Following President Joe Biden’s decision to protect Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from a lawsuit on Thursday for his role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the paper released a statement on Friday in which it harshly criticized the VP.
In response to a lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancée and the rights group he founded, Democracy for the Arab World Now, the Biden administration said Thursday night that MBS’s status as holding a high office “allows immunity.”
In granting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman immunity from prosecution, the president is betraying American values, according to Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post. After killing Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post, the Saudi crown prince has been accused of “giving a license to kill to one of the world’s most egregious human-rights abusers.”
Ryan argued that the Saudis’ decision to make MBS prime minister was a cynical, calculated attempt to manipulate the law and protect him from accountability. If President Biden were to go along with this scheme, it would betray press freedom and equality. We, the American people included, should demand better for all those MBS has wronged in Saudi Arabia and worldwide.
Richard C. Visek, the acting legal adviser at the Department of State, stated on Thursday that the United States “recognizes and allows the immunity of Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman as a sitting head of government of a foreign state.”
The letter continued, stating that “as a sitting head of government, Prime Minister bin Salman is immune while in office from the jurisdiction of the United States District Court in this suit under common law principles of immunity articulated by the Executive Branch in the exercise of its Constitutional authority over foreign affairs and informed by customary international law.” When making its determination of immunity, the State Department “takes no view on the merits of the present suit” and “reiterates its unequivocal condemnation of the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”
The last thing the letter asked the DOJ to do was a suggest of immunity be submitted to the district court.
During a presidential debate in 2019, the president stated his intent to “make [Saudi Arabia] pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.” The CIA and FBI concluded that MBS “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”