PHOTO: President Obama with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman in Riyadh on Wednesday


Catherine Ho writes for The Washington Post:


The Saudi government and its affiliates have spent millions of dollars on US law, lobby and public relations firms to raise the country’s visibility in the United States and before the United Nations at a crucial time.

And some of Washington’s premier law and lobby firms — including Podesta Group, BGR Government Affairs, DLA Piper and Pillsbury Winthrop — have been tasked with the job, according to a review of Justice Department filings. Five lobby and PR firms were hired in 2015 alone, signaling a stepped-up focus on ties with Washington.

The firms have been coordinating meetings between Saudi officials and business leaders and U.S. media, and promoting foreign investment in the Saudi economy. Some have even been tasked with coming up with content for the embassy’s official Twitter and YouTube accounts.

The Saudi government, embassy and government-owned entities have been contracting with U.S. consulting firms for more than 30 years. The work ranges from years-long agreements for legislative advice to one-time PR outreach efforts during “VIP visits” of Saudi leaders to Washington and New York.

For 12 days last June, for example, consultants at the PR firm Edelman handled the visit of Abdulaziz Al-Harbi, CEO of International Trust Construction, during the executive’s trip to New York. They set up meetings with business, government and media leaders and earnied $10,000 for their efforts.

In 2014, consultants at the PR firm Qorvis developed content for the Saudi Arabia embassy’s YouTube and Twitter pages, and ran the Twitter account for the Syrian Opposition Coalition.

“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” said Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money and influence in politics. “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.”

President Obama met Saudi King Salman in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Wednesday. The sit-down comes at a complicated time in relations between the United States and its longtime ally in the Middle East.

In an interview published in The Atlantic magazine this month, Obama criticized Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf for being “free riders”. The remarks follow years of increasingly strained relations between U.S. and Saudi leaders, who were especially unhappy about the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional archenemy, which prompted many Saudi officials to question their country’s standing with the United States.

A new wrinkle has the potential to make the meeting even more uncomfortable. On Sunday, Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders expressed their support for a bipartisan bill that would allow family members of 9/11 victims other terrorist attacks to sue foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia, for restitution. The bill was introduced in September by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) and has sewn a rift between Senate Democrats and the White House.

The Saudi government has threatened to sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other U.S. assets if the bill is passed. A White House spokesman on Monday hinted that Obama would veto the measure if Congress were to pass it.

It is unclear whether lobbyists and PR representatives for Saudi Arabia are actively aiming to influence members of Congress or the administration on that particular bill. Leaders at the firms either declined to comment or did not return requests for comment for this story.

But the country and its affiliates have contracted high-profile lobby shops to help burnish their image and protect their standing in Washington. And such work comes with generous fees.

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