I’m old enough to remember when Democrats and virtually the entire mainstream press were outraged when Donald Trump “wasn’t tough enough” on Saudi Arabia following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by assassins dispatched by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The furor eventually tapered off as other disasters occupied the world’s attention, but it’s still been a sore spot for many. That’s why it may come as a surprise to learn that the State Department and the Pentagon hosted a series of private meetings in Washington yesterday with the Crown Prince’s influential brother, Saudi deputy defense minister Prince Khalid bin Salman. There’s still a lot going on in that region of the world and the United States has multiple interests involved, so it shouldn’t be all that unusual to see us in contact with one of the Arab states that is most closely aligned with us. But this appearance by a member of the royal family was bound to raise some hackles. To their credit, the Associated Press wasn’t at all shy about reminding everyone of Joe Biden’s previous statements about the Prince’s family and the difficult history involved.

Top Biden administration officials on Tuesday hosted a brother to Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the highest-level such visit known since the U.S. made public intelligence findings linking the crown prince to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi…

The high-level sessions with Prince Khalid, a younger brother and confidant to Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, renewed complaints that the administration was giving the Saudis a pass in the Khashoggi killing, given that nation’s strategic importance as a Middle East power and a top oil producer.

“US still has their back, no matter how awfully they terrorize their citizens,” Sarah Leah Whitson, who leads the Arab rights group Democracy for the Arab World, tweeted Tuesday in a criticism of Biden administration policy.

There was no announcement released about this meeting in advance, so much of the press was caught off guard. I find it hard to believe that the Biden administration thought they could keep this secret, so I’m guessing the plan was just to treat it as no big deal and wait for the ensuing criticism to fade. Or did they think they would get a pass, unlike Donald Trump? If so, this was poorly played because even the biggest sycophants in the press corps were going to find this to be a bridge too far.

The AP dutifully reminds us that during the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden vowed to “make a pariah” of the Crown Prince. He promised to adopt a foreign policy based on “human rights and American values,” clearly stating that assassinating journalists is not in keeping with those values. But now the Biden administration is saying that there is “no precedent for the U.S. punishing a top official of a country with which it has a partnership.”

Of course, there’s a significant difference between giving campaign speeches and the complexities involved in negotiating international diplomatic channels. Saudi Arabia is vital to American interests in that region for a number of reasons and Khalid bin Salman is a powerful player in that game. The Saudis are deeply involved in the ongoing disaster in Yemen, frequently acting as America’s proxy in that war. They are also opposed to seeing the United States go back into the Iran nuclear deal, so Biden is walking on eggshells here. That’s a key portion of this relationship, by the way. Saudi Arabia is opposed to Iran, and the enemy of our enemy remains our friend, even if they whack the occasional journalist.

The Prince is no stranger to Washington and really hasn’t been shunned at all since Khashoggi’s murder. You may recall that Khalid bin Salman met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Department of State in Washington on Monday, Jan. 6, 2020. That meeting wasn’t widely publicized either, but it drew a lot of flack from the media.

The schedule for this trip included some seriously heavy hitters. The Prince met at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley. He also met with Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Today he is expected to sit down with State Department Undersecretary Victoria Nuland and counselor Derek Chollet. He’s basically getting everything except a personal meeting with the President himself.

So should we be condemning Joe Biden for approving this visit? That’s in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not going to get very upset over it. Seeing an American politician act in a hypocritical fashion is just another dog-bites-man story. And the Saudis are too vital to our interests in the Arab world to just spit on their heads and turn them away. The optics of this may look bad, but there was probably no way to avoid it.