Pompeo claims 'full' vindication, but watchdog report finds fault with emergency Saudi arms sales
A new report from the State Department's federal watchdog found that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was within his legal authority to bypass Congress and approve $8.1 billion of arms sales, but it is not the"full" vindication that the top U.S. diplomat says it is.
But that's not entirely true. The report said Pompeo's"emergency certification was executed in accordance with the requirements of the" law, but it faulted the department for not meeting its requirement to"fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties." "No one ever doubted that the law provides for the authority to expedite the sale of weapons in the case of an emergency. The question was always, 'Did the administration abuse that authority in order to ram through more than $8 billion in sales to Gulf countries?'" said House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep Eliot Engel, D-NY, after the report's release Tuesday."This report tells us everything we suspected: The emergency was a sham.
In a statement to the OIG included in its report, R. Clarke Cooper, the top State Department official for arms sales, said,"The most critical deliveries... occurred in the near-immediate aftermath of the certification," but he didn't provide an update on how many packages had been delivered since then.
"This report confirms what we already know: This Administration has no qualms about lying to the American people. Rarely, however, are those lies so blatant and so dangerous as this one," said Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., who questioned Cooper during that hearing last year.
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