In Death, Khashoggi Exposes the Corruption of Kushner and Trump

There’s a word for what may be going on here: espionage

A report released yesterday by the CIA concluded that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist who was living in the United States, was assassinated on direct orders from Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), crown prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom dispatched a 15-man “death squad” to Istanbul, comprised of members of MbS’s own security detail, to make the hit. On Oct. 2, the assassins concocted a reason to lure Khashoggi into the consulate. There, they spent seven full minutes torturing him, slicing off his fingers and other body parts while he was still alive. Then they killed him and hacked up the remains with a bone saw.

Turkey jails more journalists than almost any other country in the world. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is a full-blown dictatorship.

This is at odds with the Saudi cover story: that Khashoggi, a portly man of letters a few days away from his 60th birthday, initiated a fistfight with his interrogators and died of a sedative overdose given when he was restrained—at which point his body was sawed into pieces for undisclosed reasons. The Saudi prosecutor is seeking the death penalty for…