by Clare M. Lopez, Newsmax, August 14, 2024
The Iranian regime’s full court press against former U.S. President and current Republican Party presidential candidate Donald J. Trump continues across a spectrum of operations.
The Tehran regime’s fear of a second Trump administration in the White House has been on full display through a series of assassination plots, online influence operations, and now, most recently, suspected Iranian hacking attempts against the Trump campaign.
As noted in this earlier Newsmax op-ed piece, the Iranian regime has spewed a steady stream of threats against Trump as well as former officials who served in his prior administration.
Pledges of vengeance against them began after the January 2020 elimination of Qods Force commander Qassem Suleimani and have not ceased since.
As Trump began his second quest for the White House, however, and launched his re-election campaign, both the pace and variety of credible threats against him, in particular have picked up noticeably.
While it’s not possible at this point to claim with any certainty that the Iranian regime was involved in any way with the July 13, 2024 assassination attempt against President Trump, at his outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, both the drumbeat of threats emanating from Tehran and the known Iranian intelligence use of online gaming app sites to influence potential young targets do contribute to an assessment that Iran should be considered a possible suspect — and that there could be more Thomas Crooks out there.
The July 12, 2024 arrest by U.S. law enforcement of Pakistani Asif Merchant was not revealed publicly until some three weeks later, but it’s notable that his apprehension took place the day before the Trump rally in Pennsylvania.
Merchant was charged with murder-for-hire in a foiled plot to assassinate U.S. government officials and a U.S. politician (Trump) on U.S. soil.
According to court documents, Merchant arrived in the U.S. in April 2024 after having spent time in Iran.
He is alleged to have tried to hire hitmen to carry out assassinations in the U.S., much along the same lines as earlier Iranian plans, likewise thwarted, in the years since 2020.
The latest Iranian operation against both the Trump and Biden presidential election campaigns involves Iranian attempts to influence American voters through online operations that include fake websites, so-called “spear-phishing campaigns,” and more.
On Aug. 9, 2024, Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) released a report indicating that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence unit was targeting staffers for both the Trump and then-Biden-Harris campaigns.
The Iranian regime’s apparent overall objective is to sow chaos among the U.S. electorate and disrupt the November 2024 elections.
The Trump campaign confirmed that it had been the target of a cyberattack, naming Iran as the culprit, that was able to breach its online security and steal internal documents that were part of the vetting process for Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who was subsequently selected as Trump’s vice presidential running mate.
According to Epoch Times reporting, “the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement in July [2024] confirming that Iranian groups had targeted the U.S. political campaign, specifically that of Trump, to influence the November election.”
That the Trump campaign would be a particular target of Iranian regime influence operations, not to mention assassination plots, should be no surprise, as given his tough approach against that regime during his presidency, there clearly is intense concern in Tehran about his potential return to the Oval Office.
When set against the backdrop of ratcheting tensions across the Mideast, including the bombshell new report about Iran’s nuclear weapons work, though, the threats coming from the Iranian regime clearly have reached an unprecedented and dangerous level.
It was just in July 2024 that the ODNI’s regular update on Iran’s nuclear weapons program for the first time dropped previous statements claiming that “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.”
In plain English, this means that the U.S. intelligence community is finally admitting what it must have known for some time, namely that the Iranian regime of course has been working on a deliverable nuclear weapons capability for some time.
Indeed, given the plethora of reporting from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), David Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the Israeli “Amad Plan” document heist out of Tehran, and the Iranian opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) over literally decades, it’s inexplicable why it’s taken the U.S. Intelligence Community this long to state openly what’s been increasingly obvious for so long.
The full-court press by the Iranian regime is aimed specifically at Donald Trump, but the broader implications of its ability to deploy assassination teams onto U.S. soil, launch disruptive internet operations, and now evidence that it’s a threshold nuclear power, are critical threats to Israel, the entire Mideast region, and the U.S. as well.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.