US congressman alleges Pompeo ‘cooked up’ emergency to give go ahead for Gulf arms sale

The chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs has criticised Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for proceeding with a controversial ‘emergency’ arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, saying that an emergency ‘was cooked up’ to deceive Congress.

Eliot Engel, a Democrat representing New York, charged that Pompeo had abused his authority in approving some $8 billion in arms sales to the Gulf allies, following a UN report expressing concern that airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen with weapons largely supplied by the United States and United Kingdom had violated international humanitarian law.

Engel tore into the State Department for heavily redacting and spinning a report by its own Office of Inspector General (‘IG’) to look as if it had absolved Pompeo of wrongdoing or abuse of power.

‘This report tells us everything we suspected: the emergency was a sham. It was cooked up to get around congressional review of a bad policy choice. And ever since Mr. Pompeo declared that ‘’emergency’’, he and his top lieutenants have worked to bury the truth,’ Engel declared in a statement to the press.

‘No one ever doubted that the law provides for the authority to expedite the sale of weapons in the case of an emergency. The question was always, “Did the administration abuse that authority in order to ram through more than $8 billion in sales to Gulf countries?’” Engel said.

‘The IG didn’t offer an opinion on that,’ he added. ‘But the report’s details signal a resounding “Yes”. I presume that’s why the Department insisted on redacting the most salient information and trying to tell us what the report said before it was out.’

Engel said that the timeline of the sales, contained in an unredacted version of the IG report seen by Congress and some media outlets, clearly showed that an emergency was invented as a ruse to get around humanitarian concerns that were holding up the sales.

In the unredacted timeline, the IG said that in early April Pompeo asked his staff to look into ways the Department could go ahead with held-up arm sales and was given the idea of declaring an emergency. With that idea, on 4 May, Pompeo instructed his staff to prepare the certification for 24 May. On 21 May he went to Congress to warn of an Iranian threat and on 24 May announced the emergency declaration as planned.

The IG report also found that the State Department had been selling precision guided munitions (‘PGMs’) in component parts, so that each individual transfer fell below the threshold requiring congressional approval.

There were ‘4,221 below-threshold arms transfers involving Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with an estimated total value of $11.2bn since January 2017,’ the IG reported.