Biden Won’t Penalize Saudi Crown Prince Over Khashoggi’s Killing, Fearing Relations Breach - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Biden has decided that the diplomatic cost of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is too high, according to senior administration officials, despite a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist who was drugged and dismembered in October 2018.

Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value,” came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies.

While human rights groups and members of his own party applauded the president for making public the official intelligence finding, whose contents leaked more than two years ago, many said that it was just a first step — and that more had to be done to hold the crown prince, known by his initials M.B.S., accountable for his role.

Biden to, at a minimum, impose the same travel sanctions against the crown prince as the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.

Biden’s aides said that as a practical matter, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon, and they denied that they were giving Saudi Arabia a pass, describing series of new actions on lower-level officials intended to penalize elite elements of the Saudi military and impose new deterrents to human rights abuses.

Biden, one official said, described the new sanctions the United States is imposing to King Salman, the crown prince’s father, in a phone call on Thursday that was only vaguely described in a White House account of the call.

That review, officials said, would be part of the annual State Department human rights report.

It is part of an effort, officials said, to create a new category of human rights abuses — one called “extraterritorial repression,” a growing issue as Russia, China and even allies like Turkey try to silence critics who are living in Europe, the United States or other free societies.

A study by administration officials found that the United States had acted against adversaries like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria; Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea; President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; and Robert Mugabe, the former prime minister of Zimbabwe.

“Over all, I’m hugely pleased by the declassification,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, who was the assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Obama administration.

And if you sanction the crown prince directly you basically create a relationship of hostility, and you force them to show that there is a high price the United States has to pay for that.”.

needs to act now to put human rights at the forefront of its relationship with Saudi Arabia.” That is exactly what Biden administration officials say their raft of new actions will do

But the group added that the United States should declare that its freeze on offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia would not be lifted until the Saudis themselves brought those implicated in the killing to justice, “including the crown prince.”