CNN said it had learned from its sources that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked his ministry officials to search for arguments to justify the emergency decision he issued last year to expedite a huge arms deal for Saudi Arabia.
A US State Department official said they disclosed Pompeo's behavior to the department's inspector general’s office late last year, as part of an investigation the office had opened on that emergency decision that expedited the $ 8 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, and avoided passage of Congress’s reviews.
The CNN report comes in light of suspicions hovering over Pompeo, after US President Donald Trump issued a decision a few days ago to dismiss the State Department's inspector-general, Steve Link, on the recommendation of Pompeo.
However, the minister denied in press statements that his recommendation came in retaliation against Linnik, and he said he was not aware of the investigations carried out by the ministry's inspector general's office, but at the same time he did not reveal the reason for his recommendation to remove the inspector.
The chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Elliot Engel - a Democratic Party deputy - said he believed the investigation of the Saudi deal could be one of the reasons for the overthrow of Inspector Linnick.
The CNN report states that Pompeo's directives to search for justifications for his emergency order have made various offices of the ministry (regional bureau, military-political bureau, and legal bureau) well under way to this end.
Turning the page of Khashoggi
The report indicated that the American administration was seeking in this emergency order to turn the page of the crisis raised by the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which put Trump in a critical position; Due to his relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, who was reported by Western reports to have issued the assassination order.
"It (the administration) seemed intent on going beyond the Khashoggi file. The meaning of the message is that we have to turn that page and provide support (to Saudi Arabia)," a ministry official said. "This was an incredible audacity," he added.
Pompeo had announced in May 2019 the emergency order, and said that the US administration would go beyond the Congressional review of that deal, because the weapons are necessary to counter an emergency situation caused by Iran's "destabilizing" actions in the Middle East.
In the same month, Pompeo wrote to a letter to members of Congress saying that he had "found an emergency requiring the immediate sale of defense equipment and services" to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, to counter Iranian influence across the Middle East, including Tehran's support for the Houthis in Yemen.
The US arms export laws authorize the president to declare a state of emergency that requires the sale of weapons immediately to protect "the national security interests of the United States."