The Washington Post reports:

Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.

Trump’s remarks about reporters amid the Khashoggi fallout have inflamed existing tensions between his allies and the media. At a Thursday rally in Montana, Trump openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year.

“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said.

Hours earlier, prominent conservative television personalities were making insinuations about Khashoggi’s background.

“Khashoggi was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asserted on Thursday’s highly rated “Outnumbered” show. “I just put it out there because it is in the constellation of things that are being talked about.” Faulkner then dismissed another guest who called her claim “iffy.”

The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”

While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.

Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, left his home country last year and was granted residency in the United States by federal authorities. He lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post.

Nevertheless, the smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities. [Continue reading…]

The nature of a whispering campaign is that it hinges on insinuation and the insinuation here is that Khashoggi got what was coming to him. Of course, none of Trump’s minions have the audacity to spell out what they are implying. Moreover, given Trump’s moral depravity and that of those aligned to him, the more specific implication in their apologism for the Saudis is that the treatment of the man they murdered was only unwarranted in that it went too far.

Trump is an unapologetic advocate for the use of torture, so perhaps he would have had few qualms if Khashoggi’s butchers had merely cut off his fingers without decapitating him.

As for those who opt to push back against this smear campaign by defending the victim’s journalistic integrity and his commitment to democracy, it’s a defense that obfuscates the real issue: no human being on this planet deserves to be treated with the extraordinary brutality exercised by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s henchmen.

President Trump on waterboarding: “I feel it works,” but will rely on team’s guidance and do everything “legally." https://t.co/89o6NhpsWh pic.twitter.com/vWoL5W2ycc

— ABC News (@ABC) January 26, 2017