US President Donald Trump said he rushed to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei before carrying out a new assassination plot, highlighting that the Iranian government had tried to kill him twice in the past.
“I reached out to him before he reached out to me,” President Trump said in an interview with ABC News yesterday (Sunday) night. They tried twice and I beat him. ”
He noted that recent American military operations had brought about fundamental changes in Iran’s leadership, adding that the names proposed as successors to the ruling regime had been pre-identified before the attack, but were killed in the first attack.
He said: “The attack was very successful and expelled most of the candidates. All the candidates were killed, so it’s probably not the candidate we had in mind. Even the second or third place candidates were killed.”
President Trump’s statement comes in light of the escalation of U.S. military operations against Iran and new scrutiny of what the U.S. government describes as Iran’s efforts to target Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
In 2024, U.S. prosecutors indicted a number of individuals in connection with an alleged Iran-linked assassination plot targeting presidential candidate Trump.
According to the US Department of Justice, elements linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards attempted to recruit personnel in the US to carry out the attack, which was said to be a response to the 2020 US airstrike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.
In one case, federal authorities said the suspect was trying to hire a hired hitman, who later turned out to be an undercover FBI agent as part of a high-security operation. Prosecutors have described these efforts as part of a broader Iranian campaign targeting current and former U.S. officials, but the Iranian government has denied involvement in these plans.
