Pennsylvania Democrats have withdrawn a campaign ad after the widow of Jamal Khashoggi said it was insensitive to the memory of her late husband, who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
The ad, sponsored by the re-election campaign of Democratic senator Bob Casey, alleges that Republican challenger Dave McCormick “demanded his hedge fund stay loyal to the murderers to protect their investments” in Saudi Arabia.
On Saturday, the Casey campaign said it would not renew the spot, which showed a picture of Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist. His widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, had said the ad was insensitive and incorrectly identified her late husband as an American.
“The commercial is a very painful reminder of how my husband died, and as you can imagine, I have been traumatized every day for the past 6 years,” Elatr Khashoggi said in an email to Casey’s office obtained by Politico.
“I take no position on the politics of your Senate race, but I am dedicated to correcting misconceptions about my late husband,” she added.
Casey, who is seeking a fourth term, is locked in a close race with McCormick, the one-time CEO of the Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund.
The ad also claimed that McCormick “had ties to Vladimir Putin’s personal slush fund investing nearly half a billion into Russian sovereign bonds”.
Maddy McDaniel, a Casey campaign spokesperson, said the ad would cycle out next week but there is “no dispute that McCormick demanded his hedge fund show support and loyalty to Mr Khashoggi’s murderers, all to protect his own business interests.
“We have the utmost sympathy for what Mrs Khashoggi has experienced,” McDaniel added.
Khashoggi’s murder remains an acutely sensitive political topic as the Biden administration seeks to re-energize a normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would involve US security guarantees for Saudi Arabia.
The deal floundered after Hamas’s cross-border attack on Israel on 7 October last year, killing 1,200 people, and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 people and destroyed much of the Palestinian-controlled sliver of territory.
Relations between the Biden administration and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were strained after the US president made a pre-election promise to re-evaluate ties with Saudi Arabia over the murder of Khashoggi after US intelligence agencies concluded it could not have taken place without the ruler’s knowledge.
The administration later sought to repair relations, granting the crown prince immunity from civil claims related to Khashoggi’s murder. Biden said last year that the US would “remain an active, engaged partner” and added: “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran.”
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have come under pressure from the families of 9/11 victims to oppose the US-Saudi deal until the US government holds the country accountable for any role it might have played in the attack 23 years ago.
Last month, CBS News obtained a letter from 9/11 Justice, an organization formed in 2022 to represent families of victims of the terrorist attacks, that calls on the presidential candidates “to pledge that you will not endorse any Middle East peace deal involving Saudi Arabia unless it fully addresses the role of the Saudi Arabian government in the 9/11 attacks”.
Fifteen of the 19 al-Qaida hijackers who flew the four planes on 11 September 2001 were from Saudi Arabia, but potential links between the Saudi government and the terrorists have remained unclear.
