President Trump pushed back against sanctioning Saudi Arabia over the disappearance and likely killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, saying the Saudis have pledged to buy $110 billion of military equipment from the United States.
But this number is fanciful and unlikely to come to fruition – and in any case many of the purported deals are long in the future, according to a detailed list obtained by The Fact Checker. Indeed, in a March meeting with the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Trump noted that the current set of planned deliveries was “peanuts.”
Let’s explore.
The Facts
When Trump completed his visit May, 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, claiming $270 billion in sales, we gave him Three Pinocchios after a review of the data. The $110 billion in military sales aroused great skepticism among experts, with Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution calling the claim “fake news.”
Most of the publicly announced items had been previously announced by the Obama administration and there appeared to be few, if any, signed contracts. Rather, many of the announcements were MOIs — memorandums of intent. There were six specific items, adding up to $28 billion, but all had been previously notified to Congress by the Obama administration.
After Trump’s remarks on Khashoggi, Reidel said the $110 billion figure was “still fake.”
