HK GOT INT,L STRATEGIC CONSULTING LIMITED

WASHINGTON — President Trump defied the nation’s intelligence agencies and a growing body of evidence on Tuesday to declare his unswerving loyalty to Saudi Arabia, asserting that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s culpability for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi might never be known.

In a remarkable statement that appeared calculated to end the debate over the American response to the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, the president said, “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

“We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi,” Mr. Trump added. “In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

His statement, which aides said Mr. Trump dictated himself and reflected his deeply held views, came only days after the C.I.A. concluded that the crown prince, a close ally of the White House, had authorized the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and columnist for The Washington Post.

In 633 words, punctuated by eight exclamation points and written in an impolitic style that sounded like Mr. Trump’s off-the-cuff observations, the statement was a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional, heedless of the facts, determined to put America’s interests first, and founded on a theory of moral equivalence.

In a world of malefactors, Mr. Trump argued, Iran’s crimes exceeded anything Saudi Arabia had done. His words seemed certain to alienate Turkey, a NATO ally that has raised the pressure on Saudi Arabia to offer a full accounting of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

They also drew outrage from members of Congress and human rights activists, for whom the grisly killing has become a test of America’s willingness to overlook the crimes of a strategically valuable ally. Even Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion.

“The behavior of the crown prince — in multiple ways — has shown disrespect for the relationship and made him, in my view, beyond toxic,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee, and the ranking Democrat, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, sent Mr. Trump a letter demanding that the administration determine whether Prince Mohammed was responsible for the death of Mr. Khashoggi.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said he expected Congress to take some kind of action but declined to be more specific. “There are not only Democrats but Republicans upset,” he said in an interview.

Far from criticizing Prince Mohammed or other Saudi leaders, the president came close to embracing the narrative of Mr. Khashoggi’s critics in the kingdom: that he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an “enemy of the state” bent on undermining the House of Saud.

“My decision is in no way based on that,” Mr. Trump insisted. “This is an unacceptable and horrible crime. King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.”

Punishing Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump said, would put at risk $110 billion in military sales to Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other military contractors, as well as $340 billion in other investments, which the Saudis have agreed to make since he became president.

Economists and military analysts said those numbers were so exaggerated as to be fanciful.

“The world is a very dangerous place!” Mr. Trump began his statement, before seguing into a critique of Iran’s malign behavior in the Middle East. He blamed it for killing Americans, sponsoring terrorist organizations and conducting a “bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen.”

As if to illustrate his point, the Treasury Department on Tuesday morning announced sanctions against nine targets in what officials said was an Iranian-Russian plot to sell oil to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and use the proceeds to finance Iranian-backed militant groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Mr. Trump left open the possibility that Prince Mohammed was aware of Mr. Khashoggi’s killing — in effect conceding that the prince could have lied to him in multiple phone conversations.

In exchanges with aides, Mr. Trump has rolled his eyes when asked whether he believes the prince could not have been aware of the complex operation to kill Mr. Khashoggi. It involved multiple teams of operatives — some of whom had close ties to the prince — flying to Istanbul on private jets and turning a diplomatic compound into a slaughterhouse.

Yet none of that outweighs what Mr. Trump views as the benefits of an alliance with the Saudis that dates back to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The president denied he was motivated by personal gain. “I don’t make deals with Saudi Arabia,” he told reporters as he left the White House for Palm Beach, Fla., where he is spending Thanksgiving. “I don’t have money from Saudi Arabia.”

Mr. Trump’s defense of Prince Mohammed has hardened as the evidence implicating him has mounted. In an interview with The New York Timeslast month, he acknowledged the likelihood of a high-level Saudi role in the killing and said it would demand a “very severe” response.

“I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately.”

A week later, after the Saudi explanation of the killing shifted yet again, he accused the Saudis of the “worst cover-up ever” and promised that the United States would find out what happened to Mr. Khashoggi, a resident of Virginia.

But then the Turkish government shared an audio recording with the United States and other Western countries, which intelligence officials said pointed to a more direct role by Prince Mohammed. Mr. Trump gave up any pretense that he would follow the facts wherever they led.

He said he would not listen to the recording because “it’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape.” And he played down the likelihood that a report prepared by his own administration would establish definitively whether Prince Mohammed was responsible for the crime.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the investigation had clarified many details about the crime. But he made clear that the trail ended with 17 Saudis that the administration imposed sanctions against last week — a list that included some close aides to Prince Mohammed, but not the prince himself.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would continue to assess new information in the case. “Facts will, obviously, still continue to come to light,” he told reporters. “It’s the way the world works.”

But he made clear that Mr. Trump would weigh any further action against the nation’s interests, which the president has said lie with the Saudis, not with Mr. Khashoggi.

“An innocent man, brutally slain, deserves better, as does the cause of truth and justice and human rights,” The Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan, said in a statement.

Even before he took office, Mr. Trump singled out Prince Mohammed as his preferred partner in the Middle East. His son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, began cultivating the 33-year-old prince, who was then jockeying to be the designated heir to King Salman.

Mr. Kushner saw Prince Mohammed as critical to advancing a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians that has been a major focus of his time in the White House. Mr. Trump’s hawkish aides, encouraged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, saw the prince as critical in marshaling a coalition to isolate Iran.

Iran reacted scornfully to Mr. Trump’s statement. Its foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, alluded to the president’s unfounded assertion that California could have avoided its calamitous wildfires if he had adopted Finland’s practice of clearing debris from the forest floor.

“Mr. Trump bizarrely devotes the FIRST paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse IRAN of every sort of malfeasance he can think of,” Mr. Zarif said in a tweet. “Perhaps we’re also responsible for the California fires, because we didn’t help rake the forests — just like the Finns do?”

Mr. Trump’s economic argument for the Saudi alliance is suspect on several grounds. He argued, for example, that if the United States canceled its military contracts, they would be quickly filled by Russia or China.

“It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!” he said.

But military analysts said the Saudi military was so deeply reliant on American equipment — F-15 fighter jets, armed with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles — that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for it to switch to an alternative supplier. That is even truer right now, in the midst of its air campaign in Yemen.

Of the $110 billion in weapons sales claimed by Mr. Trump, defense analysts have calculated only $14.5 billion in booked sales, and the real number might actually be lower than that. The Saudis have not concluded a single major new arms deal since Mr. Trump took office.

The president also contended that Saudi Arabia was critical to keeping a lid on oil prices.

“If you want to see oil prices go to $150 a barrel,” he told reporters, “all you have to do is break up our relationship with Saudi Arabia.”

The Saudis did agree to boost production to offset the loss of oil from Iran after Mr. Trump reimposed sanctions on Iran’s energy industry this month. But now, after the United States eased the pressure on the market by granting waivers to several countries that import Iranian oil, Saudi Arabia is again considering cutting production.

Perhaps the biggest consequence of Mr. Trump’s statement is that it complicates the efforts of his own advisers to hasten an end to the war in Yemen.

In recent weeks, Mr. Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have called on all parties for a swift end to the fighting, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians and caused a ruinous famine. But Mr. Trump placed the onus entirely on Iran, saying that “Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave.”

Bruce O. Riedel, a longtime expert on Saudi Arabia now at the Brookings Institution, said, “The adult advisers in the room — Pompeo and Mattis — tried to steer this debate so it would move away from Istanbul and toward Yemen.”

“But the president is not really on board. He’s all-in on M.B.S.” he said, referring to Mohammed bin Salman by his initials.

“It’s going to undermine the nascent effort to get a settlement in Yemen,” Mr. Riedel said.