Revealed: Pompeo asked aides to find a way to push through weapons sale
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked his aides to find a way for the State Department to push through weapons sales to Saudis and the idea for an emergency declaration was raised in April 2019.
The unredacted version of a report by Inspector General Steve Linick, fired by Pompeo while investigating the emergency declaration, explored the former CIA chief's role in the arms sales and the consequent deaths of civilians in the Saudi aggression on Yemen.
Nicole Thompson, a spokesperson with the State Department’s press office, said the office of Inspector General “has confirmed in a final report that the Department acted in complete accordance with the law and found no wrongdoing” in the Trump administration’s use of the emergency declaration for the arms sales.
Pompeo's department has so far sold $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and other US allies in Wast Asia by bypassing the Congress.
"Before Secretary Pompeo had Inspector General Linick fired, the [Office of Inspector General] was looking at the connection between Congress’s concerns about civilian casualties in Yemen and the administration’s use of the emergency authority to ignore those concerns and get around congressional objections,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-NY), House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), and Sen. Bob Menendez (NJ), the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said in a joint statement, citing an interview with Charles Faulkner, a former senior official in the State Department’s bureau of legislative affairs.
The Democrats further warned that Faulkner’s testimony “undercuts the administration’s explanation for the emergency declaration — details that the department sought to redact and keep hidden from the public in the final OIG report.”
Soon after his victory in the 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump clinched a massive deal with Riyadh for arms that would later be used against the people of Yemen.
The monarchy waged a military aggression against the impoverished nation in March 2015 in collaboration with a number of its allied states.
The aggression has resulted in what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
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