People hold posters showing the portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani, 2020. Photo / Getty Images
People hold posters showing the portrait of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Major General Qassem Soleimani, 2020. Photo / Getty Images
The Biden administration alerted the Secret Service of an unspecified threat to Donald Trump by Iran before the assassination attempt on the former president at the weekend, though the shooting in Pennsylvania was believed to be unrelated to any Iranian effort, US officials said.
After providing the warning, the Secret Service surged resources and assets for the protection of Trump, said a national security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Whatever adjustments may have been made to the security detail, however, did not prevent 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks from ascending a rooftop near a Trump rally and firing at the former president.
US law enforcement officials had not identified ties between the shooter and any accomplice or co-conspirator, foreign or domestic, National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said.
“As we have said many times, we have been tracking Iranian threats against former Trump administration officials for years, dating back to the last administration.
“These threats arise from Iran’s desire to seek revenge for the killing of Qassem Soleimani. We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority.”
US and other Western security officials have raised alarms for more than two years about Iranian plots to harm current and former US Government officials, as well as against Iranian political activists living outside the country. Iran’s intelligence and security services rely largely on proxies to carry out their plans, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to jewel thieves, drug dealers and other criminals in murder-for-hire schemes, according to officials who have investigated the plots.
That hands-off approach probably caused some operations to fail, the officials said. Several plots have been disrupted and, in some cases, the hired hitmen appear to have gotten cold feet and never carried out their orders.
The intelligence community’s February 2024 Annual Threat Assessment noted that Iran “seeks to target former and current US officials as retaliation for the killing of” Soleimani.
Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Tehran, 2016. Photo / Getty Images
In 2022, the director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Christine Abizaid, noted Iran had publicly threatened to conduct lethal operations against Trump and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and “has recently increased its threats of lethal action in the homeland”.
Watson said as part of the response to Iran’s alleged threats, the United States “invested extraordinary resources in developing additional information about these threats, disrupting individuals involved in these threats, enhancing the protective arrangements of potential targets of these threats, engaging with foreign partners, and directly warning Iran”.
US security officials were also consistently in touch with the security details of former Trump officials to share “evolving threat information,” she said.
