ARMS-WEAPONS/HOUSE OF REPS/SAUDI ARABIA/STATE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “A senior State Department official on Wednesday [6-12-19] defended the Trump administration’s use of an emergency declaration to push through arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, telling a hostile House committee that holding back the weapons would have offered an opening to commercial rivals in China and Russia. In a contentious hearing, lawmakers from both parties pressed R. Clarke Cooper, the assistant secretary of state in the bureau of political-military affairs, to detail when the administration first developed the plan to declare an emergency and sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Congress’s will. Lawmakers are outraged by the decision by President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in late May to use a loophole in the Arms Export Control Act to push through more than $8 billion worth of weapons sales, almost all to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The two countries are leading an air war against rebels in Yemen that has resulted in a humanitarian disaster and thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children. In both chambers, bipartisan groups of lawmakers are already moving to block the sales, many of which Democrats had informally held up since last year.”
–Catie Edmondson and Edward Wong, “State Department Defends Saudi Arms Sales Before Hostile House Panel,” The New York Times online, June 12, 2019