Cotton backs Biden on shielding Saudi leader from Khashoggi lawsuit

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Sunday voiced agreement with the Biden administration’s decision to grant sovereign immunity to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, shielding the autocrat from a lawsuit over the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

“What the administration has touted this week in granting sovereign immunity to Mohammed bin Salman is in keeping with the practice of custom of lawsuits involving foreign heads of state,” Cotton told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream. “It would have been a major break if those customs did not grant that kind of immunity.”

Through the State Department, the administration last week said the crown prince is legally immune from a lawsuit filed by Khashoggi’s fiancee.

The U.S. intelligence community previously concluded the killing of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, was ordered by the crown prince.

But Cotton said other regimes had done worse, and that the U.S. could not be too picky with its foreign partners.

“Saudi Arabia’s far from the world’s worst abuser of human rights,” Cotton said on Fox News. 

“You look at what’s been happening in Iran for the last three months, for instance, and where they’ve massacred protesters in the streets, or what China does to harvest organs or to commit genocide against religious and ethnic minorities,” he added. “Look, if we didn’t have allies and partners who don’t always share our political systems or our cultural and social sensibilities, we wouldn’t have any allies and partners.”

President Biden vowed during his presidential campaign to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” following Khashoggi’s killing, but he reversed course in July as he traveled to the country and gave a fist bump to bin Salman.

The trip to the oil-rich country came amid elevated oil prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that have contributed to inflation, although the White House has insisted Biden’s visit was not only about oil. 

Fred Ryan, the publisher of The Washington Post, has criticized Biden for both the trip and the recent move to grant the crown prince immunity.

“He is granting a license to kill to one of the world’s most egregious human rights abusers,” Ryan wrote of Biden.

Cotton noted that federal laws have changed to allow American citizens to sue governments that sponsor terrorist attacks, but he argued those changes don’t apply to the Khashoggi case.

“When you’re talking about individuals who are at the head of a foreign government, it’s been customary for decades to grant them immunity,” Cotton said. “So it would be a major break and another effort in the campaign to alienate and ostracize Saudi Arabia not to recognize this traditional kind of immunity.”

Later in the program, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said he agreed with Cotton’s assessment.

“The reason why there was a grant of sovereign immunity, even to leaders we don’t like, is as much to protect American leaders and American diplomats when they’re posted abroad from being subject to Saudi Arabian law or Russian law or South African law,” Warner told Bream. “So, this has been historical precedent.”