Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his attacks on members of Congress Wednesday after an internal surveillance report revealed that the State Department had been unable to fully cope with potential civilian casualties when it used emergency powers to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia last year.
Arms sales have to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan with billions of dollars in arms. Congress had blocked some of the sales for months before Pompeo used a May 2019 emergency declaration to pass them.
Lawmakers in either corridor denounced the ongoing bombing crusade through the Saudis and Americans in Yemen, which resulted in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
And while the surveillance report revealed that the State Department had fully assessed the threat to civilians from arms sales, Pompeo held Wednesday what the branch called an exemption.
“U.S. senators allegedly defied the integrity of foreign service agents, suggesting they had done something illegal,” Pompeo said Wednesday. “It’s outrageous then. It is outrageous that they continue to make these claims.”
The report revealed that the emergency powers themselves were being used in accordance with the law, as Pompeo noted: “We did everything through the book. We comply with the law, that’s also what the State Department’s IGO found,” he said. referring to the Office of the Inspector General.
But the Secretary did not mention that the Arms Export Control Act does not describe the term “emergency” and that, therefore, the OIG “did not assess” whether the scenario constituted an emergency.
In addition, an un redacted edition of the report, which was published shortly after its publication, shows that Pompeo planned to use his emergency powers for weeks before uttering the news publicly, suggesting that the urgency that could be expected to be discovered in a genuine “emergency” is not there.
The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel (D-CA), said on a Tuesday that no one doubted the mechanics of the State Department’s emergency powers.
“The consultation has been: “Has management abused this authority to make more than $8 billion in sales to the Gulf countries?” he said.” The IG has not given any opinions on this matter. But the main points of the report point to a resounding “yes.” »
When asked Wednesday about the findings of the report on civilian casualties at a press convention with the Czech prime minister, Pompeo attacked at the inspector general’s office.
“As for what is contained in the IG report, it is completely unfounded,” he said. “We were very attentive to how we saw the risks.”
“We need the lives of civilians in Yemen,” he added later. “We need the lives of civilians in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And the resolution we took surely did.”
The main points of the Department’s investigation into the civil history of such arms sales are generally confidential. At various points in the report, the OIG indicates an “annex” detailing Pompeo’s decision. This document, Engel told members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, can only be read at the Committee’s Sensitive Area Information Center, or SCIF.
“We sense that the Department would possibly have incorrectly drafted certain sections of the classified calendar sent to Congress,” Engel wrote to committee members tuesday.
The State Department filed the emergency declaration as an urgent factor last year when it announced the sales, but THE IG report tells another story.
As early as April 3, investigators discovered that branch staff had proposed emergency powers to carry out arms transfers despite several held-ups in Congress. On 4 May, according to the report, Pompeo ordered the branch’s Office of Political, Military and Legislative Affairs to complete the emergency certification procedure until 24 May.
In committee, this component of the report was well drafted in the edition made public by the OIG. Politico received and published an unreleased edition on Tuesday. See an example of the differences below:
Engel took note of the report’s timetable to emphasize his argument that the emergency declaration is a “farce.”
And in a post-Congressional testimony, Linick said that a close friend of Pompeo’s, the undersecretary of state for Management, Brian Bulatao, hoped he would behave like a supporter. At one point, Linick said, Bulato tried to pressure him not to investigate Saudi arms sales, and told the IG that “it’s not a proper review because it’s a policy review.”
Linick’s interim replacement, Stephen Akard, resigned last week after less than three months at work. The department’s deputy inspector general and the new acting inspector general, Diana Shaw, drafted the report, which was published Tuesday.
In a letter to Congress accompanying the report, Shaw pointed to the highly worded classified annex to the report, the component detailing the civilian position of arms sales. “The decomposition has established that the requested redactions are mandatory for the privacy interests of the executive branch,” he wrote.