Trump Is Briefed on Iranian Assassination Threats
Former President Donald J. Trump was briefed on Tuesday by U.S. intelligence officials about “specific threats from Iran to assassinate him,” according to his campaign.
U.S. intelligence agencies had previously tracked a potential Iranian assassination plot earlier this summer, with officials stressing that they did not consider the threat related to the shooting in July that wounded Mr. Trump. Earlier this month, another man was arrested by the police after he was found lurking with a gun near Mr. Trump’s golf course in Florida. The federal government will pursue a charge of attempted assassination against that man, and there is no evidence to suggest that plot was related to Iran.
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that the threats from Iran were part of “an effort to destabilize and sow chaos” and that “intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months.”
A spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the briefing took place but declined to answer questions or provide any specifics. It is not clear if the intelligence officials provided new details about existing threats by Iran against Mr. Trump or if spy agencies had gathered information about new plots against him.
Iranian hackers seeking to influence the 2024 election breached Mr. Trump’s campaign and then sent excerpts from documents pilfered from the campaign to people associated with President Biden’s re-election campaign this summer, though law enforcement officials said that the recipients of those materials had not responded. Iranian hackers also tried to breach the Biden-Harris campaign.
Iran has also engaged in an ambitious and brazen effort