Biden Says He Confronted Saudi Prince Over Jamal Khashoggi. How True Is That?

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — As President Biden advised the story, it sounded fairly dramatic.

After assembly with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, on Friday for the primary time since taking workplace, the president insisted that he had pointedly blamed him for the homicide of the columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

“He mainly mentioned that he was not personally liable for it,” Mr. Biden recounted to reporters. “I indicated that I believed he was.”

The White Home on Saturday didn’t again down. “The president was very clear concerning the dialog, and we stand by his account,” mentioned John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications on the Nationwide Safety Council.

Requested by reporters after touchdown again in Washington whether or not the Saudi minister was telling the reality, Mr. Biden replied merely, “No.” He appeared exasperated by the second-guessing of his journey. When a reporter requested if he regretted the fist bump he had greeted Prince Mohammed with, he complained, “Why don’t you guys speak about one thing that issues?”

Each side had an curiosity in spinning the closed-door assembly. Mr. Biden has been denounced by rights teams, media organizations and politicians in each events for assembly with the crown prince, who the C.I.A. says ordered the 2018 operation that killed Mr. Khashoggi, a United States resident and columnist for The Washington Submit. By selling how robust he was behind closed doorways, the president clearly hoped to defuse a number of the criticism for abandoning his marketing campaign promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.”

For his or her half, the Saudis have been desperate to current the assembly as a return to enterprise as ordinary between the leaders of two longtime allies, and had each hope of minimizing the lasting import of the Khashoggi case. Mr. Jubeir confirmed to reporters that Mr. Biden had raised the matter however characterised it in much less confrontational phrases. The very last thing the Saudis wished was the picture of a president lecturing their younger chief.

Certainly, each side have been acutely attuned to the choreography of the encounter. American information photographers touring within the White Home motorcade got no alternative to get in place to seize the picture of the president greeting the crown prince upon his arrival at a palace right here, an image Mr. Biden’s aides had dreaded. The Saudi authorities, for its half, made positive its official photographers have been in all places and snapped myriad photographs of the 2 collectively, which have been promptly posted on-line.

Mr. Biden is by nature a storyteller with a penchant for embellishment. He has typically advised the story of assembly President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in 2011 as vice chairman and telling him, “I’m wanting into your eyes, and I don’t suppose you have got a soul.” Others current on the time had no reminiscence of that particular alternate.

Mr. Biden has equally described an unvarnished confrontation in 1993 with Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian nationalist chief who unleashed an ethnic warfare within the Balkans. “I believe you’re a rattling warfare prison and you ought to be tried as one,” Mr. Biden, then a senator, associated having advised Mr. Milosevic, in line with a 2007 memoir, “Guarantees to Maintain.” Another folks within the room later mentioned they didn’t recall that line.

Mr. Biden likes presenting himself as standing as much as dictators and crooked figures. One other favourite story stemmed from a gathering with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in 2008, when the Afghan chief denied that his authorities was awash in corruption. Mr. Biden mentioned he grew so irritated that he threw down his serviette, declared, “This dinner is over,” and stormed out.

Typically, others within the room for such classes say that some model of what Mr. Biden has described did happen, solely not with fairly as a lot camera-ready theatricality. Throughout his presidential marketing campaign, as an example, he advised a shifting story about honoring a warfare hero that truth checkers at The Submit later concluded conflated parts of three precise occasions right into a model that didn’t occur.

In providing their softer model of what transpired between Mr. Biden and Prince Mohammed on Friday, the Saudis weren’t in search of to name out the president for misrepresenting it. The truth is, they appeared anxious to keep away from any notion of variations or pressure. Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi ambassador to america, advised reporters that when it got here to the Khashoggi case, the dialog “was candid.”

The query was, how candid?