President Obama said Wednesday that Congress’ decision to override his veto of a bill allowing families and victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia in federal court sets a “dangerous precedent.”
In a direct clash with the White House, Congress on Wednesday voted to override Obama’s veto of the measure – the first time lawmakers have done so during the president’s nearly eight-year tenure.
Obama reacted to the override news during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper by expressing deep disappointment with Congress on the issue, and said politics was behind the vote because it came just two months before the November election.
“It’s a dangerous precedent, and it’s an example of why sometimes you have to do what’s hard,” Obama said. “And frankly, I wish Congress here had done what’s hard.”
“I didn’t expect it,” he added. “If you’re perceived as voting against 9/11 families right before an election, not surprisingly, that’s a hard vote for people to take, but it would have been the right thing to do.”
By allowing the measure to become law, Obama argued, the U.S. is opening up U.S. service members and diplomats to the same types of lawsuits from other countries.
“And the concern that I’ve had … has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia per se or my sympathy for 9/11 families, it has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we’re suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we’re doing all around the world,” he said. Those suits could take place in courts where the U.S. doesn’t “even know exactly whether they’re on the up and up, in some cases.”
The president prefaced those remarks by expressing deep sympathy for the families of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks even though he said giving them the ability to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. federal court is a “mistake.”
“Well, I think it was a mistake, and I understand why it happened,” he said. “Obviously, all of us still carry the scars and trauma of 9/11 – nobody more than this 9/11 generation that’s fought on our behalf in the aftermath of 9/11.”
Giving them the right to sue in federal court sounds good on the surface, he said, but it creates an entirely new litigious dynamic around the world that goes against the notion of sovereign immunity – that countries or high-ranking officials cannot be sued in another country’s courts.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both opposed the measure for the same reasons, and some members of Congress who voted for it have said they didn’t know what was in the bill and there was no debate on it, Obama argued.
“It was basically a political vote,” he said.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., in the Senate, attracted broad bipartisan appeal from lawmakers supportive of the families of Sept. 11 victims. The bill passed the House by voice vote Sept. 9 and the Senate by unanimous consent in May.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudi citizens, and in July, a long-classified portion of a congressional investigation into the attacks showed that they might have received some help from Saudis connected with ties to the government.
Obama also suggested that the U.S. intelligence agencies still aren’t convinced that the Saudi government should be held responsible for the attacks even if the 9/11 report implicated some former or current officials.
“By the way, the last point I’d make, if we know that a country was helping a terrorist, then we’d call them a state sponsor of terrorism,” he said. “But that’s a judgment that we make based on the intelligence that we have, based on our military assessment and in this situation, we did not make such an assessment, that Saudi Arabia was as state sponsor of terrorism.”
Congress passing this bill into law, he concluded, is “taking that out of our military and our intelligence and the hands of our national security professionals and putting it into the courts. And that’s a mistake.”
