“If you don’t have anything nice to say,” goes the proverb, “don’t say anything at all.” Apparently, Mike Pompeo never heard that advice. In his new book, written to hype up a potential campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, the former secretary of state denigrates deceased Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi to excuse his own failures as a member of then-President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
Pompeo rightly describes the 2018 murder of the Washington Post columnist — which American intelligence believes was authorized by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — as “grotesque butchery … outrageous, unacceptable, horrific and despicable, evil, brutish and, of course, unlawful.” He could have — and should have — stopped there. (Disclosure: I worked for the Post’s opinions section while Khashoggi was a columnist.)
Clearly, the widespread criticism of the Trump administration’s sluggish response to Khashoggi’s killing has annoyed Pompeo ever since.
But clearly, the…
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