Leon Panetta on Remaining Allies with Saudi Arabia

LEON PANETTA: Well, I think the President, obviously, was struggling to try to figure out some kind of approach here and decided that he would ignore what the CIA determined to be the fact. I mean, the CIA said with a high degree of confidence that the Saudi prince, crown prince, was involved here, that this was a deliberate murder, a brutal murder that took place in another country’s consulate. And if those are the facts, then it strikes me that the president has an obligation to acknowledge those facts as opposed to somehow excusing them because he thinks that there are other problems he has to deal with.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, as former CIA director I want to ask you what you make of this. First, on the CIA issue. They do — I mean, we understand that they don’t have a smoking gun but as you say their best evidence, their best intelligence indicates what you just said. But the president said yesterday, despite what Americans may hear in the coming days from the CIA we may never know all the facts. How troubling is that, again, about America’s foremost foreign intelligence agency?

PANETTA: Well, it raises the tremendous concerns. I mean, the president did this with regards to the finding by 17 intelligence agencies that Russia had deliberately interfered in our election process and yet, he decided to accept Putin’s word that he had nothing to do with it. Now, with regards to Saudi Arabia, he’s repeating the same mistake. The intelligence officials, the CIA have produced a very strong evidence of what happened there. And the president, rather than accepting the word of his own intelligence agencies says that the crown prince has denied this, others have denied it, maybe he did maybe he didn’t, trying to somehow find a way to excuse that kind of behavior. Not recognizing that by doing that he is sending a terrible message to the world that the United States, which, you know, our greatest strength is adhering to a high moral standard and adhering to our values as a country that somehow, we’re going to throw all of that out of the window in order to make sure that we protect our relationship with Saudi Arabia.