Last March, shortly before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrived in America to pitch his younger, hipper brand of authoritarianism, American Media Inc. produced an ad-free, 97-page tribute to M.B.S called The New Kingdom. Boasting of bin Salman’s multi-billion-dollar fortune and 54,000-square-foot palace, promoting his Vision 2030 plan, and dubbing the kingdom “Our Closest Middle East Ally Destroying Terrorism,” the whole thing read like a vintage issue of Tiger Beat. Except, of course, that instead of fawning over young actors and boy bands, the gushing was reserved for a dictator starving the people of Yemen and who, just a few months later, would allegedly order the hit on journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

The $13.99 magazine was presumably a hit in the Oval Office, held up as a piece of real journalism by Donald Trump and his son-in-law, who’d been working to forge a close connection with the Saudis since January 2017, but to the outside world it might as well have been a special issue praising the leadership of Benito Mussolini. In fact, the whole thing felt so bizarre and over-the-top obsequious that A.M.I. apparently had some qualms of its own.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the publisher “sought advice from the Justice Department” last year over whether its obvious propaganda would cross the line between substandard journalism and literally working as an agent of a foreign government. While A.M.I. claimed in the past that Saudi officials had no role in the magazine’s creation, in fact, the publisher gave an adviser to the Kingdom a draft of the magazine and followed the adviser’s editorial advice, per a letter to the D.O.J. However, because there was no official contract stating the company had to follow the adviser’s suggestions—because, in other words, A.M.I. did so simply out of its love for M.B.S., or as a person familiar with the matter put it, in an attempt to “kiss his ass”—the Justice Department ruled that the publisher was not required to register as a foreign agent, a conclusion it warned could change if the facts “are different in any way from those depicted in your submission.”

Of course, last summer’s glossy isn’t the only time A.M.I. has crossed paths with the Kingdom, directly or indirectly:

In recent years, American Media sought Saudi financial backing to finance a failed effort to acquire Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Money, the Journal reported last year.