State Department Admits Trump’s Iran Envoy Facing ‘Serious and Credible Threats’
Emboldened by Biden’s weakness, Iran targets Trump and Trump-era officials.
By Robert Spencer
Biden’s handlers, as hyper-partisan and self-serving as ever,have been reluctant to admit it up to now, but the Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that “the Trump administration’s Iran envoy is facing ‘serious and credible’ threats to his safety, according to a non-public assessment produced this month by the State Department.” This news “was delivered to Congress amid a campaign of public death threats by Iran aimed at former president Donald Trump and top administration officials.” Why is all this happening? Because of the weakness of Joe Biden and his Potemkin presidency.
The State Department noted that a “specific threat persists with respect to former special representative [for Iran] Brian Hook,” who, according to the Free Beacon, “helmed the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Tehran and was instrumental in the assassination of Iranian terror leader Qassem Soleimani. The document does not name the actors behind the threats, describing them only as a ‘foreign power or the agent of a foreign power.’”
Gee, which one? And why doesn’t the State Department want to say? Could it be because despite this revelation, the Biden administration is still determined to appease the Islamic Republic of Iran at the nuclear negotiation table in Vienna?
Nothing seems to stop this quest for appeasement, and the problem doesn’t stop with the State Department, either. The rot is just as advanced, if not more so, in American academia. According to the Free Beacon, “the State Department’s notice to Congress was issued just days after a former top Iranian official bragged about the death threats against Hook in the Iranian media. 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, sparked a media firestorm when he was seen touting the threats against Hook in a documentary produced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”
In the IRGC documentary, Mosavian says: “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.” The remarks, say the Beacon, as well as Mousavian’s “close ties to the Iranian ruling regime…put Princeton in the hot seat, with U.S. advocacy groups calling on the high-profile university to fire him.” One thing is certain, however: he won’t be fired. If he had been found to have appeared in a video of a counter-jihad group, then he would be fired. But the IRGC? Come on, man!
Twitter, of course, is just as supine as Princeton and the State Department: the website of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently released a video showing the assassination of Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago. This came as Iran issued a barrage of threats against Trump for the killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. On January 1, 2022, Khamenei tweeted: “Martyr Soleimani is an eternal reality that will live on forever. His assassins – including Trump & the like – will go down in history’s garbage bin, but of course after receiving retribution in this world for the crime they committed.” This is a clear threat, but Twitter did not ban or suspend Khamenei’s account. After all, he was threatening Donald Trump, and as far as Twitter is concerned, what could be wrong with that?
The Iranians saw all this coming: it is enlightening to remember what former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on November 5, 2020: “the next U.S. administration will surrender to the Iranian nation.” This wasn’t just tough talk. In light of Biden’s handlers’ apparent willingness to give the mullahs all they want and more, it was a sober assessment of the geopolitical situation.
And now Iran is openly threatening Brian Hook and others. Khamenei and his henchmen are in the enviable position of hating the same people the Leftist self-appointed guardians of acceptable opinion hate, so they are able to spread their hatred on social media and anywhere else they want without fear of suffering the fate of Khamenei’s nemesis Trump. They know there is no one in power in America who has the will or the desire to stop them now.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons