Tuesday on CNN’s “New Day,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) weighed in on the White House, announcing that President Joe Biden would be visiting Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia to discuss issues including energy, climate, human rights and the increasing threat of Iran.
Durbin, who has been an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia over its government’s alleged role in killing journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the country’s embassy in Turkey, said he had “mixed feelings” about the planned trip. He emphasized that the Saudi’s “standards are not our standards.”
“Listen, I respect President Biden,” Durbin stated. “I know he has a tough job dealing with gasoline prices, trying to find ways to find new sources and supplies to bring down inflation in the energy sector, and Saudi Arabia is a major player, full stop.”
“Next point I want to make is that the Saudi Arabia record, particularly when it comes to Khashoggi, is an outrage,” he continued. “It is the type of thing that clearly it was a designed murder and an effort to dispose of the corpse in a way that it could never be discovered. We now know what happened, at least to a large extent. And to say that that is just the ordinary course of business for a government is outrageous. So, I have mixed feelings on this, and if the president called me, I would say, ‘Mr. President, you can’t trust these people. Their standards are not our standards. Their values are not ours.'”
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