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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s given his advisers instructions to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him.
“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.
