Relatives of 9/11 victims prepare for day in court

Saudi Arabian officials accused of financing plot

BOCA RATON, Fla. — The pain of Sept. 11, 2001, never goes away for Gina Cayne.

When the Boca Raton widow speaks of losing her husband as he worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, tears well in her eyes, her voice strains.

“They killed my husband,” she says, accusing Saudi officials of having financed the 9/11 attacks. “All I want is my day in court.”

She might be within weeks of getting it.

For more than 14 years, relatives of the nearly 3,000 people who died Sept. 11, 2001, battled Washington and several federal judges for the right to sue Saudi Arabia and the royal family in Riyadh — suspected by families and senior members of Congress of providing money and other support to the 19 attackers.

First, district and appellate courts in New York ruled — repeatedly — that a legal protection called “sovereign immunity” prevented the families from suing Saudi Arabia. Then Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Barack Obama stymied one effort after another by Congress to pass legislation that would overcome those court rulings and open a path for a case to proceed.

But the 9/11 families’ fortunes changed in September, when during a distracting, raucous 2016 presidential campaign, Congress delivered the only veto override of Obama’s eightyear tenure and made the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, settled law.

It has already had an effect: While JASTA was being debated, a federal judge in New York ordered Iran to pay the families and insurance companies $14 billion for having allowed some of the hijackers to enter and leave the country before Sept. 11 without having transit visas stamped in their passports. Such visas would have made it more difficult for them to enter the United States.

Now, the families are heading to court in the coming weeks, seeking a punitive payout that legal experts say could exceed $1 trillion.

But Saudi Arabia is not done fighting — in court or in Congress. Indeed, Riyadh looks ready to pump unprecedented sums into a lobbying effort to unwind the new law.

The Saudis have hired a team of Washington powerbrokers who have held senior White House and congressional posts going back decades, paying at least 17 firms in Washington, Houston, Cleveland, Denver and Alexandria, Va., more than $1 million a month to try to turn back the clock.

“This is one of the biggest lobbying efforts in the history of our country,” James Kreindler, lead attorney for the 9/11 families, told McClatchy.

This time, though, the families can boast of an advantage they’ve never had before: a president who supports their right to sue. President Donald Trump, a native New Yorker, vowed on the campaign trail to do everything he could to help the families, and those families believe he will stand by them even if Saudi money succeeds in turning Congress against a law it just passed.

EMILY MICHOT/MIAMI HERALD/TNS Gina Cayne, whose husband died in the World Trade Center’s north tower during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has battled Washington and several federal judges for the right to sue Saudi Arabia and the royal family in Riyadh — suspected by families and senior members of Congress of providing money and other support to the 19 attackers.