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“If they did that they would be obliterated,” Trump said in an
exchange with reporters while signing an executive order calling
for the U.S. government to impose maximum pressure on Tehran.
"I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated,
there won’t be anything left.”
If Trump were assassinated, Vice President JD Vance would become
president and would not necessarily be bound by any instructions
left by his predecessor.
Federal authorities have been tracking Iranian threats against
Trump and other administration officials for years.
Trump ordered the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, who led the
Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
A threat on Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security
in the days before a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania where
Trump was shot in the ear, according to U.S. officials. But
officials at the time said they did not believe Iran was
connected to that assassination attempt.
The Justice Department announced in November that an Iranian
plot to kill Trump before the presidential election had been
thwarted.
The department alleged Iranian officials had instructed Farhad
Shakeri, 51, in September to focus on surveilling and ultimately
assassinating Trump. Shakeri is still at large in Iran.
Iranian officials, at the time, dismissed the allegation, with
foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei calling the report a
plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-U.S. relations more
complicated.
Investigators were told of the plan to kill Trump by Shakeri, an
accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American
prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintained a network
of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and
murder-for-hire plots, according to the complaint.
Shakeri, an Afghan national living in Iran, told the FBI that a
contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed
him last September to set aside other work he was doing and
assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill
Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal
court in Manhattan.
Trump recently revoked government security protection for former
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his top aide, Brian Hook, as
well as his former national security adviser John Bolton, who
have all faced threats from Iran after they took hardline
stances against the Islamic Republic during Trump’s first
administration.
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