Iran is still actively engaged in plots to assassinate two senior Trump administration officials, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, according to a non-public notice sent to Congress and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The notification, which the State Department transmitted to congressional leaders last week, reveals that Pompeo and former U.S. Iran envoy Brian Hook continue to face “serious and credible” threats from a foreign nation, reported to be Iran.
The findings come on the eve of a contested presidential election in which Iran’s plots to assassinate former president Donald Trump have taken center stage in recent weeks. Trump was briefed late last month about real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States, according to his campaign.
Trump said last month on social media that there are “big threats on my life by Iran.” He added that “moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again.”
Tehran’s assassination plots first came to light in January 2022, when the Free Beacon reported on another congressional notice about threats to Hook’s life. It soon became clear that Pompeo was also one of Tehran’s targets due to his role in isolating the hardline regime when he served as secretary of state.
It is the 20th time since January 2021 that Congress has been informed of credible threats against Hook, a key architect of the Trump administration’s tough sanctions campaign on Iran. For Pompeo, it is the 17th time Congress has been alerted to similar threats.
Pompeo, Hook, and former White House national security adviser John Bolton are all under U.S. government protection as a result of these threats.
In May, the FBI said that it is actively searching for an Iranian intelligence operative planning to assassinate Pompeo and other American officials. The individual, named as Majid Dastjani Farahani, was said to be recruiting “individuals for operations in the U.S., to include lethal targeting of current/former [U.S. government] officials.”
The Biden-Harris administration came under fire earlier this year for attempting to suppress information about Iran’s assassination plots, the Free Beacon first reported in February.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) disclosed that U.S. officials were “abusing the classification system” to ensure these plots could not be discussed in a public setting. “They find public discussion of Iran’s aggression politically inconvenient because it gets in the way of their appeasement of the regime,” Cruz said during a Senate hearing.
Iran is reported to have a “hit list” composed of former Trump administration officials and aides, according to Politico, with Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matt Olsen describing Tehran’s plots as “extraordinarily serious.”
“Iran has made it very clear that they are determined to seek retaliation against former officials in connection with the Soleimani strike,” Olsen told the outlet in October.
Hussein Mousavian—a former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team who works as a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University—touted the threats against former Iran envoy Hook in a 2022 documentary produced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
“I went to America and an American told me that Brian Hook’s wife can’t sleep, she cries and trembles, she told Brian, ‘They’ll kill you,’ since Hook was a partner in the death of Haj Qassem [Soleimani], that’s how much they were trembling,” Mousavian said in the documentary 72 Hours, produced and released this month by a company tied to the corps.
