The Biden administration told a US judge last week that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, should be granted immunity in a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That decision effectively ends one of the last efforts to hold the prince accountable for Khashoggi's assassination by a Saudi hit team inside the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. In July, Biden swallowed his pride and traveled to Saudi Arabia, trying to reset his relationship with a regime he called a "pariah" as a presidential candidate. Biden greeted Prince Mohammed with an embarrassing fist bump, hoping that the photo op would convince the Saudis to increase oil production and lower gasoline prices. By October, the Saudi-led Opec+ cartel did the opposite of what the Biden administration asked " it decided to cut oil production by 2 million barrels a day, which will mean higher global fuel prices this winter. Thanks to the Biden administration's immunity decision, Prince Mohammed now has a level of protection from US legal actions that even Trump did not offer him. The prince's lawyers started seeking immunity in US federal courts in August 2020, when Saad Aljabri, a former top Saudi intelligence official, sued the crown prince in Washington. Aljabri alleged that the royal had dispatched a hit squad to kill him in Canada in 2018, just weeks after Khashoggi's murder. The Trump administration declined to grant Prince Mohammed immunity in that case, and the suit was ultimately dismissed.