Sen. Bernie Sanders joined calls for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia if the country is responsible for the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a consulate in Turkey earlier this month.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., has joined a bipartisan group of senators who are urging President Donald Trump to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance.
Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident, has not been seen since he entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to get documentation he needed in order to marry his fiancée. Turkish government investigators say they believe Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered within a few hours of entering the building.
Several senators on both sides of the aisle, as well as military officials, have urged decisive action against Saudi Arabia if the United States determines the country’s government killed Khashoggi.
Trump has said publicly that his administration is investigating Khashoggi’s disappearance, and has promised to hold Saudi Arabia accountable.
However, he has also expressed reservations over sanctioning Saudi Arabia, saying it could have negative economic impacts for the United States. On Saturday, he told reporters that cutting off arms deals with Saudi Arabia would mean American factories and workers take an economic hit, and that Saudi Arabia would simply find other sources.
“So, we do that, we really are hurting our country a lot more than we’re hurting Saudi Arabia. They’ll go to Russia. They’ll go to China. They’ll make the order,” he said, according to a pool report.
“It’s clear, we cannot have an ally who murders, in cold blood, in their own consulate, a critic,” Sanders said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning.
Sanders suggested that cutting ties to the war in Yemen would be among the strongest responses the U.S. could undertake.
“One of the strong things that we can do is not only stop military sales, not only put sanctions on Saudi Arabia, but most importantly, get out of this terrible, terrible war in Yemen led by the Saudis,” he said.
On Friday, Sanders said in a post on Twitter that a reevaluation of the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia is “long overdue.”
Find out what happened to Jamal Khashoggi and holding the perpetrators accountable is more important than defense contractor profits.
The time is long overdue for us to reevaluate the US-Saudi relationship and ask whether it’s actually advancing our interests and values. https://t.co/x9KCr7ikEj
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 12, 2018
Sanders has long been a vocal critic of U.S involvement in the war in Yemen.
Earlier this year, Sanders introduced a resolution with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that would have given the Trump administration 30 days to remove troops from Yemen. The Senate voted in March to table the resolution, 55-44.
Meanwhile, a group of 22 senators already triggered the Global Magnitsky Act Wednesday with a letter to Trump that requires him to undertake an investigation of Khashoggi’s disappearance, and to determine whether to impose sanctions on individuals who were responsible.
Leahy, the ranking member of a subcommittee of Senate Appropriations focused on foreign relations, was one of 11 Democrats who signed the letter. Eleven Republicans also endorsed the statement.
Under the Magnitsky Act, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee can require the president to investigate gross human rights violations against people exercising freedom of expression or other rights.
“So far the response from the White House has been very subdued at best,” Leahy said in an interview on CNN this past week.
Leahy said the U.S. stands for allowing a free, critical press.
“If we do nothing, what do we stand for?” Leahy said.
