WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he had directed his advisors to take severe action against Iran if they were to attempt to assassinate him. In comments made while signing an executive order aimed at imposing maximum pressure on Tehran, he stated, “If they did that they would be obliterated. I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.”
In the event of Trump’s assassination, Vice President JD Vance would assume the presidency and may not necessarily follow any directives established by Trump.
Federal agencies have been monitoring Iranian threats against Trump and other officials from his administration for several years. This scrutiny follows Trump’s authorization of the 2020 drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
Security concerns related to a potential threat on Trump’s life from Iran led to heightened protective measures just before a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this past July, where an incident resulted in Trump being shot in the ear. However, officials stated at the time that they did not believe there was any link to Iran regarding that assassination attempt.
In November, the Justice Department revealed that they had thwarted an Iranian plot targeting Trump ahead of the presidential election. Allegedly, Iranian officials had tasked Farhad Shakeri, 51, with the mission to surveil and eventually eliminate Trump in September. Shakeri is reportedly still at large in Iran.
Iranian officials at that moment refuted these claims, with foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei characterizing the information as fabricated by entities connected to Israel that aimed to complicate relations between Iran and the United States.
Authorities learned about the assassination scheme from Shakeri, who is believed to be an Iranian government asset and has prior convictions for robbery in American prisons. He supposedly managed a network of criminals enlisted by Tehran for various activities including surveillance and murder-for-hire schemes, according to legal documents.
Shakeri, an Afghan national residing in Iran, informed the FBI that a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard had directed him last September to abandon his other projects and devise a strategy within one week to survey and subsequently kill Trump, as revealed in a criminal complaint recently unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.
In a recent move, Trump also rescinded government security clearances for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, top aide Brian Hook, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton, all of whom have been targets of Iranian threats due to their hardline policies toward the country during Trump’s initial term in office.
