Former President Donald Trump defended hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Series at his Bedminster, NJ course on Thursday, brushing off criticism from families of 9/11 victims by saying “nobody’s gotten to the bottom” of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
With families set to protest the event on Friday, ESPN pressed the 45th president for a response to the controversy.
“Well, nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately, and they should have as to the maniacs that did that horrible thing to our city, to our country, to our world,” Trump said. “So nobody’s really been there.”
The former president then attempted to put a positive spin on the event, saying, “there are a lot of really great people that are out here today, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun.”
“We’re going to celebrate and money’s going to charity,” Trump went on. “A lot of money [is] going to charity.”
For many Americans – particularly the family members of 9/11 victims – Saudi Arabia is the nation most directly responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people 21 years ago. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who deliberately crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., were Saudi nationals — as was Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
In a letter to the former president this week, a victims’ families group pointed out that even Trump himself had once accused the kingdom of being behind the atrocity.
“Who blew up the World Trade Center?” Trump told Fox News in a 2016 interview. “It wasn’t the Iraqis — it was Saudi. Take a look at Saudi Arabia. Open the documents.”
The families wrote that they “simply cannot understand” why Trump would accept money from LIV Golf to host the tournament — a decision they said had caused them “extreme pain, frustration, and anger.”
The Saudi government has long denied any involvement in the attacks, and the 2004 9/11 Commission report detailed that Riyadh “worked closely with top US officials in major initiatives to solve the Bin Laden problem with diplomacy.”
However, a lawsuit filed on behalf of the families of hundreds of victims in 2017 revealed that the Saudi government might have funded a “dry run” for the plane hijackings.
Two years before the attack, the Saudi Embassy paid for two Saudi nationals living undercover in the US as students, to fly from Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks,” according to a complaint obtained by The Post.
The filing specifically accused Saudi officials of following “a pattern of both financial and operational support.”
Additionally, in September of last year, the Biden administration declassified a 2016 FBI report tying two Saudi nationals living in the US at the time — one of whom enjoyed diplomatic status — to the 9/11 hijackers.
LIV Golf is backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is chaired by the notorious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Trump’s decision to host LIV Golf has also come under fire from the National Press Club over bin Salman’s connection to the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was brutally murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2019, and the US intelligence community has since concluded that the crown prince, known widely as MBS, ordered the operation.
“We are revolted by the way the Saudi-funded LIV enterprise has followed the fist bump in the desert by shoving themselves onto golf courses and television screens,” the NPC said Tuesday.
“We call on all Americans to see this unsavory attempt to minimize the grisly bone-saw attack on Washington Post opinion writer Jamal Khashoggi for what it is – an attempt to sweep under the rug a brutal state-sponsored murder. We call on people of conscience to reject this tournament. Do not attend. Do not watch it on television. Let it fail.”
