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U.S. officials are coming to a troubling realization about Iran’s repeated threats to kill Donald Trump and some of his former top generals and national security strategists: Tehran isn’t bluffing — and it isn’t giving up anytime soon.
Iran has been openly threatening Trump and those who oversaw his national security strategy since January 2020, when Trump ordered a drone strike killing Qassem Soleimani, then Iran’s most powerful military general. Tehran has put out videos depicting the future deaths of Trump and others who helped orchestrate the Soleimani attack, pushed for their arrest and extradition and issued menacing statements promising revenge.
U.S. intelligence community officials briefed the Trump campaign last month about assassination threats against the former president from Iran, with the Trump campaign saying they were warned the threat has “heightened in the past few months.” The briefing followed a pair of assassination efforts on Trump this summer. No evidence has been presented to link those to Tehran.
But Iran’s efforts to kill Trump and former senior officials it has blamed for the Soleimani strike are even more extensive and aggressive than previously reported, according to a dozen officials familiar with the Iranian assassination threat.
“This is extraordinarily serious,” said Matt Olsen, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security. “Iran has made it very clear that they are determined to seek retaliation against former officials in connection with the Soleimani strike.”
And, while the government has gone to unprecedented lengths to protect many of these officials, some who experience similar threats receive no government protection.
POLITICO spoke with 24 people with direct knowledge of the Soleimani strike or the ensuing assassination threat, including current and former U.S. lawmakers, Secret Service agents, congressional aides and senior U.S. officials. Some were granted anonymity due to ongoing threats against them or the sensitivity of their work.
They collectively painted a picture of a pervasive assassination threat that is much more concrete than the graphic videos, brash proclamations and menacing social media posts that have found their way into the public eye. They detailed hacking and digital surveillance efforts against the former officials and their family members, a drumbeat of personal FBI warnings about new threats from Iran, increasingly tense discussions about how to protect individuals amid ongoing plots, and efforts by suspected Iranian operatives to trail a U.S. official during a trip abroad.
Many who spoke with POLITICO argue the U.S. government is still coming to grips with the Iranian threat and hasn’t yet found a sustainable way to to protect all those who are at risk for as long as they need — creating an opening for Tehran to make good on its threats.
“There were a number — not a huge number — but a number of people who would probably be considered pretty significant targets who were not getting pretty much any support,” said Megan Reiss, a former national security policy adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who worked on the threats from Iran while in Congress.
Lawmakers have recently ponied up more money to help the Defense and State departments up an already unprecedented degree of protection for some of the former agency officials whom Iran is seeking to kill, costing the federal government close to $150 million per year.
But former National Security Council officials who some say are also on Iran’s hit list are largely on their own. Since they worked for the White House, they believe they should draw their protection from the Secret Service. The beleaguered agency has stepped up — but only in part. One former National Security Council official had a government security detail withdrawn without explanation. A second had to push to get that protection, and the others never got any support to begin with.
Some of those officials are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on security for themselves and their families.
The Secret Service declined to comment for this story.
Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said the Biden administration considers Iran’s threats a “national and homeland security matter of the highest priority.” Savett also said Iran will face “severe consequences” if it attacks any U.S. citizens, including those who served the government.
Even the assassination of a lower-profile official than the former president could thrust the two nations into a crisis.
“The U.S. would regard it as an act of war,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. “Now, how we would respond to that, I don’t know, but it would not be a pleasant day for the Iranian regime.”
The gamble on Soleimani
The Trump administration knew the killing of Soleimani risked bitter retaliation.
As the head of Iran’s elite paramilitary arm, the Quds Force, Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s proxy wars across the Middle East. He was also a close personal confidante of the most powerful man in Iran, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Soleimani was almost like a son to the Supreme Leader,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran specialist at the International Crisis Group.
The Pentagon assessed under Trump that Soleimani was responsible for the death or maiming of thousands of Americans during the U.S. war in Iraq. It claimed the Trump administration’s 2020 drone strike against him and nine other Iran-backed militants stopped “active plans” to kill more.
The Iranian government and some legal scholars have questioned just how imminent those plans really were. In any case, Vaez described the strike as an exceptional breach of sovereignty in the eyes of Iran.
While the U.S. considers the Quds force a terrorist organization, it is viewed internally as a formal part of Tehran’s military. “From their perspective, you can’t let the killing of your most senior military leader go unpunished,” Vaez said.
Despite fears of an all-out war, Iran’s immediate response to the strike was relatively muted: a ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces stationed in Iraq, which failed to kill a single U.S. soldier.
That led Trump and many who supported the strike to take something of a victory lap, thinking Iran had stood down.
But Iranian proxies would launch a steady drumbeat of rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq for months after, at one point leading then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to threaten a pull-out of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
At the same time, Iran began laying the groundwork to go after specific officials.
The idea that Iran would seek to assassinate a U.S. official in retaliation for the Soleimani strike was not something U.S. intelligence agencies had anticipated beforehand, many told POLITICO.
But U.S. spies assessed that Iran was serious about taking that extraordinary step almost immediately after the strike, drawing their conclusions from both classified intelligence and public statements. “It was pretty fast,” said a former senior national security official with direct knowledge of the Soleimani strike.
Over time, those threats became less subtle.
“Those who ordered the murder of General Soleimani as well as those who carried this out should be punished,” Khamenei posted on his social media account nearly a year later, in December 2020. “This revenge will certainly happen at the right time.”
‘A fatwa for life’
Many who spoke with POLITICO cautioned that Iran lacks sophisticated hit teams and likely could not pull off a hit against a well-defended individual inside the United States.
But the two assassination attempts against Trump this summer have reopened questions about the government’s ability to protect even its senior-most former officials. And, some argued, the machinery of the U.S. government is only adjusting slowly to an insidious new threat from a foreign state.
“This is historic, and different and new,” said a former senior Trump administration official with knowledge of the Soleimani killing. “We’ve never had former senior national security officials, a Cabinet member, that have had this risk profile from a foreign adversary.”
Those who spoke to POLITICO, including some directly under threat from Iran, described near-constant Iranian surveillance efforts — largely but not exclusively online — against a shortlist of more than a half-dozen former officials. That includes attempts to access travel schedules and understand the target’s daily habits, that same official said.
Those who Iran is targeting have also received a steady cadence of “duty to warn” briefings in which FBI agents have reached out to inform them individually of discrete threats to their life.
“Sometimes it can be fairly specific. They know where you are, they know your pattern of life,” a former senior Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the assassination efforts said about the FBI warnings. “And sometimes they’re wildly inaccurate.”
“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” the former Pentagon official said. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”
It is unclear, however, when or how Iran might seek retribution.
Four people who spoke with POLITICO cited the example of Salman Rushdie, the Nobel Prize winning author. Thirty-four years after Iran’s supreme leader ordered Rushdie’s killing over a novel he claimed insulted Islam, a would-be assassin stabbed Rushie 15 times onstage at an event in New York.
“When they put these fatwas out, they’re like for life,” said the first senior national security official.
Going on defense
More than four years after the Soleimani strike, the shadow of that decision still looms large over the national security establishment in Washington.
In addition to Trump, who receives Secret Service protection as the former president, at least seven former generals, diplomats and civilian policy advisers from his White House receive a 24/7 government security detail, according to the people who spoke to POLITICO. Sometimes a single security detail includes roughly a half-dozen people.
The list is dominated by those with direct ties to the Soleimani killing or high-up in the Trump administration: Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense; Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Paul Nakasone, head of NSA and U.S. Cyber Command; Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command; Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State; and Brian Hook, the State Department’s Special Representative for Iran. Milley did not respond to requests for comment. The others declined to comment.
The ongoing and round-the-clock security details represent an unprecedented precaution for former national security officials.
It still may not be sufficient.
Iran slapped largely symbolic financial sanctions on a broader list of more than 50 former Trump administration officials, including those who now receive protection, and has issued Interpol “red notices” for their arrest.
Some believe the threat is significant for a subset of those officials whose pictures appeared alongside Trump’s in a propaganda video from an IRGC-linked social media account in January 2023 that promised vengeance for “the perpetrators of the general Soleimani martyrdom.”
Two of the officials in that video remain in government and three have retired but are among those who now receive security details. The remaining four receive no government protection, even though they were singled out in the video and have received at least two FBI duty-to-warn briefings about threats from Iran, they told POLITICO.
The common denominator for those four is where they worked: the National Security Council.
Most of the officials who have protection worked for the Defense and State departments, both of which have received additional funding from Congress in recent years to ramp up their ability to stymie Iran’s assassination plots.
Lawmakers recently set aside $40 million for the State Department to protect Hook and Pompeo. And Congress last year boosted the Pentagon’s ability to reimburse former officials who need protection or extend it so long as there is an active threat. Its efforts now cost roughly $100 million per year, one congressional aide estimated.
Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said the Defense Department “does not disclose details regarding security measures for current or former officials.” A State Department spokesperson said the agency cannot discuss details of its protective operations per longstanding security practice.
The once-famed presidential protection agency, meanwhile, is on life support, having suffered a spate of scandals that culminated in the two attempts on Trump’s life this summer.
The Secret Service was “stretched really, really thin,” said Reiss, the former Romney aide.
Some argue that Iran would only be satisfied with killing someone they view as a rough equivalent to Soleimani, and that not every official who has received a threat should fear for their life.
“It seems that Iran has two groups: the people for whom their assassination would be proportional revenge for Soleimani. And then there’s everybody else,” said another former national security official.
Not just ‘idle internet chatter’
The lack of protection for former National Security Council officials is particularly alarming because former White House officials have had some of the closest encounters with Tehran.
The most public and earliest indication of Iran’s willingness to try to kill a former Trump official was against someone who left office before the Soleiman strike: John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser.
Bolton has been one of the most outspoken U.S. policymakers about the need to take a hard line on Iran, often staking out hawkish positions and blasting them out through cable news appearances.
It is clear the Ayatollahs aren’t fans.
Bolton said he received his first FBI duty to warn briefing about Iranian threats against him around late 2020 or early 2021, followed by a succession of such warnings in 2021 that escalated in “in specificity and level of concern.”
Bolton did not have a government security detail at the time. But he felt he needed one. During a meeting with more than 15 FBI, Justice Department and Secret Service officials the week before Thanksgiving 2021, he asked for some type of help. “Well, I appreciate you’re telling me this, but what are you going to do about it?” he remembers saying.
Secret Service agents raised the idea of asking for a dedicated security detail, Bolton said, and he pushed the Justice Department to make a pitch to the White House, since he thought it would look more credible coming from them.
The Justice Department complied, and the Biden administration extended a Secret Service security detail to Bolton in December 2021.
It was almost too late.
A member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps began soliciting hitmen to kill Bolton in the United States in early November of that year, when he did not have protection, according to a criminal complaint later filed by the Justice Department.
The case shows this isn’t “idle internet chatter” or “some nut-case sitting in his mother’s basement,” argued Bolton, who said he is willing to speak publicly about the threats against him, unlike others, because his name is already in public charging documents.
He also called a $300,000 bounty that Iran put on his head “insultingly low.”
Bolton is not the only former national security adviser who appears to have had a close brush with Iran’s hitmen.
Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser at the time of the Soleimani strike, traveled to Paris in June 2022 to receive an award from the French government. The Secret Service detail assigned to protect O’Brien at the time spotted two Middle Eastern individuals trailing O’Brien throughout the city, according to one former Secret Service agent and two people familiar with the matter.
The final time they spotted the two men, the detail reacted with alarm, pulling O’Brien out of a meeting at the Ritz and hustling him back to his hotel room, the people said.
O’Brien declined to comment for this story.
It is not clear if the threat against O’Brien has diminished since then — even though he no longer receives government protection.
In a letter sent to O’Brien in June 2023 informing him of the decision not to renew his detail, then-Secret Service Director Kimbery Cheatle told him the agency would give him 60 days to “make alternate security arrangements, if you elect to do so,” according to a copy of the letter viewed by POLITICO. The letter did not provide another explanation for the decision.
Some Republican lawmakers — including Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee — believe the threat against O’Brien remains as great as any of the other former officials.
“It is a dangerous precedent to set, to not extend a former national security adviser’s protective detail while there are active threats against his life,” Turner wrote in a letter to national security adviser Jake Sullivan last January, a copy of which was viewed by POLITICO.
Some argue that the risk to Trump from Iran is also increasing.
This July the FBI arrested an Iranian operative who had entered the U.S. in an effort to arrange the assassination of “a political person” in retaliation for Soleimani’s death, the Justice Department has said. The individual, a Pakistani national, even remotely scouted a Trump rally.
“Let there be no doubt, the threat of the Iranian regime targeting [Trump] is more real than ever,” Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
On Friday, the Trump campaign requested military aircraft, flight restrictions around his rallies and residences, and other protections in light of the Iranian assassination threat.
Savett, the NSC spokesperson, said “President Biden has reiterated his directive that the United States Secret Service should receive every resource, capability and protective measure required to address those evolving threats to the former president.”
The Biden administration says it has also sent warnings to Tehran to cease all plotting against Trump and former U.S. officials.
Paying out of pocket
The Secret Service told O’Brien to provide for his own security. It turns out it’s not cheap to fend off a nation-state.
O’Brien is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for private security, including a personal bodyguard; advanced home alarm systems, cameras and ballistics; and digital counter-surveillance, according to three people familiar with the matter.
O’Brien defenses are robust, those officials insist, but he shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden himself. O’Brien was listed second on the Iran sanctions list after Milley and second in the January 2023 propaganda video. He has received four separate duty-to-warn briefings from the FBI, one of the three people said.
“Security should be based on need,” said Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican lawmaker from Utah and a close friend of O’Brien’s. “They keep telling him he’s on the top of, or near the top of the list of ongoing threats. So do we believe the intelligence community or not?”
The three other National Security Council officials who featured in the January 2023 propaganda video find themselves in a similar predicament as O’Brien: worried that Iran is coming for them — and with no agency who has their back.
The officials worked directly under O’Brien: Matt Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and two senior National Security Council officials who oversaw the Iran portfolio: Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway.
Greenway, Pottinger and Coates have all received at least two duty-to-warn briefings from the FBI since leaving office, and they collectively spend hundreds thousand of dollars each year on physical and digital security, they told POLITICO.
All three said they believe the threats against them warrant some government protection — though not on the scale that people like Pompeo or McKenzie get. They worry Iran will view them as easy targets if the government doesn’t step up for them.
“If you are a thief and you see five houses with ADT and one that doesn’t, it doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to realize which one will get robbed,” Greenway said.
They are urging the government to do more to protect them — or better yet, deter Iran outright. The trio wrote to the Department of Justice in July 2023 to ask for some basic protections, such as cybersecurity support.
The Justice Department never responded directly, the trio say, but it did respond to Rubio, who took up their case on their behalf. In a June 2023 letter to him about the threats to the three officials, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Slade Bond told Rubio the department was “aware of and deeply concerned about this category of threats.” Bond also said the DOJ was forwarding Rubio’s letter to “appropriate government agencies” who make determinations about who deserves protection.
The White House, which determines who the Secret Service protects, did not respond to questions specifically about O’Brien and the other officials lacking protection.
Both Coates and Greenway said Iran hacked their emails at least once since the Soleimani strike, and the FBI recently told Pottinger that hackers for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard had targeted him. In Coates’ case, the personal email accounts of her two children were also hacked at the same time. A digital forensic firm who she hired with her own money determined Iran was behind the activity, she said.
“I can take care of myself, but they’re not used to this,” Coates said about her kids.
For his part, Pottinger said he was not actually involved in the planning of the Soleimani strike, and Iran appears to have tied him to the incident based on a 2021 news article that falsely claimed he was.
Still, he thinks many Americans are not taking Iran’s efforts seriously enough because of their disdain for Trump. “It could just as easily be the Biden guys,” said Pottinger, who argued the Solemani strike was a deliberate and responsible decision that saved American lives.
Pottinger’s worry is that China, Russia or Sunni and Shia terrorist groups will feel emboldened by the Biden administration’s feeble response to the assassination threat, and target individual American officials in a bid to cow them against policies they dislike.
“We don’t want national security officials who are chicken shit,” he said.
