President Barack Obama's impending veto of a bill that would allow the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia flies in the face of a "finely written law" that allows such legal actions and would show Obama is "making arrangements with the Saudis," Rep. Peter King said Wednesday.
"It's a finely written law, it's very precise," King told J.D. Hayworth on Newsmax TV's "America Talks Live." "What it says is that if a foreign government plans or is involved or coordinates in any way a terrorist attack in our homeland, they can be sued for that. And this is not anything drastically new.
"It's the way the law all along has been, that if a country is involved in a terrorist attack – for instance, if they paid off somebody in Manhattan to carry out a terrorist attack – we can sue them; the families can sue them.
"The way the court has interpreted this case, though, is saying that because the Saudis did it, they did it overseas and the attack was carried out in the United States that they can't be sued because the actual planning did not occur in the United States. We're saying that's a distinction, not a difference."
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King took a victory lap last Friday as the House passed a bill allowing 9/11 victims and their families to sue the Saudi Arabian government. The House passed the measure by overwhelming margin on a voice vote, confirming a similar Senate vote in May.
King picked up the legislation on behalf of 9/11 victims' families in 2012 after the original sponsor, Rep. Dan Lungren, a California Republican, lost his reelection bid.
King, a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said "whether the planning was done in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, families have the right to sue."
"You always have the right to sue a foreign government for torts carried out and certainly this would be a tort," he said. "President Obama knows that, the Saudi lobbyists on Capitol Hill.
"He is making arrangements with the Saudis and in some ways they're helpful in the war against terrorism, in many ways they're not. They play both sides of the fence."
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