Deputy National Security Adviser For Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes speaks to the media during the daily briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Feb. 18. | AP Photo Obama aide: Saudi Arabia paid 'insufficient attention' to extremist funding

President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser said that the government of Saudi Arabia had paid "insufficient attention" to money that was being funneled into terror groups and fueled the rise of Al Qaeda.

Ben Rhodes was speaking to David Axelrod in his podcast "The Axe Files" out Monday when he was asked about the validity of the accusation that the Saudi government was complicit in sponsoring terrorism.


“I think that it’s complicated in the sense that, it’s not that it was Saudi government policy to support Al Qaeda, but there were a number of very wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia who would contribute, sometimes directly, to extremist groups. Sometimes to charities that were kind of, ended up being ways to launder money to these groups," Rhodes said.

“So a lot of the money, the seed money if you will, for what became Al Qaeda, came out of Saudi Arabia,” he added.

“Could that happen without the government’s awareness?” Axelrod asked.

Rhodes said he doesn’t believe the government was “actively trying to prevent that from happening.”

But he said that certain people, within the government or their family members, were able to operate on their own which allowed for the money flows.

“So basically there was, at certainly, at least kind of a insufficient attention to where all this money was going over many years from the government apparatus,” Rhodes said.

The remarks from Rhodes come as Obama prepares to head to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and confront the strained relations between the two allies. The Saudis are still fuming over an Atlantic magazine article that described Obama's frustrations with Saudi Arabia's religious ideology, its treatment of women and its rivalry with Iran. Obama also suggested in the piece that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states are "free riders" who rely too much on the U.S. military.

Friction has also been created by a push from relatives of people who died on 9/11 and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to allow U.S. courts to hold the Saudi government responsible if it is found to have played a role in the 2001 attacks.

In the meantime, the Saudis have mounted their own counter-messaging campaign, insisting they are playing a major role in combating terrorism.

During the podcast, Axelrod pushed Rhodes on at-times awkward dynamic between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, asking, “How do you explain that to Americans, that, you know, on the one hand we call them an ally on the other hand they have these deep roots in these extremist elements?”

“I would stop short of saying that there was any willful government intention from Saudi Arabia to support Al Qaeda,” Rhodes said. “I think the difficult thing that Americans need to understand is we forge these relationships with governments because we have some shared interest with them.”

He added that for a long time the main interest was oil and security which meant that the U.S. was “slow to pay attention to that [connection to extremist groups] because the way the relationship was set up was we just kind of thought about security and oil and didn’t kind of go that other layer down.”