Saudi Arabia is (maybe) buying $14.5 billion in arms from the US. Kushner lied and said it was $110 billion. Trump then bragged that the arms deal would create "hundreds of thousands of jobs." He, too, lied -- because he repeated Kushner's lie and embellished it. Two liars. "Like father-in-law, like son-in-law." And why is Trump selling arms to the country that the 9/11 hijackers came from? Oh, that's right: money. That's the same reason he refuses to say anything about the Saudi Crown Prince ordering the torture and murder of a journalist.
Jared Kushner pushed to inflate Saudi arms deal to $110 billion: Sources
ABC News, Nov 26 2018 12:07 PM
President Donald Trump's reluctance to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman accountable for the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi stemmed from a partly aspirational $110 billion arms deal between the US and Saudi Arabia that was inflated at the direction of Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, according to two US officials and three former White House officials.
Kushner, in a bid to symbolically solidify the new alliance between the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia while claiming a victory on the President's first foreign trip to Riyadh, pushed State and Defense officials to inflate the figure with arms exchanges that were aspirational at best, the officials said. Secretary of Defense James Mattis supported Kushner's effort and ultimately endorsed the memorandum, according to a former NSC official familiar with the matter.
Since the deal was signed by Mattis and bin Salman in Riyadh, there has been minimal activity toward purchasing the defense equipment and arms laid out in the arms agreements and signed. According to the Department of Defense, of the original $110 billion, Saudi Arabia has signed Letters of Offer and Acceptance valued at around $14.5 billion for equipment, including helicopters, tanks, ships, weapons and training.
"This is a record amount of money," Trump said Wednesday. "It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great US defense contractors."
The memorandum of intent shows an agreement between the two countries with very little legal weight. It states: "This document does not create any authority to perform any work, award any contract, issue articles from stock, transfer funds or otherwise obligate or create a binding commitment in any way either for the United States or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
One former senior National Security Council official called the scale and level of exaggeration of the $110 billion figure "unprecedented." Democrat Rep. David Cicilline, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, "These details raise even more questions about what is really driving the Trump administration's refusal to crack down on Saudi Arabia's behavior. If Jared Kushner inflated the size of this arms deal, we need to figure out why. Congress should get to the bottom of this and work to impose stronger sanctions on the Saudi regime."
Since the death of Khashoggi, Trump has insisted the US would be "foolish" to disrupt any potential weapons sales with the Saudis.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kush...ry?id=59418244
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