Trump's administration intends to conclude a new arms deal with Saudi Arabia

The Senator, who opposes the deal, added in an article published by the CNN website that the US administration is currently trying to sell thousands of precision bombs to Riyadh.

For his part, the deputy chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee said that the Trump administration is seeking to conclude this deal, whose details have not been disclosed yet, "at a time when the Saudis say they want to end their failed and brutal war in Yemen."

The Democratic Senator stated that following the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at his country's consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, Congress rejected a Trump administration deal to sell Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates various weapons with a total value of up to $ 8 billion.

Menendez stressed that the American intelligence services concluded that Khashoggi’s liquidation was carried out at the behest of the Saudi crown prince, and he described Prince Muhammad bin Salman as “a volatile tyrant who believes he can massacre his critics without consequences.”

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo succeeded in overcoming the Congress’s rejection of the arms deal with Saudi Arabia by resorting to a mysterious mechanism in which he considered the conclusion of this deal as an “emergency”.

But the Democratic Senator expressed regret that the administration had resorted to this mechanism without yet justifying the reason behind the deal.

"Today, a year later, there is still no reason for the United States to sell bombs to Saudi Arabia, and for this reason I am particularly concerned that the State Department is still refusing to explain why it is necessary to sell thousands of new bombs to Saudi Arabia," Menendez said. In addition to the thousands of other bombs that still have to be delivered as part of the emergency measure adopted last year. "

Recently, Trump, at the request of Pompeo, removed the State Department's inspector general, Steve Link, who was investigating, among other things, the emergency measure that approved the passage of this arms deal.

T/S

ANHA