WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday he would consider releasing classified documents related to the 9/11 terror attacks in response to public pleas from victims’ families to clarify Saudi Arabia’s purported role in the atrocity.
“I’m going to look at it when I get back,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to depart Ireland’s Shannon Airport. “I know they asked me Friday. I’ll be looking at it.”
Groups like 9/11 Families United, led by Terry Strada, have pursued legal action against the Kingdom, arguing that Riyadh should be held liable for the attacks that killed 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
On Friday, Strada tore into the Saudis after reading the name of her late husband, Cantor Fitzgerald employee Tom Strada, during the remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
“How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?” asked Strada, adding as spectators applauded that “administration after administration, including leaders in front of us here today, chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families.”
Addressing Vice President JD Vance, attending on behalf of the Trump administration, Strada added: “Tell the Saudis to stop lying. Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA, they cannot continue to deny all of this, all of the pain, all of the destruction, that we have been suffering through.”
Fifteen of the 19 Al Qaeda hijackers who used passenger planes as missiles to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon were Saudi nationals. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was also born in Saudi Arabia, though the Kingdom revoked his citizenship in 1994.
The Saudi government has emphatically denied that it played any role in the attacks.
Next month, a federal appeals panel in Manhattan will hear arguments focused on one shadowy figure, Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who helped secure California lodging for a pair of American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers.
A 1999 video, unsealed by court order in 2024, shows al-Bayoumi – who had murky government ties, a web of official contacts, and who according to a 2017 FBI memo was on the payroll of Saudi intelligence – filming the US Capitol and talking about a “plan.”
Lawyers for the victims’ families say al-Bayoumi was “casing” the building – with 30 minutes of footage of the hour-long video focused on the iconic building’s entrances, showing its security procedures, and even its interior columns.
The 2004 9/11 Commission report concluded there was a high probability that the Capitol was the intended target of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
Another video, from February 2000, shows a “welcome party” al-Bayoumi threw for the future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, soon after they moved to San Diego.
