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Defense & National Security — Biden visits Saudi Arabia amid Middle East tensions

President Biden made his controversial trip Saudi Arabia on Friday, during which he met with Saudi Crown Price Mohammad bin Salman and other high-level officials. 

We’ll break down today’s developments. Plus, we’ll talk about the House passing its $840 billion National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023.  

This is Defense & National Security, your nightly guide to the latest developments at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill and beyond. For The Hill, I’m Jordan Williams. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Saudi Arabia hosts President Biden

President Biden met with Saudi Crown Price Mohammad bin Salman and other high-level Saudi officials on Friday, marking the third of his four-day trip to the Middle East. 

In remarks after his meetings, the president said the officials accomplished “significant business,” such the Saudis opening civilian airspace to all civilian carriers and working toward extending the current ceasefire between Yemen’s government and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group.

• Biden said the ceasefire between Yemen’s government and the Iranian-backed rebel group Houthis, which has been in place since April, has resulted in the “most peaceful period in Yemen in seven years.” The president also said the Saudis agreed to facilitate the delivery of food and humanitarian aid to civilians in Yemen.

“This trip is about once again positioning America in this region for the future,” Biden said. “We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia and China to fill, and we’re getting results.”  

Biden talked about Khashoggi: Biden said that he raised the 2018 murder of U.S-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi “at the top of the meeting” with Salman. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that the crown prince approved of Khashoggi’s murder.  

• “I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now,” the president said in a speech after hours of meetings with the Saudi crown prince and other Saudi officials in Jeddah.   
• “I said very straightforwardly for an American president to be silent on the issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am,” Biden continued. “I’ll always stand up for our values.” 

A historic flight: Biden on Friday became the first U.S. president to fly directly from Tel Aviv to Jeddah. 

• The fight was preceded by the news that Saudi Arabia would open its airspace to all airlines, including all commercial flights flying to and from Israel. Reports indicate the new policy could pave the way for direct flights from Israel to Saudi Arabia for Muslims to make pilgrimages to Mecca.   
• Previous presidents have flown directly between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Then-President George W. Bush flew from Israel to the Saudi capital of Riyadh, and then-President Trump flew from Saudi Arabia to Israel.   

The fist bump: Biden greeted the crown prince with a fist bump on Friday ahead of the controversial face-to-face meeting between the two men in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. 

Footage displayed on Saudi state television showed Biden emerging from his limo and fist-bumping the crown prince before the two entered Al Salam Royal Palace. 

But the gesture drew backlash as elevating bin Salman on the world stage despite Biden’s pledge to make the kingdom a “pariah” over Khashoggi’s murder.  

House passes $840 billion defense bill  

The House on Thursday passed its annual defense policy bill authorizing nearly
$840 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2023, approving a $37 billion boost to President  Biden’s defense budget. 

The lower chamber passed the bill on a bipartisan 329-101 vote. Thirty-nine Democrats and 62 Republicans voted against the measure. 

Backtrack: The House Armed Services Committee first advanced the bill in June by a vote of 57-1. 

The House bill allocates $808.4 billion in discretionary spending to the Pentagon, $30.5 billion to the Department of Energy, and another $400 million in defense-related activities elsewhere in the federal government. 

A record number of amendments: Lawmakers filed a record 1,230 amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) through the House Rules Committee for consideration by the full committee, though the lower chamber considered only 650 on the floor. 

• Among the amendments, the House turned down two offered by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to slash the total top line of the NDAA.
• The House also included amendments that would require officials to prepare a report analyzing white supremacy and neo-Nazi activities within their ranks. Another approved amendment would give Washington, D.C., control over the D.C. National Guard. 

What happens now? A separate version of the annual defense policy bill still has to be considered in the Senate, and then both versions will be reconciled in conference committee before the bill makes its way through both chambers for final passage. 

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Politico on Wednesday that the upper chamber would likely begin debating its version of the bill in September due to other high-profile bills being ironed out. 

Read the full story here.  

DEFENSE BILL BECOMES BATTLEGROUND FOR CULTURE WARS  

From vaccine mandates to abortion, the annual defense spending bill has become a vehicle for both Republicans and Democrats in the House to try to hash out culture war issues.  

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-line conservatives, on Wednesday announced an official position urging GOP colleagues to oppose the bill, citing a number of hot-button cultural issues along with concern about military funding going to other countries. 

On the Democratic side, lawmakers veered into the abortion debate by introducing an amendment to repeal current restrictions on using Pentagon funds to perform abortions. The House Rules Committee did not allow the amendment to be debated. 

Read more here. 

ON TAP FOR MONDAY

• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will hold a discussion on “Chinese Military Lessons from Ukraine” at 9 a.m. 
• The Center for Strategic and International Studies will host a discussion on “The State of the Special Relationship: Four Years at the Heart of UK-U.S. Defense” at 1 p.m. 
• The Center for Strategic and International Studies will host a discussion on “Maritime Security Dialogue: A Discussion with the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps” at 3 p.m. 

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Biden: ‘Ground is not ripe at this moment’ for two-state solution talks 
• Yellen blasts Russian officials at G-20 meeting, says they are responsible for ‘unjust war’ in Ukraine 
• Zelensky calls Russian strike on Vinnytsia work of a ‘terrorist state’  
• Jan. 6 hearing schedules prime-time hearing on Trump’s inaction during attack 

That’s it for today! Check out The Hill’s Defense and National Security pages for the latest coverage. See you next week!

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Here are the two Republicans who voted against suspending tariffs on baby formula imports in 421-2 vote

Two Republicans on Friday voted against legislation suspending tariffs on imports of baby formula.

The measure, titled the Formula Act, cleared the House in a bipartisan 421-2 vote. It comes in response to the nationwide baby formula scarcity, which Americans have been grappling with for months.

The two Republicans who voted against the measure were Reps. Rick Allen (Ga.) and Louie Gohmert (Texas).

Gohmert delivered a lengthy speech on the House floor Friday, which touched on his vote against the baby formula bill. He argued that the legislation was “thrown upon” Republicans at the last minute, after the vote was announced Thursday night, arguing that it was rushed in the chamber.

“It seems like this bill was a rush to get done without properly considering what this would mean,” he said.

The Texas Republican also voted against two baby formula-related bills in May.

He was one of nine Republicans to oppose the Access to Baby Formula Act which received widespread GOP support, passing in a 414-9 vote. The legislation, which passed through the Senate by unanimous consent and was signed into law by President Biden, permanently eased restrictions on the types of baby formula that people who are part of the federal low-income assistance program for women, children and infants are able to purchase.

The second bill, titled the Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, was opposed by all Republicans present. It would have given the Food and Drug Administration $28 million in emergency funds to address the baby formula shortage.

While the baby formula shortage has received less news coverage in recent weeks, shortages remain an issue.

The Wall Street Journal, citing data from market-research firm IRI, said about 30 percent of powdered formula products in the U.S. were out of stock in stores for the week ending on July 3.

The scarcity was in-part caused by the closure of an Abbott Nutrition factory in February, which shuttered operations because four infants who consumed formula from the facility developed rare bacterial infections and were hospitalized. Earlier this month, however, the factory resumed production.

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Secret Service under pressure over erased texts and Jan. 6 actions

Revelation of erased Secret Service text messages from Jan. 5 and 6 is putting the Secret Service in hot water, renewing questions about how forthcoming it has been in investigations into the Capitol attack, as well as the actions and motivations of agents.

The spat came to light after the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General notified lawmakers that it was unable to obtain “many” of the messages on those days due to a “device-replacement program.”

The episode has raised questions about the intent of the agency, with the government watchdog alleging they have long struggled to get information from the Secret Service, while others argue at a minimum the erasure appears to violate laws on retaining records.

“After January 6, it should have been crystal clear that there was a need to preserve records even in the absence of [an inspector general] request,” said Nick Schwellenbach, senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “You’d think that you might want to make sure nothing happened that would potentially look like a cover-up or risk inadvertently losing relevant records.”

The agency is trying to stomp out the flames, asserting that the information was not deleted intentionally after it had received a request to turn the records over, and that the device migration operation was underway before it had received a request to turn over the information.

“The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Thursday evening.

It’s the third major news story in the last two weeks for an agency that typically keeps a low profile.

One of its agents was removed from Israel Mondayfollowing an altercation in the country. And the Secret Service has also found itself at the center of explosive testimony from White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson after two of its agents said they wished to dispute her account that Trump lunged at a driver after being told he could not accompany his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Speaking with The Hill on Friday, Guglielmi said the agency has been nothing but cooperative with Jan. 6 investigations.

“We have given nearly 800,000 records to the committee. We;ve made every person available that they have requested. And we will continue to make every person available because it is important,” he said. 

“No one at the Secret Service wants to see the insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 happen again. The Secret Service is by its mission the protectors of democracy. We protect the president of the United States. We protect the symbol and the office.” 

The Wednesday letter from DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to the chairman and ranking members on the House and Senate Homeland Security committees revealing the erased messages was first reported by The Intercept.

In a critical assertion, Cuffari said that those messages were erased after the Inspector General had requested communications from the Secret Service as part of its evaluation of Jan. 6.

The Secret Service has strongly pushed back against the suggestion that it intentionally deleted text messages, as well as poked holes in the timeline of when the erasure happened. 

The agency started a system migration process in January 2021, before it had received requests from the inspector general in late February 2021, it said. 

“In that process, data resident on some phones was lost,” Guglielmi said, adding that the Secret Service said it told the Inspector General that “none of the texts it was seeking had been lost in the migration.”

The Secret Service said it has provided many records related to Jan. 6 and preparations for the day to the inspector general, including approximately 786,176 unredacted emails, and 7,678 teams chat messages by Secret Service employees. It also said that it provided a Jan. 6 text message from the U.S. Capitol Police requesting emergency assistance at the Capitol, suggesting that not every message from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 were erased.

Guglielmi said the Secret Service does not have a “culture” of sending many text messages primarily due to security concerns. Those messages would be routed through various cell carriers and be too ripe for infiltration, he said. Secret Service members do carry cell phones, but they do not use iCloud and do not even have access to the app store. Instead, they primarily rely on a secure email system, though any texts are supposed to be uploaded to the secure system.

The House Jan. 6 Select Committee met with the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General on Friday morning. 

Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (R-Miss.), who also chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said that the DHS inspector general gave his perspective on the “impediments” he had encountered. The committee will “move toward engaging the Secret Service,” Thompson said, and will see if there is a way to “reconstruct” the lost text messages.

If the messages are permanently lost, the Secret Service may have broken federal law. 

Schwellenbach, the senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, said that text messages about official government business fall into the kinds of records requiring preservation under the Federal Records Act. There is no exception for deletion due to a migration in system records.

“If records were lost, and there’s solid evidence that this was done by the Secret Service to hide information from the IG or anyone else, there are criminal penalties that could apply,” Schwellenbach said.

Even if it was unintentional, it was a “terrible idea” to migrate systems during a presidential transition period, Schwellenbach said.

Revelation of the erased messages has certainly stoked theories of malign intent.

“There have to be legal consequences to that,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said on his show Friday morning. “It appears the Secret Service is trying to cover for Donald Trump.”

Messages exchanged between Secret Service agents would help fill in information about the timeline of the day, and possibly offer further details about Vice President Mike Pence’s reported refusal to leave the Capitol on Jan. 6, despite a Secret Service request to do so.

“I’m not getting in the car,” Pence reportedly said on Jan. 6. “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.”

Had he been whisked away, Pence may not have been able to get back to the Capitol to officially certify the election. Some have theorized that the Secret Service was intentionally trying to keep Pence from certifying the votes.

Reports that many Secret Service agents were wanting to please Trump and were loyal to him have raised eyebrows.

Secret Service Assistant Director Tony Ornato became Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff in 2019, an unusual role for a career Secret Service official. Ornato is now back to being the agency’s assistant director in charge of training and professional development, according to its website.

Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, who wrote a book about the Secret Service, said in an MSNBC appearance last month that Pence and other aides were “incredibly suspicious” of the “palace guards, so to speak, and their alignment with Donald Trump, and whether or not they were pulling the strings if Vice President Pence climbed into that car.”

Ornato in particular was suspected by a top Pence aide as being someone who “would try to whisk Vice President Pence away from the Capitol at a critical moment,” Leonnig said. 

Mychael Schnell contributed.

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Time for Washington to stop shooting the moon

The political fight now occupying center stage on Capitol Hill may appear like more of the same. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to thwart a bipartisan bill designed to help American businesses compete with China unless Democrats abandon a big spending bill that Republicans oppose. And this does ring familiar: Steamrolling the other party has become business as usual in Washington. At the same time, however, this moment also speaks to a more universal truth. Bipartisanship could replace steamrolling as a default strategy if leaders simply decided to take a different tack. To glean a better sense of why, consider an analogy from the card game, Hearts.

A player’s goal in Hearts is to accrue the fewest points possible — to play their hand in successive turns so that their opponents pick up the points instead. But if, in any given hand, a player is dealt particularly bad cards, she can try instead to accrue all the points by losing every single turn, at which all the points are distributed among her opponents and she emerges without a blemish. “Shooting the moon,” as this strategy is known, is notoriously risky because the player pursuing it has to be perfect in every single hand. Any false move, any point claimed by an opponent, renders the entire effort a failure. As a result, it’s a strategy savvy players reserve for only the most extreme circumstances.

But that wisdom has been lost in Washington. It’s almost as if our nation’s legislative leaders have chosen to shoot the moon no matter the cards they’re dealt. Rather than build two-party coalitions, they default to strategies that require the support of every last member of their coalition. And that’s turning out to be as risky for Democrats today as it was for Republicans trying to make good on President Trump’s vow to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Not only is the strategy prone to fail—it also poisons the well with members of the other party on other topics.           

Simply put, there’s no good reason to enter every legislative negotiation with this same high-risk approach.

Democrats could have embraced in earnest President Biden’s inaugural promise to unify the country. They could have invited Republicans to join them in crafting major social and economic measures. They could have honored what some on Capitol Hill call “regular order,” namely the protocols by which ideas are typically referred to committees who, if deemed worthwhile, pass the proposals up to the full House and Senate for broader consideration.

Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) explicitly chose to bypass both the GOP and regular order from the get-go by sequestering legislative negotiations behind closed doors. But now even a slimmed down version of the reconciliation bill faces long odds, and further pursuit could imperil an easy bipartisan win against China.

This, of course, isn’t just a Democratic problem. The GOP employed this same risky technique to pass President Trump’s tax cuts in 2017— that time to success — and, today, McConnell’s piqued refusal to consider the China competition bill doesn’t really serve the nation’s economic interests. But that’s the point — both parties can now cite any number of instances where they feel that the other side has steamrolled them and perpetuate the cycle.

Here is a simple proposal: Start again. When the first incarnations of the present Democrats-only reconciliation bill were being bandied about, the pandemic threat seemed to be diminishing, the Russians had not yet invaded Ukraine, and inflation wasn’t nearly so much of a worry. Now that the nation’s economic circumstances have changed, shouldn’t the nation’s legislative agenda shift as well? Couldn’t Democrats and Republicans find a series of reforms that would pass both chambers with bipartisan support? Isn’t that much more likely than the notion that Democrats will manage to wrangle every single member of both their Senate and House coalitions to a single transformative bill? A great place to start would be the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act that the Senate passed by a large bipartisan majority over 400 days ago. The bill has been bogged down as the Senate tries to reconcile it with a more partisan House version, but a No Labels side-by side comparison of the bills reveal it should not be too difficult to align on the provisions that clearly have bipartisan agreement.

The lesson here is clear enough. Shooting the moon may be a smart strategy in some limited circumstances, but it can’t be your go-to approach. It’s easy today to say bipartisanship doesn’t work because the parties are too recalcitrant—but we’re now to the point where neither party is willing to try. Not only can bipartisanship work, in the wake of this Congress’s most remarkable achievement—passage of the bipartisan infrastructure framework—it appears to be the surest strategy for legislative success. In a country where faith in democracy is slipping, that’s wisdom worth heeding. We need to reset Congress to the point that two-party solution always gets the first pass.

Margaret White is the co-executive director of No Labels.

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These are the lawmakers who voted against their parties on abortion bills

A number of lawmakers voted against their parties Friday on two bills to protect abortion access, which the House passed exactly three weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The lower chamber voted 223-205 on the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act, a measure that seeks to protect women who travel to a different state to receive an abortion if the state they are residing in does not offer the medical procedure.

It also makes it unlawful for facilities in states where the abortion is legal to restrict access for out-of-state individuals, allows for the state-to-state transportation of abortion drugs that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration and protects individuals who help others receive an abortion out of state.

Three Republicans voted for the bill, bucking GOP leadership’s recommendation to oppose the measure: Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Fred Upton (Mich.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.).

The Hill reached out to the three lawmakers for comment. Kinzinger and Upton are retiring at the end of this term.

The House on Friday also cleared the Women’s Health Protection Act in a 219-210 vote, passing the measure for the second time in the past year. The House approved the bill in September, but the Senate has blocked it twice.

The legislation would codify the right to abortion into federal law, allowing individuals across the country to access the medical procedure.

One Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas), voted with Republicans and opposed the measure, while all Democrats present supported the bill.

The Hill reached out to Cuellar for comment.

Cueller’s vote against the bill does not come as a total surprise — the Texas Democrat also voted “no” in September when the House brought the measure up for a vote.

He defended his vote in October, saying “it’s called conscience.”

“I am a Catholic, and I do believe in rights, right to life, and it’s just a conscious. And sometimes people vote because of political, they think this is a Democratic or Republican issue, to me it’s just a matter of conscience,” he added, according to KGNS.

His vote on Friday will, however, likely spark frustration among progressives, who sought to unseat the anti-abortion Democrat in a re-election primary in May. That effort ultimately failed, with Cuellar receiving backing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) in his race against Democrat Jessica Cisneros and winning the party’s nomination in a tight runoff by fewer than 300 votes, according to a recount that was conducted.

When the race was still too close to call, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter, “On the day of a mass shooting and weeks after news of Roe, Democratic Party leadership rallied for a pro-NRA, anti-choice incumbent under investigation in a close primary. Robocalls, fundraisers, all of it.”

She was referring to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the leak of a Supreme Court draft majority opinion that showed the bench was poised to overturn Roe.

The House voted on the pair of abortion bills exactly three weeks after the Supreme Court made the draft official and issued a ruling that reversed Roe, the 1973 decision that protected access to the medical procedure on the federal level.

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GOP Senate campaign arm announces record $173 million raised so far this cycle

The Republican Senate campaign arm announced on Friday that it has raised more at this point of a midterm election cycle than ever before. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) said in release that it has raised $173.4 million after taking in $25.6 million during the second quarter of 2022. 

The release states that the committee started spending money on television ads earlier in the cycle than usual and has spent more than $21 million so far. 

NRSC Chairman Rick Scott (Fla.) said in the release that the committee has bought television ads in English and Spanish to argue that voting for Democrats leads to higher inflation, “soft-on-crime” policies, lack of border security and ideas that are out of touch with the country. 

He said the NRSC’s goal has been to define Democrats by their actions in Washington. 

“The NRSC continues to be in full force as we reach the three-and-a-half-month mark, and we will continue working hard to raise money and deliver a Republican majority in the Senate in November,” Scott said. 

The release states that the NRSC raised $9.45 million during June and currently has about $28.45 million in cash on hand. The average donation has been $54.78, according to the release. 

The Senate is currently evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats holding a majority due to Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote. Republicans are seeking to regain control of the Senate, along with the House, with a few key races, while Democrats seek to expand their majority.

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Washington Post publisher: Biden's 'shameful' fist bump with Saudi crown prince 'worse than a handshake'

The Washington Post’s publisher blasted President Biden for greeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump Friday, saying it not only “projected intimacy and comfort” but also gave the Middle East leader “redemption.”

Fred Ryan, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, called the exchange between the two leaders at the royal palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia “shameful.”

“The first bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful. It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption he was been desperately seeking,” Ryan said in a statement.

Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia has been heavily criticized, including his meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed, who the U.S. intelligence community said approved the 2018 murder of U.S.-based journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.  

The Post also reported that Saudis officials had initially excluded two reporters from the newspaper from a planned media briefing that the government was holding on Friday.

They were later allowed to attend the roundtable after bringing up the issue with the White House officials, The Post added.

This is Biden’s first visit to Saudi Arabia after he was elected in 2020 and comes after he promised during his presidential campaign to make the Middle East country a “pariah” state over Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

The president said Friday he raised Khashoggi’s murder during his meeting with the crown prince after the White House wouldn’t comment on whether the president would raise the journalist’s death in the meeting. 

“I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now,” Biden said in a speech.

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Harris to give keynote address at NAACP convention

Vice President Harris will give the keynote speech at the NAACP’s national convention on Monday, according to the group’s president. 

NAACP President Derrick Johnson told The Hill that Harris coming to speak, as the first Black woman vice president, is “evidence of power.” 

“Over the last 113 years, we’ve welcomed Presidents and Vice Presidents, from Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Biden and Obama. But we’ve never welcomed a Black Woman Vice President,” he said. “That is evidence of progress.” 

Johnson said that Harris has been a “steady voice” in fighting for voting rights and reproductive rights as well as opposing “other assaults by the far-right” on various freedoms. He said the focus of this year’s convention will be the necessity for people to vote in the upcoming midterm elections in November. 

Democrats currently hold narrow majorities in both levels of Congress, and Republicans are seeking to emphasize President Biden’s low approval ratings and high levels of inflation as they attempt to regain control of both chambers. 

“We are honored to have the Vice President join us in this critical and pivotal moment for our democracy,” Johnson said.

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Biden says he raised Khashoggi murder with Saudi crown prince

President Biden said Friday that he raised the 2018 murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi during his meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  

“I raised it at the top of the meeting, making it clear what I thought of it at the time and what I think of it now,” Biden said in a speech after hours of meetings with the Saudi crown prince and other Saudi officials in Jeddah.  

“I said very straightforwardly for an American president to be silent on the issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am,” Biden continued. “I’ll always stand up for our values.” 

Biden later told reporters that what happened to Khashoggi was “outrageous.”  

Biden received criticism earlier Friday when he was photographed fist bumping the Saudi crown prince, who the U.S. intelligence community concluded approved Khashoggi’s 2018 murder.  

Developing

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