Three US Senators move to halt Trump’s $23bn arms sale to UAE

Three United States Senators have indicated their intention to introduce a legislation seeking to halt Donald Trump administration’s effort to sell more than $23bn of drones and other weapons systems to the United Arab Emirates.

Democratic Senators Bob Menendez and Chris Murphy and Republican Senator Rand Paul announced on Wednesday that they would introduce four separate resolutions of disapproval of Trump’s plan to sell billions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones and other munitions, F-35 fighter aircraft and air-to-air missiles to the UAE.

The lawmakers who cited national security concerns and the UAE’s ‘behaviour’ in Yemen and Libya as reasons to halt the sale said that the move by Trump’s administration to rush the sale of the sophisticated weaponry circumvented the normal congressional review process.

One of the Senators, Murphy was also concerned with the UAE’s “behaviour” in the region, according to a joint statement he and Menendez released on Wednesday.

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“The Emiratis are an important security partner, but their recent behavior indicates that these weapons may be used in violation of U.S. and international law. The UAE has violated past arms sales agreements, resulting in U.S. arms ending up in the arms of dangerous militia groups, and they have failed to comply with international law in Libya and Yemen,” Murphy said in the statement.

This came after Trump fired the head of the federal agency charged with protecting the 2020 US Election from cyber-attacks, Christopher Krebs, for saying the November 3 presidential election was clean and fair.

Trump took to his verified Twitter handle on Wednesday, November 18, to announce the sacking of Krebs, whom he said was working discretely for the Democratic Party and its candidate, Joe Biden.

In one of his tweets, Trump accused Krebs of issuing a “highly inaccurate” statement when he said the US election was conducted without error.

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