The Chairman of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Elliot Engle, said that there is misleading and fraud regarding the use of the "national emergency" to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while the State Department confirmed that it did not violate the law.
Elliott Engle said he hoped the State Department's inspector general report would shed light on why the state of emergency was being used to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
He criticized Assistant Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs Clark Cooper for briefing reporters on the inspector general's report on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's use of the state of emergency to pass an arms deal to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
He said in a statement that the report, which was not submitted to Congress or made public, is the prerogative of the Office of the Inspector General, and that the persons who conducted the press briefing were included in the inspector general's investigation, and they were not the ones who prepared the report.
Engel indicated that there was an attempt to divert attention and mislead about the report's findings, accusing Pompeo of "using the tricks of Justice Secretary William Barr."
Engel confirmed that the inspector general will present to his office today, Tuesday, a copy of the report issued on Pompeo's use of the state of emergency, including a section containing important but not confidential information, in addition to a secret facility that has been revised at the request of the State Department.
Engel announced that he would review the report to ensure that the secret facility was not used to bury important information that might constitute incriminating evidence.
He said that he had been searching from the beginning about the reason for using the state of emergency to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE while there was no state of emergency, and he hoped the inspector general's report would shed light on that.
Dismissal of inspectors and
assured that the American people deserve answers about why the State Department Inspector General, Steve Linnick, was expelled, and what the investigation he was conducting.
Last May, US President Donald Trump abruptly fired the State Department's inspector general at the time, Steve Linnick, who was studying the Pompeo procedure. Currently, a congressional committee is investigating the dismissal.
Lynnick is the fourth government inspector general to be sacked by Trump in the past few months, raising concerns among Democrats and some of his fellow Republicans about scaling back oversight of such sensitive sales.
Linnick succeeded Stephen Akard, who resigned last week after stepping down from the arms sales investigation. A final report was completed by Diana Shaw, Accard's deputy.
For his part, a senior official at the US State Department said Monday that the report of the inspector general of the ministry concluded that Secretary Mike Pompeo did not violate the law when he used an "emergency measure" to sell weapons to Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the inspector general's final report found no error in Pompeo's implementation of the administration's decision to declare a "national emergency" to justify $ 8 billion in military sales to Saudi Arabia despite congressional objection.