turkey. Plus, they're putting themselves together and doing it. And hopefully they'll get to an answer as to what happened. But I will say they were very strong in their denial about themselves knowing.

Time to ring up Ed Whelan, see if he can cook up a backstory about Omar bin Squi, the notorious ROGUE KILLER who has never met the Crown Prince, but still has access to state-owned Gulf-stream jets, a diplomatic passport, the Saudi consulate's appointment calendar, and a forensic pathologist with expertise in dissection and mobile autopsies. 

Trump has a lot of practice disregarding the findings of his own intelligence agencies, but the US government picked up sig-int showing that MBS ordered his goon squad to "bring home" dissident reporters abroad, by whatever means necessary. David Ignatius says in the Post, 

One possible scapegoat, according to several sources, may be Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, the deputy chief of Saudi intelligence. Assiri "has made numerous approaches to MBS on taking actions against Khashoggi and others," said one source who is familiar with Western intelligence reports.

The U.S. government learned last month that Assiri was planning to create a "tiger team" to conduct covert special operations, I'm told, though officials didn't know the targets. U.S. intelligence also learned, but only after Khashoggi's disappearance after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, that the crown prince had told his subordinates this summer that he wanted Khashoggi and other Saudi dissidents brought home.

As reporters connect the dots between MBS and the kill team, which included members of the Saudi royal guard and Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a diplomat formerly assigned to the Saudi embassy in London, Trump digs in further to insist that the Saudis "were very strong in their denial about themselves knowing." Who you gonna believe, the guys who lied about his death for two weeks now, or your lying ears? Middle East Eye reports,

It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist's last moments told Middle East Eye.

Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general's office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said.

Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said.

"The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him," the source told MEE.

The screaming stopped when Khashoggi - who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October - was injected with an as yet unknown substance.

To which the president replies, "Yeah, okay, human rights are great and all. But have you tried arms sales?" More or less. 

Well, there are many other things we can do. But when we take away $110 billion of purchases from our country, that hurts our workers, that hurts our factories, that hurts all of our companies. You know, you're talking about 500,000 jobs.

So if we do that, we're really hurting our country a lot more than we're hurting Saudi Arabia. They'll go to Russia, they'll go to China. They'll make the order. The equipment is nowhere near as good as our equipment; they know that. Our equipment is the best in the world. But they'll go to China. They'll go to Russia. They'll order equipment. We're just hurting ourselves.

So sorry that US-resident reporters are getting chopped up and taken home in diplomats' luggage. And we're really bummed that all those brown Yemenite kids have to get dead. But it's super important that we sell a lot of bombs, okay?

AMERICA FIRST!

[ AP / WaPo / Middle East Eye / White House Press Office ]

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