Congress must act in face of Iranian threats to Trump: Gingrich

Iranian assassination plots targeting American politicians, including Trump, should prompt Congress to pass laws to protect our democracy. — Image credit: Getty Images

Officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently briefed former President Donald Trump on “real and specific threats from Iran” to assassinate him. The brief does not offer any connection between the threats and the two attempts on Trump’s life in July and September. In a post on Truth Social, the former president wrote, “I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before….An attack on a former President [sic] is a Death Wish for the attacker!”

Watch the video above as Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich discusses the potential implications of Iran’s involvement in recent or possible future assassination attempts, and argues that Congress must enact stronger laws to counter hostile dictatorships that threaten American democracy.

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The following is an excerpt from the above video:

The reports that President Trump has been briefed about Iranian attempts to assassinate him, the possibility that these first two assassination attempts may have been coordinated or encouraged by the Iranians, should have a chilling effect on every American.

Assassinations by the Iranians is not something new. They have been issuing what they call “fatwas,” which is a religious indication that anybody who wants to can go kill people, and they designate certain people to go after.

Currently, they’re really still mad because we killed General Soleimani. Soleimani had been the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He had planned their terrorist activities throughout the Middle East. Our estimate is that he killed 690 Americans through projects that he had directed and he had assigned, and we felt, frankly, pretty legitimate in targeting him.

However, he was so high up in the Iranian government and in their system of power that it was a huge shock to them, and so they issued a whole series of assassination threats, including on my good friend, [former] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who, to this day, is surrounded by security people. The former national security adviser has security people. There are a number of folks, in addition, of course, to President Trump and Vice President Pence. And one of the questions we need to be asking is, how long do you tolerate a dictatorship that believes it has the right to try to assassinate your leaders or to kill other people?

The reports that President Trump has been briefed about Iranian attempts to assassinate him, the possibility that these first two assassination attempts may have been coordinated or encouraged by the Iranians should have a chilling effect on every American assassinations by the Iranians is not something new. They have been issuing what they call fatwas, which is a religious indication that anybody who wants to can go kill people, and they designate certain people to go after. Currently, they’re really still mad because we killed General solomini. Solomini had been the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He had planned their terrorist activities throughout the Middle East. Our estimate is that he killed 690 Americans through projects that he had directed and he had assigned, and we felt, frankly, pretty legitimate in targeting him. However, he was so high up in the Iranian government and in their system of power that it was a huge shock to them, and so they issued a whole series of assassination threats, including my good friend, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who, to this day, is surrounded by security people. The former National Security Advisor has security people. There are a number of folks in addition, of course, to President Trump and Vice President Pence. And one of the questions we need to be asking is, how long do you tolerate a dictatorship that believes it has the right to try to assassinate your leaders or to kill other people? Even as I’m talking to you, we have in custody a young Pakistani who came across from Canada, who was apparently in coordination with the Iranians, and was on the way to kill a group of preferably, from his standpoint, a Jewish group in New York City. He’d been trained. He literally came all the way across Canada from Vancouver, across the border. The Canadians had alerted us he was coming. We picked him up. But this is one more example of what I’m talking about. There are a continuing series of efforts to do everything they can to kill the people they target. In Germany, for example, there is no question, according to German officials, that the Iranians have deliberately killed a number of Iranian dissidents who were trying to help organize resistance. I went in Paris several years ago to a large conference, and was told afterwards that there were two bombs that were discovered in time and taken out designed to kill a lot of Iranian dissidents, and those of us who were there visiting with them. So I think this raises a real question about international law, to what extent can you tolerate a dictatorship which believes it has the right to target and kill your leaders? And I think this is a topic the Congress is going to have to take up, and we’re going to have to adopt much tougher rules for those who want to kill us,