WARSAW, Poland — President Trump’s administration, gratified by the public show of Israeli-Arab unity against Iran at a U.S.-led summit on Middle East peace, brushed off congressional criticism of its reaction to the murder of a dissident Washington Post columnist by elements of the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

“I think it’s obvious that it goes back to what the president told us he wanted to do, which was: Continue on the policies that we had set from the beginning of the administration towards Saudi,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “He thought they outweighed an individual ruler and an individual act, and so we have continued on.”