The most important thing to know about the Trump administration’s defense of its hotly contested use of tariffs to bring allies and opponents to heel is not that it is a novel and unprecedented legal argument but rather a full-throated articulation of the campaign themes that got the president elected – in both 2016 and 2000.
In its legal documents, and in the oral arguments that took place before the Supreme Court Wednesday, the Trump administration paints a picture of America under siege.
Once thriving industrial towns in the Midwest hollowed out. Factories dismantled as supply chains have been moved offshore. Hostile foreign nations flooding the US with drugs and once productive workers turning to opioids and alcohol for solace as opportunities slip away.
If there is such a thing as a populist legal argument, the Trump administration is making it in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. And as if to up the stakes, the administration is predicting an economic catastrophe if the court moves to curtail Trump’s ability to impose tariffs without congressional signoff.
“The President… has determined (tariffs) are necessary to rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders,” the administration argues in court papers. “With tariffs, we are a rich nation; without tariffs, we are a poor nation.”
Indeed, the President has placed so much emphasis on the outcome of the case that he suggested for a short time that he might attend Wednesday’s hearing before backing off the idea.
What is most striking about Trump’s tariff regime, and his assumption that Congress grants the president broad authority to bypass a complex regulatory framework that has been in place largely undisturbed for decades is the underlying modus operandi.
Trump would likely never articulate it this way but his style in imposing tariffs is of a piece with much else he has undertaken – the shakeup of government agencies through DoGE, his unorthodox execution of foreign policy and his wholesale remaking of the Republican party. Move fast and break things, as they say in Silicon Valley.
Whether his claim that the president has unfettered authority to impose tariffs will win the day wasn’t entirely clear from the colloquy between the justices and US Solicitor General John Sauer who made the argument for the administration. Both conservative and liberal justices peppered Sauer with questions that focused on the administration’s assertion Congress had delegated tariff making authority to the president in times of national emergency.
They seemed skeptical that Congress had ceded that power, but later in the hearing conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett posed equally sharp questions of Neal Katyal, a former US solicitor general representing businesses suing to overturn the tariffs. Kavanaugh seemed concerned that blocking the president from unilaterally imposing tariffs on foreign made goods would conflict with the power granted the president under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign policy.
It would be logically inconsistent for the law to grant the president the power to impose trade embargoes, as it apparently does, while barring the president from imposing tariffs, Kavanaugh speculated.
Barrett appeared receptive to the administration’s argument that unwinding the president’s tariff regime would require the United States to refund hundreds of billions in projected proceeds. Such an outcome would create a “mess,” she said.
The court typically issues its opinions in June and July, at the end of its term. But it agreed to hear the tariffs case on an expedited basis and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that a decision will be issued sooner.
Through much of the nation’s history, Congress jealously guarded its power under Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution to “collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” but began to cede some of that authority to the president early in the 20th century. While that has enabled the president to impose new tariffs and raise and lower existing duties, the president’s authority has at the same time been constrained by a latticework of regulatory agency requirements and foreign treaties.
The issue before the court is whether the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, enacted in 1977, delegates tariff making authority to the president, permitting him to bypass existing controls. The law grants the president the power to “investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any… importation or exportation of… any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”
Presidents have typically used the law to impose financial sanctions on foreign governments and individuals, including asset seizures, but no president other than Trump has cited it as a basis for imposing tariffs. And nowhere in the text of the statute is the word tariff used.
At the hearing, liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan made much of this fact, but so too did conservative Neil Gorsuch, one of the court’s conservative majority. If the president could leverage his foreign policy authority into imposing tariffs, without congressional consent, there would be little for Congress to do in that arena.
“Could the President impose a 50-percent tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change,” Gorsuch asked.
Citing the fentanyl epidemic, Trump imposed steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China in January and February, blaming them for the flow of synthetic opioids into the US. In April, he imposed a second set of tariffs on all US trading partners, arguing that mounting U.S. trade deficits had created a national emergency while from time to time suspending some duties as US officials negotiated with their foreign counterparts.
At the outset, Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs triggered concerns that the higher cost of foreign made goods would trigger a new round of inflation.
But so far, the impact has been subdued. Importers, still apparently rolling in lush post pandemic profit margins, have been absorbing at least a portion of the difference. Meantime, Trump’s negotiated sale of soybeans and other agricultural goods to China may blunt the impact on agricultural imports and assuage American farmers. Moreover, the tariffs have had a huge impact on the US Treasury receipts. So far, the government has collected nearly $100 billion and estimates for a full year range as high as $750 billion if the tariffs remain in place.
But it isn’t just about revenue and economic clout. At bottom, the case centers on a fundamental theme of governance in the United States. Where does congressional authority end and where does the president’s begin and to what extent can the president’s foreign policy portfolio override the House and the Senate? It is a question that has animated American jurisprudence and politics from the beginning. Often there are powerful arguments on both sides and finding the right balance can be excruciatingly difficult.
Author: Chris Mondics
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Will the Supreme Court force Trump to repay tariffs?
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Will SCOTUS strip seats from Democrats?
The headwinds facing Democrats in Congress have been blowing powerfully for some time now. On culture, the economy, law enforcement and immigration the party is on the defensive as it casts about not only for a winning message, but leaders able to persuade the public the party remains relevant in the age of Trump.
Add to that list of hurdles the Supreme Court.
The court’s conservative majority has delivered one blow after another to treasured progressive causes including transgender rights, maintaining the federal workforce and presidential authority. Now the court is contemplating changes to the Voting Rights Act that could, if carried out, cause Democrats to lose a dozen or more seats in the House, all of them held by minorities.
Further losses for House Democrats couldn’t come at a less opportune time. While the Republican House majority is razor thin, Democrats have yet to hit on a theme that could plausibly drive a campaign to take back control. Off year elections typically favor the party out of power, but with opinion polls showing historically low ratings for Democrats nationally, the picture is bleak.
That is why the case before the Supreme Court is so problematic for Democrats. During oral arguments Oct. 15, Republican appointed justices seemed to suggest they were open to restricting and perhaps even ending a provision of the Voting Rights Act that permits state legislatures to consider race when drawing up congressional districts. It’s not at all clear that the court, if it decides to strike down or dramatically change the law, will issue a ruling in time for next year’s congressional elections, though the possibility cannot be ruled out.
Most of the vulnerable districts are in the south. Were the court to curtail the act, some 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, might lose their seats.
The case, Louisiana v. Phillip Callais, centers on a redistricting battle in Louisiana following the 2020 census. Population changes forced the state Legislature to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts to ensure that the state’s voters were evenly distributed among them. A group of black voters challenged the plan, arguing that by creating only one black majority district, the state had intentionally discriminated against African American voters, who composed one third of the state’s residents.
A federal district court judge agreed and in response, Republican leaders preemptively came up with a new plan that created a second black majority district while at the same time protecting the seats of House Speaker Mike Johnson and majority leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans.
Deploying a dash of Constitutional finesse, the Republican authors of the new map declared that even though they had created the state’s second black majority district, the primary goal was not to redress a racial injustice, but rather to insure the Republicans’ advantage in the upcoming congressional elections. In the abstruse and often murky precincts of Constitutional law, the Republican map drawers seemed to be creating a defense against a line of attack that they had impermissibly used race in their redistricting plan.
It didn’t work. A group of white voters sued, alleging the map breached the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment by engaging in racial stereotyping to design the district, and they asked the court to throw out the redistricting plan.
During oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices appeared open to the idea of restricting or perhaps even overturning section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which in broad terms restrains state legislatures from engaging in the practice of racial gerrymandering, or intentionally distributing minority voters among multiple districts in a way that leaves them short of a majority.
Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that state legislatures may consider race among a number of other factors, including incumbent protection and geographic consistency, so long as the purpose of the plan is to remedy past discrimination.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh queried Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who argued in favor of keeping the second black majority district, on whether section 2 ought to be time limited in some way. The implication of course was that maybe the time had come to end the practice.
“As you know… this court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” Kavanaugh said. “And what exactly do you think the end point should be or how would we know for the intentional use of race to create district.”
Later in the hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointedly asked whether creating a black majority district would require that a state intentionally discriminate on the basis of race by excluding white voters.
At another point, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to imply that apportioning white or black voters from one district to another might not have anything to do with racial stereotyping but rather the result of partisan politics, since in many jurisdictions whites overwhelmingly vote Republican while blacks vote largely for Democratic candidates.
Under those circumstances, what might look like racial stereotyping instead is simply one party or another seeking to pack a district with their voters.
“If it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting, or is that just partisan voting?” Alito asked.
Gerrymandering, the practice of creating congressional districts to capture certain voting blocks and gain partisan advantage, dates back to former Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, an early master of the art. In 1814, Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, signed off on a redistricting plan with a state legislative district so misshapen that critics said it resembled a salamander. It wasn’t long after that “gerrymandering” entered the political lexicon.
The Supreme Court has periodically weighed in on the practice, usually giving great deference to state legislature. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, it even declared that there was no role for federal courts in restricting or controlling most gerrymandering disputes, since it was fundamentally a political function and a prerogative of state legislatures.
The court, however, has from time to time stepped into redistricting disputes that involve racial discrimination and that are brought under the Voting Rights Act. After the 2020 Census, when South Carolina state legislators redrew the boundary lines of Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace’s coastal district and removed about 30,000 black voters to make it more reliably Republican, the court upheld the new map saying the challengers had not proven that race was a predominant factor.
The Supreme Court agreed that the redesigned district’s purpose was to maximize Republican votes, not exclude blacks.
Earlier, in a 2013 opinion, chief justice John Roberts, wrote the court’s majority opinion overturning section 5 of the voting rights act, which required certain states with a history of discriminatory behavior to get preapproval from the Justice Department for changes to voting procedures.
Each decision marked an incremental change, but the overall effect has been to ratchet back judicial oversight of elections. If the Supreme Court curtails or eliminates section 2 of the voting rights act, the effect will be to further diminish the federal role. -
Is conversion therapy free speech?
Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice.
To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan.
While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation.
Fearing the law would interfere with her treatment of teenage clients wrestling with their sexuality, Chiles filed suit in federal court against Colorado alleging the statute violated her First Amendment free speech rights. She lost at the trial level and in the initial round of appeals, with jurists finding that Colorado’s ban fell well within its right to regulate medical practice and protect patient safety.
But it now appears the US Supreme Court is leaning toward upholding Chiles’s right to advise young clients that changing their sexual orientation is a viable and realistic option, despite widespread medical and scientific agreement that such techniques rarely, if ever, work.
In oral arguments on October 7, the state’s conservative majority peppered both sides with questions suggesting they were leaning in Chiles’s favor. A decision upholding Chiles’s appeal would follow a string of Supreme Court rulings in recent years favoring religious conservatives while creating new hurdles for gays and transgenders.
Without First Amendment protections, “states can transform counselors into mouthpieces for the government,” argued James Campbell, a lawyer for Chiles, at the Supreme Court hearing.
The case poses novel Constitutional questions that center on ability of medical professionals to communicate with patients about treatments they believe are effective but that have been outlawed by state regulators.
On a deeper level, though, Chiles’s lawsuit and the legal battle surrounding it are simply the latest fight in the nation’s long running conflict over cultural values, ranging from gay and transgender rights to abortions and race relations.
In June, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled in favor upheld a Tennessee ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity. In another ruling this year, the court also upheld, on a temporary basis at least, the Trump administration’s ban on LGBTQ persons serving in the military while the litigation continues
And in a 2018 decision that may well have a bearing on Chiles’s appeal, the court found in favor of religious conservatives by striking down a California law requiring anti-abortion groups to provide information on state funded abortion and contraception when counseling their clients. The court found that the law infringed on anti-abortion groups’ free speech rights.
Reflecting the heated politics underlying the Chiles case, dozens of interest groups from both sides of the ideological spectrum have filed amicus briefs with the court. Medical societies of various stripes have been particularly scornful of Chiles’s case. One brief filed by the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and other organizations representing health care professionals maintained that conversion therapy rarely if ever works. It argued at the same time that the practice causes great harm to patients by further confusing them about their identity and disrupting family relations while raising the risk of suicide.
Conversion therapy embraces a wide range of techniques, some bordering on barbaric, including aversion therapies using electroshock treatment and nausea inducing drugs. Some 30 states have banned it.
Chiles and her lawyers say she would employ none of those practices and that she engages only in talk therapy. But in court filings and in interviews, they stop short of describing exactly what Chiles would tell clients seeking to change their sexual orientation, only that she might advise them on how not to act out unwanted sexual impulses.
“When she engages in those conversations, she’s encouraging them to achieve their goals,” Campbell said during oral arguments. “She’s discussing concepts of identity and behavior and attractions and how they fit together.”
This is an ongoing active dialogue where she’s helping them explore their goals, and that absolutely has to be protected by the First Amendment.”
The state of Colorado of course sees it differently.
“No one has ever suggested that a doctor has the First Amendment right to offer the wrong advice,” countered Shannon Stevenson, Colorado solicitor general. “The law applies only to treatments, that is, only when a licensed professional is delivering clinical care to an individual patient. In that setting, providers have a duty to act in their patients’ best interests.”
During the October 7 oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices seemed supportive of Chiles’s free-speech claims. Justice Samuel Alito for one opined that because Colorado law bans discussion of conversion therapy but permits therapists to advise clients on transitioning from one gender to another, the law had clearly crossed a First Amendment red line.
“That looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Alito declared.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett queried Campbell on whether clients who felt they had been harmed by conversion therapy might be able to file a malpractice claim. It was a loaded question in the sense that proponents of Colorado law argue conversion therapy is harmful and that a First Amendment protection for therapists would leave patients defenseless.
Bryant’s question implied that civil litigation against irresponsible therapists might serve as a brake against harmful practices.
Chiles’s legal team, Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent Christian legal organization that has participated in over 70 Supreme Court cases, has packaged their client in a way that aims not only to persuade jurists but also the public at large. That is hugely important in the world of civil litigation. Having a sympathetic client is often just as pivotal as a powerful claim or even a particularly effective legal team. All the legal firepower in the world won’t help if juries and judges are put off by the claimant.
On its website, Chiles, who is based in Colorado Springs, is depicted in a video hiking in the Rockies near Denver while she talks on an audio track about her clients and how Colorado’s conversion therapy ban had frustrated their efforts to regain emotional health.
“They say that emotions are like children. It’s not OK to let them drive the car and it is not OK to stuff them in the trunk,” she says in the video. “I counsel my clients on… how to make their lives more fulfilling, satisfying and more in line with who God created them to be. What I am struggling with right now is that the state of Colorado has decided to impose their own values, not only on me but more importantly on my minor clients.”
It’s a well-articulated rationale by a seemingly credible plaintiff. It’s just not altogether clear, from the science at least, that her clients would benefit.
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Let the retribution begin
Let the retribution begin. A federal grand jury in the eastern district of Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, has indicted former FBI director James Comey for lying to Congress about leaking classified information to the press. During his four years at the FBI, Comey became a linchpin of the movement among Democrats in Congress and their legacy press supporters to oust Donald Trump during his first term.
Trump never forgives and he never forgets. He’s been vocal in calling for his Attorney General Pam Bondi to bring the hammer down on Comey and applauded the departure of the acting US attorney for eastern Virginia, whom he called a “woke RINO [Republican in name only]” when he declined to seek indictments of Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, another Trump scourge.
Comey’s bizarre tendency to insert himself into electoral politics is well documented. In July 2016, as Hillary Clinton moved toward winning the Democratic presidential nomination, Comey held a press conference to announce the results of a months-long investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, which contained hundreds of classified emails and which the FBI determined had probably been hacked by foreign governments. Despite finding that Clinton’s private server was likely to have violated the law – an apparent effort to hide her email communications from congressional investigators and the press – Comey gave Clinton a pass. “No reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring such a case, he declared, without providing much in the way of explanation.
Yet three months later, just weeks before the general election, Comey announced that he had found a new trove of Clinton emails and that he had reopened the investigation. The ensuing uproar changed the dynamic of the race, with Clinton having to defend herself against allegations she’d broken laws designed to protect government secrets from foreign spies. Clinton later blamed her narrow election loss on Comey’s decision to disclose the reopened investigation shortly before the election – and she was probably right in thinking so.
On the Republican side, no government figure was more instrumental in triggering the cascade of lawfare that overwhelmed Trump’s first term. Comey engineered a questionable criminal investigation into Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who was indicted on overblown allegations that he’d lied to FBI agents in a set-up interview.
In the world of white-collar crime, such charges are tantamount to door prizes for also-ran prosecutors who fail to prove the crime that initiated the investigation in the first place – in this case, colluding with the Russians. After years of legal wrangling, Trump pardoned Flynn and the Justice Department withdrew the case. But the affair bankrupted Flynn, who had to sell his house to pay the gargantuan legal bills. And of course, his career in public service was destroyed. Later, after hinting in congressional testimony that Trump had been colluding with the Russians in the 2016 election, Comey arranged to brief Trump on the almost entirely fallacious dossier of former British spy Christopher Steele, which asserted that the Trump election campaign was working with the Russians. The Steele dossier had been circulating among a handful of reporters in Washington in the fall of 2016, but no news organizations would touch it at first, so cartoonish were its allegations.
The briefing solved that dilemma. Word of Comey’s sit-down with Trump was leaked to CNN, which was then able to coyly explain that the dossier was newsworthy and important because, after all, it was the subject of a presidential briefing. In the minds of many Republican voters, Trump’s transparent desire to hit back at Comey is not only predictable but a desirable outcome. After all, the Russia collusion investigation turned up no evidence that Trump or his campaign worked with the Russians to defeat Clinton in 2016, yet much of Trump’s first term was consumed with pushing back against a manufactured scandal.
Although the allegations were baseless, they were like catnip for the anti-Trump press. Thus, more than a few Republicans have been heard to remark about Trump’s targeting of political enemies: “Yes, this is what I voted for.” But this is an extremely shortsighted approach. Just as the Biden administration’s targeting of Trump posed grave risks for the country, so too does Trump’s singling out of political enemies for prosecution. This case seems weak, based as it apparently is on conflicting “he said, she said” accounts of what Comey supposedly did. The congressional testimony in question took place on September 30, 2020, and the five-year statute of limitations was set to run out, meaning criminal charges would have been barred after the end of last month.
Career prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office for eastern Virginia and Attorney General Pam Bondi – who’s no woke RINO – all reportedly recommended against pursuing the matter. It’s not implausible that the trial judge may take a look at the evidence and dismiss the case at the outset. In law enforcement, a system driven by reprisals and a payback mentality quickly loses credibility and public trust.
Independence and judicious application of the law without political bias are fundamental characteristics of a credible justice system. Any hope that citizens will believe the law is being fairly applied, that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that prosecutors and judges are making good-faith decisions based on the law rather than some crass election issue would soon be dashed if it becomes acceptable practice to use law enforcement as a tool for pursuing political vendettas.
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When will we learn the truth about Saudi involvement in 9/11?
Will Saudi Arabia ever be held to account for the 9/11 terror attacks? For decades, the Kingdom has successfully parried lawsuits in the United States accusing it of providing logistical and financial support to a network of Islamic extremists who launched a global terror campaign, culminating in the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
Those attacks occurred 24 years ago and since then survivors and victims of the 9/11 hijackings have had to counter not only vigorous Saudi denials mounted by their well-funded American legal team but also repeated attempts by the US government to thwart the lawsuits.
But there are signs the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. On August 28, US District Judge George B. Daniels, in a little noticed ruling in Manhattan, denied a motion by the Kingdom to dismiss the case, opening the way for a trial. In his decision, Daniels found that a small cadre of Saudi government employees tied to the consulate in Los Angeles had formed a support network for two of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 and 2001 and probably had advance knowledge of the plot. In his opinion, Daniels raised the prospect of wider involvement by Saudi officials. Daniels ruling is the first judicial finding in the United States that the government of Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
A key piece of evidence in the case, what plaintiffs lawyers call an al-Qaeda surveillance video of the US Capitol, came from the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service. The Met obtained the video during a raid of the Birmingham home of a suspected Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, two weeks after 9/11.
Daniels said the evidence suggests Bayoumi, employed ostensibly as an accountant for a Saudi aviation firm, and Fahad al-Thumairy, a radical cleric based in the Los Angeles consulate, assisted two of the hijackers in advance of the attacks in their official capacity as Saudi government employees. “Thumairy and Bayoumi were not just acting as an imam and accountant,” Daniels declared. “Their employment with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia likely had some connection with assisting the hijackers.”
Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, 15 of them Saudi nationals, hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States the morning of September 11, 2001, and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. A fourth plane, which the terrorists apparently intended to use to attack the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers revolted and rushed the cockpit.
In all, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, including 657 at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, who were killed when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Cantor’s former CEO, Howard Lutnick, now US Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the Kingdom.
Plaintiffs lawyers have been collecting evidence of Saudi involvement almost from the day of the attacks – the first lawsuit against the Kingdom was filed on September 10, 2003 – and those facts have long suggested that the Saudis provided logistical and financial support to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The plaintiffs’ theory rests in part on uncontroverted evidence that the Saudi royal family and Saudi government officials, beginning in the mid-1980s funded Islamist charities that in turn supplied weapons and logistical support to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.
That movement later spread to the vicious Balkans war of the 1990s, which pitted indigenous Muslims and their al-Qaeda allies against local Serbs and Croats. From there, al-Qaeda quickly leapfrogged to attack other western targets including two US embassies in East Africa and the US Navy destroyer, USS Cole, culminating in the 9/11 attacks.
Regional offices of the charities employed al-Qaeda members in senior positions and these charities supplied money, travel documents, arms, safe houses and other assistance to al-Qaeda cells, the plaintiffs allege. Absent the assistance of Saudi government funded charities, a half dozen of which were designated as terrorism supporters by the US Treasury Department, al-Qaeda and bin Laden never could have mounted the logistically complex 9/11 operation.
So alarmed were US government officials by the role of the Saudi charities in funding international terror that then-vice president Al Gore met privately in 1999 with then crown prince Abdullah in the White House to ask for assistance in tracking down terror groups based in the Kingdom. Abdullah agreed to put senior US intelligence officials with their Saudi counterparts, but US officials said nothing came of it.
“We went to the Saudis as a government, showed them what we had, asked them for more information, warned them of what might take place and ultimately nothing happened,” said Jonathan Winer, then deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement.
Central to the lawsuits against the Kingdom are reports that emerged within days of the attacks that Bayoumi and Thumairy, the Saudi consular official, assisted Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the first 9/11 hijackers to arrive in the United States, getting settled in southern California in January of 2000.
Bayoumi’s ostensible employment as an accountant was with a Los Angeles based Saudi aviation company named Dallah Avco, in a government funded position. While Bayoumi drew a salary, fellow employees told investigators he only rarely showed up for work. He did, though, have multiple contacts with the hijackers, along with Thumairy, helping them find an apartment and co-signing a lease for a rental in San Diego, and arranging for them to take flying lessons and learn English.
When interviewed by the FBI shortly after 9/11, Bayoumi said he had met the hijackers by chance in a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles on February 1, 2000, near the Saudi consulate, where he had traveled to clear up a visa problem. He claimed to have taken the initiative to introduce himself to the hijackers when he heard them speaking an Arab dialect common in the Persian Gulf and felt it was his duty as a fellow Muslim to help them get settled.
This claim was dismissed early on by FBI investigators who concluded that Bayoumi’s luncheon meeting with the hijackers had been planned and that he likely was a Saudi intelligence operative with links to al-Qaeda. “(Bayoumi) acted like a Saudi intelligence officer, in my opinion,” an FBI agent told congressional investigators. “And if he was involved with the hijackers, which it looks like he was, if he signed leases, if provided some kind of financing or payment of some sort, then I would say there might be a clear connection between Saudi intelligence and UBL (Osama bin Laden).”
Bayoumi moved to England before 9/11, but soon after the attacks FBI agents who had picked up his trail in southern California, alerted British authorities of his potential role and the Met Police searched his Birmingham home. Among the items taken from the house was a video recording Bayoumi made of the US Capitol building in 1999 along with the Washington Monument and other landmarks. Also confiscated was a drawing of an airplane with a calculation that experts for both the FBI and plaintiffs lawyers later concluded was a mathematical formula showing the rate of descent necessary for an airplane to collide with a target on the ground.
While he made the video, Bayoumi was accompanied by two Saudi embassy officials from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, a branch of the Saudi government staffed at the time by radical clerics whose role was to propagate a militant form of Wahhabi Islam that vilified the west. In the video, Bayoumi takes pains to note the Capitol’s main entrances and points out locations of the capitol’s security staff.
Former acting CIA director Michael Morrel, and other former US intelligence officials have described the video as a casing film made in preparation for a terrorist attack. “No doubt in my mind that al-Qaeda tasked him to do this casing video,” Morrel said in an interview with CBS news.
One of the more salient aspects of the aftermath of 9/11 is the degree to which the United States government has sought to conceal what it knows about the origins of the plot, a tactic that has frustrated efforts by the plaintiffs lawyers to get at the truth while greatly benefiting the Saudis. The stonewalling began with the administration of President George W. Bush, which insisted on classifying and keeping from public view portions of the first congressional investigation, the so-called Joint Inquiry, raising questions about Bayoumi and the potential role of the Saudi government.
The late Senator Bob Graham, who co-chaired the investigation, then went so far as to accuse Bush of protecting the Kingdom because of Bush family ties to the oil industry and Saudi royals.
The equivocations and evasions continued through each succeeding administration. The FBI, for example, has been in possession of the Bayoumi video of the Capitol building since 2001, but failed to turn it over to not only plaintiffs lawyers but also the 9/11 commission. The plaintiffs only were able to access the video when the Met Police agreed to give it to them in 2022.
Some of the foot dragging at times has resembled theater of the absurd. Early in the case, when plaintiffs lawyers requested the Justice Department make public a copy of the Interpol bin Laden arrest warrant, the answer they got back was the warrant was protected by privacy rules and that department couldn’t release it without bin Laden’s permission.
At other points, the government obstruction was of far greater import. In 2009, then US Solicitor General Elena Kagan, now a US Supreme Court Justice, filed an amicus brief in the litigation asking the Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a lower court decision dismissing the case against the Kingdom. Kagan argued there was no persuasive evidence of Saudi government involvement, even as the FBI continued to pursue evidence Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence operative with possible links to al-Qaeda. The Supreme Court, heeding Kagan’s request, declined to hear the matter.
Later, in 2016, the Obama administration lobbied heavily against legislation intended to aid the 9/11 victims by expanding the basis for suing foreign governments that foment terrorism. Administration officials warned the Saudis would withdraw upwards of $750 billion in assets from US financial institutions if the bill became law. Obama vetoed the measure after both the House and Senate passed it overwhelmingly. Congress overturned the veto and the bill became law.
That measure, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, clarifies the US State Department need not designate a foreign government a terrorism supporter as a condition for being sued in US courts, a requirement that had hampered the 9/11 lawsuits. It also makes clear that not all of the tortious conduct must to take place in the United States.
The dire scenarios depicted by the Obama administration never came to pass, while the measure gave new life to the plaintiffs’ litigation and set the stage for Daniels’ groundbreaking decision on August 28.
Now that the lawsuits seem to be headed for trial, 9/11 victims and their families, along with the nation as a whole, may finally get answers to questions about Saudi Arabia’s involvement that have been swirling around the case since the beginning.