Jailed Saudis seek influence in Washington to counter crown prince

A handful of prominent jailed Saudis and their allies, concluding they are unlikely to win release by pleading directly with their own government, are planning to press their cases in Washington, including by hiring lobbyists with connections in President Donald Trump’s orbit.

The unusual prospect of Saudis publicly airing the royal family’s deep divisions comes at a challenging moment for Saudi Arabia and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Expected to ascend to the throne after the death of his aging father, King Salman, 84, Crown Prince Mohammed, 34, is struggling to guide his nation through a coronavirus-triggered economic downturn, while grappling with human rights concerns prompted in part by waves of arrests of dozens of royals, business and government officials, activists and journalists.

In an apparent effort to exploit the situation, allies of several Saudis in recent weeks have approached Washington lawyers and consultants about legal, lobbying and public relations campaigns to push for an end to what they say is political persecution by the kingdom.

A former senior associate of the jailed Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud on Friday signed a $2 million agreement to retain Robert Stryk, a Washington-based lobbyist who is well connected in Trump administration foreign policy circles, to “advocate for the release” of the prince, according to a contract.

Last month, Barry Bennett, a lobbyist and Republican strategist who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign, signed a client with links to an imprisoned prince who had been a top rival of Crown Prince Mohammed’s.

And another imprisoned royal, Princess Basmah bint Saud, a daughter of Saudi Arabia’s second king, has gone public with pleas to be released from detention, while her representatives have quietly reached out this month to lawyers and consultants in Washington and London about rallying support for her cause.

Despite the clampdown and other actions that have raised international concerns about Crown Prince Mohammed’s leadership — including the Saudi military intervention in Yemen, the killing of dissident Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 by Saudi officials and the kingdom’s oil price war this year with Russia — the Saudi government has enjoyed strong support from the White House. Crown Prince Mohammed has cultivated close relationships with Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser. The Saudi government has also increased its huge lobbying budget since the killing of Khashoggi.

But in Congress and in some corners of the Pentagon and the State Department, there is growing uneasiness with the crown prince, who is known by his initials MBS and who is acutely sensitive to his image on the world stage.

Allies of those imprisoned by him, and their Washington representatives, hope to exploit that situation to pressure him to release them through some combination of lobbying, public relations efforts to highlight human rights concerns and possible legal action in international courts, according to people familiar with the efforts.

Filings submitted by Stryk’s consulting firm, Sonoran Policy Group, to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act indicate that the firm will push for the release of Prince Salman with the governments of the United States, Britain, France and the European Union. The client for the contract, which lasts six months, is Hashim Mughal, a Paris-based Pakistani who is described in the filings as “a former senior associate” of Prince Salman.

Prince Salman was among 11 princes arrested in January 2018. At the time, the Saudi government justified the arrests as resulting from an unlawful protest, but the details of the arrest and Prince Salman’s whereabouts remain murky.

People close to Prince Salman say he spent about a year in the maximum security Al Ha’ir Prison outside Riyadh, the Saudi capital, then was transferred to home detention at a villa in Riyadh with his father, who was also detained, before being moved again this year.

The people suggest that Crown Prince Mohammed was motivated at least partly by jealousy toward Prince Salman, a Sorbonne-educated billionaire philanthropist who had travelled the world cultivating influential connections. Prince Salman is from a secondary branch of the royal family, but is married to a daughter of the late King Abdullah, and reportedly had lobbied for the release of a powerful cousin, Prince Turki bin Mohammed bin Saud al Kabeer, who had privately criticised MBS.

A representative of Princess Basmah’s family confirmed that he and one of the princess’s relatives had approached law firms in Washington and London about working for her release. But he said they were not able to hire any firm because the Saudi government had frozen Princess Basmah’s bank accounts after her appeal for release appeared on Twitter.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment about Princess Basmah, Prince Salman or other imprisoned Saudis.

Stryk has some experience representing MBS’ rivals, having previously registered to lobby in 2017 for Mohammed bin Nayef, who was the crown prince and first in line to the throne before being pushed aside and later detained by Crown Prince Mohammed.

One of Mohammed bin Nayef’s top advisers in Riyadh was Saad bin Khalid Aljabri. Last month, a firm controlled by one of his sons, Khalid Aljabri, a cardiologist based in Toronto, hired the lobbying firm of Bennett, the former Trump campaign adviser, to lobby for “emigration of foreign nationals for humanitarian reasons,” according to a lobbying filing. The filing does not indicate whose emigration is being sought or why.

While Saudi Arabia’s willingness to spend tens of millions of dollars annually on lobbying has made some Washington firms leery of representing its critics, Bennett’s firm already represents Qatar, a regional rival of the Saudis.

And Stryk has developed a reputation for representing international figures from whom many Washington lobbyists shy away. This year alone, he signed contracts to represent Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars from a state oil company she once headed, and the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, which the Trump administration considers illegitimate.

Stryk was representing the Maduro government as a subcontractor to a law firm. The law firm terminated its representation of the Venezuelan administration after Sen Rick Scott, who is a staunch Maduro opponent, wrote the law firm threatening to cut it off “as long as you represent a dangerous dictator who is against everything this country was built on.”

Stryk has connections to key figures in Trump’s orbit. He worked with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, during the impeachment inquiry on efforts to win business with foreign governments, including Bahrain. And he is close to Kirsten Fontenrose, who was the lead official on Trump’s National Security Council handling US policy toward Saudi Arabia before resigning in late 2018.

Fontenrose had pushed for reforms from the Saudi government in response to the killing of Khashoggi, but she was known to have negotiated agreeably with Prince Mohammed’s advisers. After her resignation, she went to work for Stryk’s firm before accepting a position running the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank.

Fontenrose, who is not working on behalf of any of the detained Saudis, said that in some ways, the pressures on Crown Prince Mohammed make this “look like an opportune time to press” him to release prisoners. But she suggested that American lobbyists and lawyers might have a hard time convincing the Trump administration of “the compelling reason for this to become a priority when the United States and Saudi Arabia have so many other topics” of more urgent geopolitical concern to address.

Some in Washington and Riyadh have speculated that Prince Salman may have gotten crosswise with the Saudi crown prince by meeting in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election in the United States with Rep Adam B Schiff, who was a leading Trump critic and later the manager of his impeachment.

The meeting also reportedly included Ahmad Khawaja, a Lebanese American businessman. Khawaja was charged in December with acting as a conduit for more than $3.5 million in illicit campaign donations to buy access and influence in Washington — initially with Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies during the 2016 campaign, and then with Trump after he won the election — to gain “favour” and “potential financial support” for the United Arab Emirates, a close Saudi ally.

Prince Salman’s representatives have sought to enlist support of Western leaders outside the United States, including President Emmanuel Macron of France.

And officials from the European Parliament have raised concerns about the detention of Prince Salman and his father in letters to the European Commission and to Crown Prince Mohammed.

“I remain confident that the release would positively impact in the relations of the European Parliament with Saudi Arabia,” wrote Marc Tarabella, a vice chairman of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab peninsula, in a letter to a leader of the European Commission.

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