The most charitable thing that can be said for President Joe Biden’s handling of the Khashoggi report is that he failed to manage expectations. Having promised to make Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman a pariah for the murder of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden can only clutch at his pearls, declaring that “it is outrageous what happened,” while leaving the prince unpunished.
Declassified on Friday afternoon, the report, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, makes the headline-grabbing claim that Prince Mohammed approved the 2018 operation “to capture or kill” Khashoggi. But it offers no new compelling evidence, much less a smoking gun, for the prince’s personal involvement.
