1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Protection of Saudi Dissidents Act of 2019 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist, was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2, 2018, by agents with close ties to the Government of Saudi Arabia. (2) Khashoggi was a longtime resident of the United States, living in Virginia under an O visa and was in the process of applying for a permanent residency. Two of his four children are United States citizens. (3) For many years, Khashoggi wrote on Saudi political and cultural issues and after criticisms of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, Khashoggi chose to reside in the United States due to his growing fear of arrest in Saudi Arabia. From a self-imposed exile, he wrote monthly columns in the Washington Post, including columns that criticized various Saudi policies. (4) On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul with his fiancée to conduct routine consular matters. She waited for him for over ten hours outside the consulate, but he never re-emerged. The Turkish authorities subsequently reported that Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate. (5) For over two weeks following the murder, Saudi Arabia denied any knowledge of Khashoggi’s whereabouts and claimed the allegations were false and baseless . However, on October 20, 2018, state television in Saudi Arabia reported that the journalist was murdered in a rogue operation under the orders of intelligence officers. (6) Though Saudi Arabia has detained 21 people, dismissed two senior officials, and charged eleven people for Khashoggi’s murder, the Government of Saudi Arabia has denied that Saudi leadership ordered the killing and has refused to extradite any suspects to Turkey. (7) To date the United States Government has taken no actions to force an independent, international investigation of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi nor shown any willingness to hold accountable the highest