Previously on Conspiracy Land, MBS stands up in the middle of the room and begins to lecture Obama.

You don't understand the Saudi justice system and dripping condescension, you know.

It laid bare the utter bullshit of the narrative around MBS to me.

A day of deadly bombing by Saudi-led warplanes witnesses said many civilians were caught up in the blast.

The scene there is something that I never will forget.

There were families with their bare hands digging through the rubble, trying to find not just bodies of their loved ones but missing body parts of their loved ones.

Saudi Khatani basically makes his pitch to MBS to sort of do a electronic warfare in favor of MBS.

Basically he called on his followers to submit names to the blacklist.

Do you tell me who the problems are and we're going to go after them?

And then German slowly slowly started discovering that his hope of reforming the system is not actually working.

Then he wrote back to me, I've been thinking it's time I gave up and retire somewhere safe in the West just to be free and right freely.

For all the momentous events in the Middle East, there is one issue in particular that became something of an obsession for senior officials during the last years of the Obama administration.

It was the behind the scenes power struggle inside Saudi Arabia's royal family to determine who would become the country's next king.

It pitted a long time favorite of the U.S. intelligence community, interior minister Muhammad bin Nayef, known as MBN, against his up-and-coming and ruthlessly ambitious cousin Muhammad bin Salman or MBS.

And it was, as Joseph Westful, then the U.S. ambassador in Riyadh, all that Washington wanted to hear about.

I'm talking about the president, the vice president, the national security adviser, Susan Rice, John Kerry and others.

A lot of people were interested in who's going to be the next king.

And I was always queried, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think is going to happen?

A little context here.

As we told you in the last episode, when 79-year-old King Salman inherited the throne upon the death of his brother Abdullah in 2015,

he named his 29-year-old son Muhammad bin Salman, the defense minister, and deputy crown prince.

But in deference to tradition, he named the longtime interior chief, MBN, as the crown prince, the next in line for the throne.

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