Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman was concerned about Riyadh losing support in Washington if US President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a US intelligence assessment declassified by the White House reveals.
“In mid-2019, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman expressed concern that Riyadh would lose US support for its priorities if the President were to lose the election in 2020,” reads the assessment that was part of a trove of documents that Trump released last night as he attempted to raise the alarm about purported foreign threats to US election integrity.
US-Saudi ties did indeed deteriorate after Trump lost to Biden in 2020, but Biden would go on to try to repair the relationship as he sought to negotiate a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The rest of the sentence is redacted, except for a phrase characterizing Trump as “the most Saudi-friendly of any US president.”
Another line in the intelligence assessment states that “senior Turkish officials, including President Erdogan, believe that segments of the US government have an entrenched, anti-Turkey viewpoint, and as a result have sought to covertly influence US politicians’ and political candidates’ thinking on Turkey.”
“Ankara’s efforts have, over the past year, included covert funding of US municipal election campaigns, unregistered lobbying efforts, and messaging on social media by state-owned outlets,” the document adds.
The documents note that Iran is among the leading foreign actors attempting to influence US elections, though, not to the degree of China and Russia.
Overall, the documents don’t appear to have a smoking gun validating Trump’s alarmist claims about threats to election integrity. Israel goes unmentioned in the released documents.