Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a possible 2024 GOP presidential run, claimed in his new book that slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi received too much sympathy from the media following his brutal 2018 murder. According to an excerpt obtained by NBC News, Pompeo mockingly asserted the media portrayed Khashoggi as a “Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles in the Washington Post.” The ex-Trump administration official also criticized Khashoggi as an “activist” who was a member of the “terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood,” an allegation that Khashoggi’s widow denied. “He didn’t deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was – and too many in the media were not,” Pompeo wrote, adding that the “ugly” killing of Khashoggi wasn’t “surprising” due to Middle Eastern culture. “I’d seen enough of the Middle East to know that this kind of ruthlessness was all too routine in that part of the world,” he insisted. Pompeo, who was also a former CIA director, wouldn’t say last year whether he accepted the agency’s finding that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi’s murder in 2018.
Read it at NBC News
