The Prince, With a Hit Squad, In the Embassy: The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Istanbul embassy last month. The Washington Post first reported the story.

Khashoggi had gone to the embassy to pick up documents he needed to get married. He was directed to go there by Saudi Ambassador to the US  Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince’s brother, the Post reports according to its sources. The ambassador assured Khashoggi he would be safe and it’s not known whether he was a party to the plot.

A 15-man team was waiting for Khashoggi, one of them carrying a bone saw to dismember his body.

The CIA made its conclusion based on a number of sources, including a recording of the killing made through a microphone hidden by Turkish intelligence in the Saudi embassy. It also concluded that no one in Saudi Arabia would plan and carry out such an operation without the crown prince knowing and ordering it. “The accepted position is that there is no way this happened without him being aware or involved,” one official told the Post.

The leak of the CIA’s assessment appears to be an intentional effort to publicly pressure and embarrass President Trump, who has accepted bin Salman’s denial that he ordered the hit. Trump’s effort to be tight friends with Saudi Arabia, led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, is a key part of his Middle East strategy.

Decorum in the Press Room: The White House must restore press credentials to CNN’sJim Accosta, according to a limited ruling by a federal judge who did not tackle the First Amendment issues in the case. US District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee,  ruled that the White House violated Acosta’s right to due process when they revoked his pass after a testy confrontation with the President during a news conference.

Kelly made no ruling on whether a reporter can be ejected for asking questions the White House doesn’t like. “I want to emphasize the very limited nature of this ruling,” the judge said from the bench. “I have not determined that the First Amendment was violated here.”

The case is back in court Monday.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying, “Today the court made clear there is no absolute First Amendment to the White House.”

No, he didn’t — just as he said he didn’t. Sanders went on, “In response to the court, we will temporarily reinstate the reporter’s hard pass. We will also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future. There must be decorum at the White House.”

That’s actually ominous. They describe Acosta’s pass as “temporary” and they might create rules that will make it easier to kick out reporters.

The News Roundup: President Trump says he will nominate Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler has been acting administrator since the departure of the ethically-slippery Scott Pruitt. He has been instrumental in rolling back environmental regulations to reign in coal and tailpipe emissions.  —Amidst a spate of mass shootings this fall, gun control groups outspent the National Rifle Association in campaigning for the midterm elections. They spent $37 million, compared to $20 million by the NRA.—The Argentine navy announced that it has found its submarine that disappeared under the Atlantic a year ago with 44 sailors on board. — By the end of yesterday, 71 bodies had been found in the ashes of the wildfire that wiped out Paradise, Calif. The number of missing and unaccounted for jumped by 400 to 1,000. Some, if not many of those, will be people who don’t know they’ve been declared missing.

Down for the Count: Democrat Stacey Abrams conceded her quest to become governor of Georgia yesterday, admitting she doesn’t have the votes to beatRepublican Brian Kemp. She said an “erosion of democracy” had kept many of her supporters from the voting.

The Obit Page: William Goldman, considered one of the greatest screen writers of the late 20^thcentury, has died at age 87.

Goldman wrote, “Misery,” “A Bridge Too Far,” “The Stepford Wives,” “The Princess Bride” and “Marathon Man.”He was a struggling novelist when his first screenplay for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” sold for an astounding $400,000 in the late 1960s. He became a rare thing in Hollywood, a writer who was a star.

Goldman didn’t love the business in which he was a master. He offended all of Hollywood when he wrote in his book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” that “Nobody knows anything.” By that he meant no one really knew how to make a hit.

About screen writing he told an interviewer, “I don’t mean to knock it — it ain’t easy. But if it’s all you do, if you only write screenplays, it is ultimately denigrating to the soul. You may get lucky and get rich, but you sure won’t get happy.”— Zhores Medvedev, the dissident Soviet biologist and writer who was a key figure in the intellectual resistance to Soviet Union repression of ideas, science, and human rights, has died in London at age 93. Medvedev was a prominent dissident along with his  physicist brother Roy, the physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To get rid of him, the Soviets declared Zhores Medvedev insane and put him in a mental institution.

Homework:President Trump says he has completed written answers to questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia investigation. He said it was “very easy.” He also said of the questions, “I’m sure they’re tricked up by people who probably have bad intentions.”

If getting to the truth is a bad intention then, yes, they are.

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