Trump Jr. promotes tweet smearing missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi as a secret terrorist ally

Donald Trump Jr. on Friday promoted a tweet from Federalist founder Sean Davis that smeared missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi as an ally of the late terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In the tweet, Davis commented on a separate tweet from Pajamas Media foreign correspondent Patrick Poole, who dug up an old article from 1988 that Khashoggi wrote about the U.S.-backed anti-Russian insurgency in Afghanistan.

"I didn’t realize until yesterday that Jamal Khashoggi was the author of this notorious 1988 Arab News article of him tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda co-founder Abdullah Azzam," Poole wrote. "He’s just a democrat reformer journalist holding a RPG with jihadists."

Davis then approvingly cited Poole's analysis and commented, "It's almost like reality is quite different than the evidence-free narratives peddled by media with a long history of cooperating with or getting duped by Iran echo chamber architects."

This tweet was subsequently promoted by Trump Jr.

What Poole doesn't mention in his citation of the Khashoggi-written article on the Afghanistan mujahideen, however, is that at the time they were receiving American money and weapons to fight against the Soviet Union, which had been occupying their country for nearly a decade.

In 1983, then-President Ronald Reagan praised the mujahideen by referring to them as "Afghan freedom fighters" for their struggle to drive out the Soviet army.

Jamal Khashoggi, who frequently wrote articles critical of the Saudi government, has been missing ever since he entered Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey last week. Several leaks from intelligence agencies have claimed that he was killed by Saudi operatives and then dismembered and removed from the building in pieces.