Intel: Congress tries to force Trump to declassify report on Khashoggi murder

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is crying foul over the Donald Trump administration’s refusal to publicly disclose a list of every Saudi official complicit in the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And one senator — Ron Wyden of Oregon — is about to turn to a little-used mechanism on the Intelligence Committee to force the US intelligence community to declassify the list, which could implicate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“The Trump administration’s silence on this has just been deafening, particularly because the administration is ignoring a law duly passed by the Congress and signed into law by the president of the United States,” Wyden told reporters standing beside Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée.

Why it matters:  Trump signed a national defense bill into law in December that required the US intelligence community to submit an unclassified report to Congress listing every Saudi official involved in the Khashoggi murder. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) delivered the report list last week but classified the entire report. Although the law required the Trump administration to submit an unclassified list, ODNI argued that publicizing it would jeopardize “sources and methods.”

“The report is highly relevant to the debate that we need to be having in this country about our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and that is a debate that needs to take place with public input,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who oversaw the State Department’s human rights bureau under the Barack Obama administration. “You can name somebody, you can say you were responsible for this crime, without revealing the methods that they have used to determine that responsibility. So, that’s not an excuse, and they know it.”