WASHINGTON – Why did Biden grant judicial immunity to Bin Salman? An expert on regional issues, referring to the White House’s move …
in granting judicial immunity to Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi crown prince on the Jamal Khashoggi murder case, said, “The move is a kind of political hypocrisy and shows that the U.S. has agreed to play an overbearing role in Bin Salman’s future and takes power in his father’s place.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden promised Americans to make Saudi Arabia and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), veritable “pariahs” on the international stage. The virtually unprecedented threat against a top-ranking member of the ruling house in Riyadh stemmed from the murder of the journalist-dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, who was hacked to pieces in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Four years later, the Biden administration has now secured formal immunity for MBS, who will thus have nothing to fear from the ongoing legal case against him in a U.S. court.
The heir to the Saudi throne is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, seeking “substantial” monetary reimbursement and proof from the U.S. government that the regime’s top leadership was responsible for ordering the brutal killing of the journalist. The role played in the events by MBS and some of his closest associates had almost immediately been revealed by the Turkish government, at that time at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia. Later, U.S. intelligence had also found and admitted with some confidence that the young prince was responsible.
As soon as he became president, Biden had also agreed to the publication of a CIA report that MBS was behind Khashoggi’s assassination, carried out under the direction of his personal security chief. Biden’s warnings as a White House candidate were clearly not dictated by moral scruples, but were primarily related to an attempt to politically exploit the very close ties established with the Saudi royals by then-President Trump. Once in the White House, moreover, Biden intended to pressure Riyadh basically to communicate a certain discontent with the regime’s foreign policy choices, which were increasingly marked by strategic autonomy from Washington.
However, this tactic bore no fruit. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia has since consolidated its relations with China and Russia even more, exemplified by its cooperation with the latter country in managing global oil flows through the “OPEC+” mechanism. As the situation in the oil markets worsened in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the government in Washington found itself pleading for increased Saudi crude oil extractions, thus advising a change in tone in communications with Riyadh.
Last week, therefore, the U.S. State Department instructed the Justice Department to intervene in the Khashoggi case and notify the court where the case is being heard that Mohammed bin Salman, as the head of a foreign government, should enjoy judicial immunity in connection with any proceedings on U.S. soil. For experts quoted on the issue in the U.S. press, the Biden administration was under no obligation to comment on MBS’s position. The government could have remained “neutral” and left the decision to the court. Instead, the fact that it decided to intervene in this way demonstrates the existence of a political motivation, if not an outright agreement with the Wahhabi monarchy.
