The Arms Deal That Wasn’t: Jared Kushner Inflated Numbers on Saudi Deal

So let me get this straight…

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia orders the brutal, bloodthirsty murder of a journalist and American resident, Jamal Khashoggi, and our president blows it off because of an arms deal between our nations?

WAIT… It gets better.

He blows it off because of an arms deal, but it’s apparently a deal that is nowhere near as big as the Trump administration made it out to be, and they’re not even locked into the amount they actually did agree to.

The price tag we’re seeing tossed about by the administration is $110 billion, but ABC News reported on Monday that that was an “aspirational” price tag, with inflated numbers, at the direction of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

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.

“We need to sell them as much as possible,” Kushner told colleagues at a national security council meeting weeks before the May 2017 summit in Saudi Arabia, according to an administration official familiar with the matter.

Initially, Department of Defense and State Department officials informed Kushner that a more realistic number was around $15 billion. The Saudis had an interest in a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system and maintenance of other systems. At this point, however, even those sales have remained unfinished.

The sale was supposed to go down by September, but it didn’t happen.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council said that the White House, State Department and Department of Defense worked “tirelessly” with their Saudi counterparts to come up with the arms outlined in the memo, based on “rigorous analysis of Saudi requirements and of optimal U.S. solutions.”

“This unprecedented level of cooperation and effort led directly to the Memorandum of Intent, which was signed at the summit,” an NSC spokesperson said in a statement. “The administration continues to make progress on the $110 billion in intended arms sales announced in May 2017.”

Let’s not be naïve about this. This is an effort to make President Trump appear to be a great dealmaker, while also giving a nod to the relationship between Kushner and the murderous crown prince.

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.

Many of these deals were negotiated during the Obama administration, but U.S. officials say Trump’s diplomatic pressure was effective in fulfilling the pending orders.

Except they’re not fulfilled, and the inflated numbers are just to make it sound as if Donald Trump is a wheeler and a dealer.

He’s not.

“This is a record amount of money,” Trump said. “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 U.S. defense contractors.”

More Trump puffery.

A memo of intent was seen by ABC News and confirmed by a former White House official. It’s apparently vague, at best. It’s almost as if the United States and Saudi Arabia were “chatting” about one day making some kind of deal, rather than actually making a deal.

It’s embarrassing.

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 state official described the list of goods as those things that the Saudi government had expressed an interest in.

That’s it. They were interested, but not necessarily prepared to buy.

We call that “window shopping.”

“They were asking us to put as much pressure on the Saudis as we could [to buy American arms],” said a former National Security Council official. “It was definitely being pushed on the Pentagon people to see what was possible with the Saudis.”

And that’s the point. It was a promise, or a hope, but that big arms sale we were told was the reason Trump would not be tougher on the Saudi government for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi isn’t even a “thing.” It’s smoke and mirrors, at best.

Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institute defense strategy analyst slammed the memo of intent as being “amateurish.”

“It acknowledges it’s not binding,” O’Hanlon told ABC News.

“It’s a multi-billion dollar transaction with three short lines of information as if that’s meaningful. It’s like you’re taking notes on the back of a napkin over dinner. It’s not a contract. It’s the idea of putting all of these numbers in the interest for the biggest number you can find.”

One former senior National Security Council official said it’s not unusual to push for concrete deliverables to announce at major events, but the official called the scale and level of exaggeration of the $110 billion figure “unprecedented.”

And I get aiming big, when trying to make a sale of this nature. I also get the planning, the sales pitch, the work to close the deal.

What I don’t get is pushing on in something that is nowhere near a sure thing, when one party has done something so egregious as dismembering another human being while they were still alive.

And of course, this gives Democrats plenty to say about Trump and the Republican party that backs him.

“These details raise even more questions about what is really driving the Trump administration’s refusal to crack down on Saudi Arabia’s behavior,” said Democrat Rep. David Cicilline, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“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, thoroughly review our relations with Riyadh, and cut off assistance for Saudi efforts in Yemen that have created a massive humanitarian crisis.”

And he’s not wrong to bring up those questions.

Trump warned that if we turned from Saudi Arabia now, that China and Russia would capitalize and make those sales.

At this point, there’s no guarantee they won’t do that very thing, anyway. We don’t have a deal with the Saudi government.

All we have for certain, at this point, is Jared Kushner’s inflated numbers and a dead journalist.