Trump Promised To Crack Open the Secret Saudi 9/11 Files yet Grieving Families Are Waiting

A quarter-century after 19 hijackers turned four passenger jets into weapons, Washington is still sitting on a stack of secrets about who inside Saudi Arabia may have helped them pull it off. President Trump hasn’t said whether he’ll finally crack open the vault. Asked about it just before he boarded Air Force One to fly home from Ireland on September 13, Mr. Trump told reporters, “I’m going to look at it when I get back.” Almost two weeks later, the White House still hasn’t said which way he’s leaning. However, the next decision on whether to release more material may come not from the Oval Office but from a Manhattan courtroom. A federal appeals panel is due to hear arguments next month on whether Saudi Arabia can escape a long-standing lawsuit filed by families of the victims. The court’s ruling could force more of the sealed record into daylight no matter what Mr. Trump decides to declassify on his own.The latest pressure on Mr. Trump began this month at Ground Zero, in the middle of a ceremony meant for mourning, not politics. Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, was killed in the World Trade Center’s North Tower, went off script while reading victims’ names and called on the president to “tell the Saudis to stop lying.” She accused the past four administrations of having “chose[n] to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the families of September 11.”“It has been one betrayal after another,” Ms. Strada said. “President Trump can still change that.”Her demand isn’t coming out of nowhere. The families’ lawsuit was first filed in 2003 and refiled in 2017 after Congress cleared the way for families to sue foreign governments directly. Recent reporting alleges that a Saudi national who provided the hijackers with an apartment and a mosque contact was working as a Saudi government asset the whole time.This raises a core question for the government as well as the families: After 25 years, three wars in the region, and the kingdom’s continued denial of any role in the worst terrorist attack on American soil, is Saudi Arabia’s friendship still worth more to Washington than the truth owed to the families of nearly 3,000 murdered Americans?The Largest Release YetOn the same day as the families’ appeal, the CIA opened a portion of its 9/11 archive. The agency released 71 President’s Daily Brief items dating from February 1998 through September 12, 2001, in what Director John Ratcliffe described as “an act of exceptional transparency” and the largest single release of the agency’s 9/11 analysis.The public had never before seen 69 of the documents, nearly all of which carried redactions. One September 1998 briefing warned President Clinton that supporters of Osama bin Laden “may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.” However, it offered no details on timing or method.The White House said on the day of the release that Mr. Trump had authorized the declassification of hundreds of pages tied to the attacks. The CIA briefings, however, center on al-Qaeda threat warnings delivered to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. They do not address the question at the heart of the families’ lawsuit: whether the Saudi government helped the hijackers once they reached American soil.That void could work in the families’ favor.“The fact that the CIA released the 71 pre-9/11 briefings, albeit in a redacted form, may certainly increase the pressure on the FBI to declassify many of its remaining records from the period before the attacks,” a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, tells The New York Sun.But he cautions that the calculus could cut the other way if the withheld material is more damaging than what the CIA has already turned over.“A potential obstacle to releasing the records would be national security considerations if there is a view that some of the records might damage U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Ulrichsen explains.“That would be the case if any of the records appeared to show a direct link to Saudi officials or if they shed light on a support network for the hijackers inside the US in the run-up to September 11. Relatedly, any record that might suggest a reluctance to investigate Omar al-Bayoumi would be revelatory.”The Man in the MiddleSuspicions keep returning to Mr. al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national whom FBI documents declassified in 2022 identified as an agent of Saudi intelligence. The finding came from a pair of memos written years earlier by the FBI’s Washington field office, which described Mr. al-Bayoumi as a “co-optee,” or part-time agent, paid a monthly stipend by the Saudi intelligence service from the late 1990s until September 11, 2001.The memos remained classified as state secrets through Mr. Trump’s first term and only became public in 2022 under an executive order from President Biden. Mr. al-Bayoumi has denied any connection to the kingdom’s spy service.In January 2000, hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar arrived at Los Angeles and were introduced at a mosque to Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi religious official. About a month later they met Mr. al-Bayoumi, who helped them secure an apartment at San Diego.Ten days after the attacks, British police raided Mr. al-Bayoumi’s home at Birmingham, England. They seized material that never reached the 9/11 Commission: a notepad sketch of an airplane alongside equations, and a 1999 video in which Mr. al-Bayoumi filmed the U.S. Capitol from several angles and referred to a “plan.” The Capitol is widely believed to have been the target of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.Lawyers for Saudi Arabia told Judge Daniels in Manhattan federal court, in filings and again during oral arguments in 2024, that the footage is a “tourist video” that includes artwork, flowerbeds and a squirrel on the White House lawn.They described the sketch as what “appears to be a high school math assignment” belonging to Mr. al-Bayoumi’s child. Saudi lawyers argued more broadly that no one in the Saudi government directed Mr. al-Bayoumi or Mr. al-Thumairy to assist the hijackers. The legal team also claimed that the two men were simply extending the hospitality any Saudi would offer a newly arrived countryman — behavior consistent, they said, with a kingdom that remains “an ally of the United States [and] a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda.”In a deposition, Mr. al-Bayoumi said he could not recall why he wrote the numbers. “It’s just an equation,” he said.Judge George Daniels of the Southern District of New York was not persuaded by the tourist-video framing, at one point cutting off a kingdom attorney mid-argument to note that Mr. al-Bayoumi could be heard on the recording referring to “the demons of the White House,” which the judge said was “not what I would expect any particular tourist to think is important to comment upon.”In August 2025, he rejected the kingdom’s bid to dismiss the suit, writing that the drawing “with equations related to the height and distance of a plane’s flight path … facially connects Bayoumi with knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.” The Saudi explanations, the judge wrote, were “either self-contradictory or not strong enough to overcome the inference that KSA had employed Bayoumi and Thumairy to assist the hijackers.”The ruling doesn’t find Saudi Arabia liable; it only allows the families to keep pursuing the case. Judge Daniels ruled only on jurisdiction, and a trial cannot go forward unless Saudi Arabia loses a pending appeal; a federal appeals panel in Manhattan is expected to hear arguments on that next month.The kingdom denies any role in the attacks and has not been charged with any crime in connection with the case, even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.What Is Still Under WrapsThe September 11 families want the FBI’s files on Mr. al-Bayoumi and Mr. al-Thumairy; phone logs tied to Mr. al-Bayoumi and two of the hijackers; unredacted 9/11 Commission work papers; and related NSA and FBI financial and communications records.In July, Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, joined two Democrats — Representatives Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler — in writing to the Public Interest Declassification Board at the National Archives.Their letter cited the “repeated obstacles” the families’ attorneys have faced in obtaining records from American law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It singled out records for a cell phone that Mr. al-Bayoumi allegedly lent to the hijackers so they could reach associates, among them the American-born al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.The board replied weeks later that it was “actively engaged in interagency consultations” on the records and asked for patience. Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the Justice Department will keep releasing records that can be declassified and is not holding back files to shield any foreign government.Officials with knowledge of the material describe something closer to bureaucratic gridlock than a cover-up. They say nothing goes out without redactions, and a good portion of the file is stuck in interagenc yreview. Given what’s at stake diplomatically, families and lawmakers alike are skeptical that that’s the whole story.“Saudi Arabia wants to save face and will stop at nothing to do so. That includes making all the personal approaches they can to Trump or the people surrounding him,” the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, Michael Rubin, tells the Sun.“But the classified files can’t stay secret forever, and Saudi Arabia’s embarrassment is nothing compared to the grief of the families of the almost 3,000 killed that day. The truth will emerge.”Twenty-Five Years of Closed DoorsCongress has been here before. It released 28 long-classified pages from its own 9/11 inquiry in 2016, the same year lawmakers overrode President Obama’s veto to pass JASTA, clearing the way for families to sue the kingdom outright..During Mr. Trump’s first term, the administration invoked the state secrets privilege in 2019, though it quietly disclosed one key name to the families’ lawyers — a move Ms. Strada called “a good result” at the time.President Biden ordered his own review in 2021 after roughly 1,700 people affected by the attacks threatened to boycott the 20th anniversary memorials. The 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report found no evidence the Saudi government funded al-Qaeda. Still, attorneys for the families say much of the evidence now before Judge Daniels was never available to the commission.Any decision by Mr. Trump unfolds against his close ties with Riyadh. He hosted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House last November and is seeking congressional approval for a deal that would give Saudi Arabia nuclear enrichment technology.Money, Mr. Rubin says, is the quiet variable weighing on the White House.“Cynics will always justify censorship in the name of commerce but ultimately call it what it is,” he says. “Blood-money.”

Trump Promised To Crack Open the Secret Saudi 9/11 Files yet Grieving Families Are Waiting

Trump Promised To Crack Open the Secret Saudi 9/11 Files yet Grieving Families Are Waiting

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