The widow of slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi fired back at former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who called her late husband an ‘activist’ and dismissed what he calls the “faux outrage” over his murder.
Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, told NBC News in an interview on Monday that she is desperate “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband and collect money from it.”
“Whatever he [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband,” Elatr said. “It is such bad information and the wrong information. … This is not acceptable.”
In his book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, to be release Tuesday, Pompeo slammed the “faux outrage … fueled by the media” over Khashoggi’s murder because reporters “hammered the story extra hard because Khashoggi was a ‘journalist.'”
“To be clear, Khashoggi was a journalist to the extent that I and many other public figures are journalists. We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things,” Pompeo wrote, according to The Guardian. “The media made Khashoggi out to be a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles in the Washington Post.”
“In truth, Khashoggi was an activist who had supported the losing team in a recent fight for the throne … unhappy with being exiled ” he added.
Pompeo also accused Khashoggi of being “cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood,” citing reporting from the New York Times.
“He didn’t deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was — and too many in the media were not,” Pompeo wrote.
“Jamal Khashoggi is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood. I confirm it to you,” Elatr said on Monday.
Khashoggi, a critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was murdered at a Saudi Embassy in Turkey in 2018 under orders from Saudi leaders.
