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mohammad bin salman
After 'Disgusting Display' at White House, Omar Says Congress Must Stop Trump Sale of F-35s to Saudis
"Trump is prioritizing weapons-contractor profits and his own family’s business interests," said US Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Nov 19, 2025
The deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said Tuesday that lawmakers should pull out all the stops to prevent US President Donald Trump from selling F-35s to Saudi Arabia following Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's White House visit.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) called the White House reception for bin Salman, who is commonly known as MBS, a "disgusting display" and a "new low in longstanding US support for the repressive monarchy," pointing to Trump's whitewashing of the crown prince's role in the horrific murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Omar also condemned Trump's attack on ABC News reporter Mary Bruce, who asked about Khashoggi's murder during the crown prince's White House visit.
"It is truly disturbing that the president of the United States dismissed Khashoggi’s entrapment, murder, and dismemberment at the hands of MBS' assassins simply as, 'things happen,'" said the Minnesota Democrat.
Omar called on fellow lawmakers to join her in working to block Trump's "reckless and corrupt deals" with the Saudis, including his proposed sale of F-35 fighter jets.
"With announced sales of F-35 warplanes and billions in financial investments, Trump is prioritizing weapons-contractor profits and his own family’s business interests, including Jared Kushner’s private equity firm that took $2 billion from MBS," said Omar, who noted that the Saudis have used US arms to devastating effect in Yemen.
The details of Trump's proposed F-35 sale are not yet fully clear, but the US president indicated on Tuesday that the agreement would not include any conditions. The Saudi regime is one of the world's worst human rights abusers, wielding the death penalty and other repressive tactics to violently crush dissent.
"We’re going to have a deal. They’ve going purchase F-35s," Trump said Tuesday. "They’re buying them from Lockheed and it’s a great plane."
Once Congress is formally notified of the proposed sale, lawmakers will have a limited window to consider a resolution of disapproval that, if passed, would block the transaction.
"While the defense industry and American billionaires will profit handsomely with the gifts Trump is doling out to MBS. The American people will be left holding the bill."
During Tuesday's meeting, Trump announced that his administration has designated Saudi Arabia as a "major non-NATO ally," a status that enhances military cooperation between the two countries. Israel is also a "major non-NATO ally" of the US.
Omar said Tuesday that "no American soldiers may be sent into harm’s way to defend Saudi Arabia" as part of the agreement "without a debate and vote of authorization from Congress."
"My Progressive Caucus colleagues and I are committed to ensuring that this remains the case," she added.
The human rights group DAWN, an organization founded by Khashoggi, also voiced concerns about the security pact, warning in a statement that Trump is working to "protect a reckless, impulsive dictator, all in the interests of personal and corporate gains."
"While the defense industry and American billionaires will profit handsomely with the gifts Trump is doling out to MBS," the group added, "the American people will be left holding the bill."
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'Cartoonishly Villainous' Saudi Plot to Hook Poor Nations on Oil Exposed
"It's like the tobacco companies that knew the addictive and lethal nature of cigarettes yet continued to get millions of teenagers hooked on them," said one African critic.
Nov 28, 2023
With the world hurtling toward catastrophic temperature rise, "Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is overseeing a sweeping global investment program" intended to "ensure that emerging economies across Africa and Asia become vastly more dependent on oil" even as the international community tries to phase out planet-heating fossil fuels.
That's according to a sixth-month undercover investigation by the U.K.'s Center for Climate Reporting (CCR) and Channel 4 News, based on regulatory filings, documents from Saudi officials, and secret recordings.
The findings were published Monday in the leadup to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) set to kick off Thursday in the United Arab Emirates.
As CCR detailed:
The Oil Demand Sustainability Program (OSP) is a vast government program with dozens of projects aimed at embedding a high-carbon, fossil fuel-dependent development model in countries across Africa and Asia. This includes meticulously researched plans to drive a major increase in gasoline and diesel-fueled vehicles and boost jet fuel sales via increased air travel.
It brings together the most powerful arms of the Saudi state, including the $700 billion Saudi Public Investment Fund; the world's largest oil company, Saudi Aramco; petrochemicals giant, Sabic; and the kingdom's most important ministries—all under the auspices of the crown prince's supreme committee of hydrocarbon affairs.
When asked by an undercover reporter whether the aim of the program is to artificially stimulate oil demand to counter global efforts to reduce oil consumption and tackle climate change, a Saudi official responded: "Yes... it is one of the main objectives that we are trying to accomplish."
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Energy—which did not respond to a request for comment—mainly "characterizes the OSP as a sustainable development initiative" to aid developing countries, CCR reported.
However, as the center highlighted, key pieces of the kingdom's plot include plans to promote oil-based power generation, deploy petrol and diesel vehicles in Africa and Asia, work with a global auto manufacturer to make a cheap car, lobby against government subsidies for electric vehicles, and fast-track commercial supersonic air travel.
Power Shift Africa director Mohamed Adow told CCR that "the Saudi government is like a drug dealer trying to get Africa hooked on its harmful product. The rest of the world is cleaning up its act and weaning itself off dirty and polluting fossil fuels and Saudi Arabia is getting desperate for more customers and is turning its sights on Africa."
"It's like the tobacco companies that knew the addictive and lethal nature of cigarettes yet continued to get millions of teenagers hooked on them," Adow added, "it's repulsive."
Rapid Transition Alliance coordinator Andrew Simms similarly said on social media, "Straight outta the tobacco companies' playbook."
The Saudi investigation was released on the same day that the center and BBC revealed that Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the UAE's Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and president of COP28, used meetings about the summit to push for foreign fossil fuel deals.
"This undermines essential impartiality and the integrity of the talks, and will accelerate devastating global heating," said the Environmental Justice Foundation, pointing to both revelations. "These backroom deals serve wealthy nations and fossil fuel profiteers at the expense of everyone else."
Also noting both reports, American author and climate activist Bill McKibben wrote Tuesday that "the new documents, which really must be read to be believed, perform the same essential task as the revelations almost a decade ago about Exxon's climate lies. They end any pretense that these countries are engaged in good-faith efforts to wind down the industry."
"It's difficult, I think, to imagine anything much more systemically evil than this spate of bids by the oil companies and oil countries to keep wrecking the planet; it's akin to the way that tobacco companies, facing legal losses in the U.S., pivoted to expand their markets in Asia instead," he added, describing the Saudi plot as "almost cartoonishly villainous."
The kingdom has a long history of impeding climate action—particularly progress at global talks, as three experts laid out in a paper released last week by the Climate Social Science Network at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.
"Saudi delegations to the U.N. climate talks are highly skilled, well-organized, and have been extremely successful over decades at slowing the efforts of the world community on climate change to a crawl," the trio wrote. "Saudi Arabia's actions should be seen as part of a wider web of obstruction to an effective response to climate change, which includes fossil fuel industry groups and other (predominantly U.S.-based) political lobbyists and elites, and allied intergovernmental organizations."
As Common Dreams reported last week, the U.N. has allowed at least 7,200 delegates for fossil fuel companies and industry trade groups to attended climate talks since 2003. This year, attendees must disclose their affiliation under new transparency rules.
The summit comes as scientists warn that 2023 is projected to be the hottest year in 125,000 years and currently implemented emissions policies will likely lead to 3°C of temperature rise by the end of the century—or double the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement.
"Leaders must act to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, protect people from climate chaos, and end the fossil fuel age," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declared Monday. "They must make COP28 count."
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'He Didn't Deserve to Die, But...' Writes Pompeo of Dismembered Journalist
"Astonishing use of 'but' that enables the efforts of the Saudi regime to blame Khashoggi for his own murder," said one journalist.
Jan 23, 2023
The widow of murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Monday denounced former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his comments about her husband in Pompeo's upcoming memoir, in which he questions Khashoggi's journalism credentials and his allegiances.
As excerpts from Pompeo's book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, became public a day before its publication date, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi told NBC News she wishes she were able "to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband, and collect money from it."
Elatr Khashoggi fired back after NBC News reported that in Pompeo's book, he writes of Jamal Khashoggi, "He didn't deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was—and too many in the media were not."
The book contains accusations that Khashoggi "was cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood," alludes to his coverage of and friendship with Osama bin Laden when both were young, and says he was an "activist" rather than a journalist.
Elatr Khashoggi, whom the Saudi national married in 2018 in an Islamic ceremony, told NBC that "Jamal Kashoggi is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood" and that he "always condemned" the September 11, 2001 attacks masterminded by bin Laden.
"Whatever Mike Pompeo mentions about my husband Jamal Khashoggi, he doesn't know my husband," Elatr Khashoggi tweeted.
Khashoggi, who wrote critically of the Saudi government, was killed in October 2018 by a group of assassins in Istanbul. Khashoggi's family sued Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and accused him of personally ordering the execution in 2020, and a United Nations report found that "high-level officials" in Saudi Arabia were responsible for the murder, but last year the Biden administration recommended that bin Salman, as prime minister, be shielded from U.S. lawsuits regarding the case.
While attacking Khashoggi for his loyalties, Pompeo, a Republican who has said he is considering a 2024 presidential run, notes in the book that the U.S. has a "strategic" relationship with the Saudis to consider.
"Shame on you, Mike Pompeo, HarperCollins, and Broadside Books for publishing these lies about my husband," tweeted Elatr Khashoggi.
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