Really long article, but excellent by Lee Smith, link below
https://twitter.com/Doranimated/status/1513910834665345033s=20&t=2dcmVW97mtMWDVv2tkxmBA
Article
How is it possible that in a building full of federal law enforcement agents, it took a postal service inspector to uncover the two men? After all, press reports have suggested for months that the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are aware of active foreign plots against U.S. officials. In particular, the Iranians are intent on taking revenge for the targeted assassination of Qassem Soleiman, the onetime chief of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ external operations unit, who was second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The Iranians have repeatedly threatened the three former Trump officials—Pompeo, Hook, and Bolton—by name in their own media. In a recent documentary, a former Iranian official, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, boasted that the Iranian regime’s threats to murder Hook have terrorized Hook’s family. “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,” said Moussavian.Bizarrely, Moussavian holds a teaching post at Princeton University, which is apparently okay with faculty who use the university’s name and platform to amplify and celebrate murder threats by foreign governments against U.S. diplomats.
Because Pompeo and Hook are former State Department employees, their security is provided by the Diplomatic Security Service. Bolton worked in the White House, so his protective detail is provided by the Secret Service—the target of the penetration effort by Taherzadeh and Ali.
Early last month, the Washington Examiner reported that U.S. intelligence services had become aware that “at least two Iranians belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ covert-action Quds Force have been plotting to assassinate” Bolton, and a full-time Secret Service protective detail was assigned to him earlier this year or late in 2021. When emailed by Tablet, Bolton declined to comment on the arrests of Ali and Taherzadeh.
This is not the first time the Iranians have plotted to kill their enemies in the U.S. capital. In September 2011, U.S. law enforcement arrested Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-born naturalized U.S. citizen who, together with Iran-based Quds Force officers, had plotted to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir at a Washington restaurant and subsequently bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies.
At the time, President Barack Obama said that Iran “will pay a price” for plotting terror attacks that were likely to have killed a huge number of people in the U.S. capital. Instead, the Obama administration legalized Iran’s nuclear weapons program when it agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015.
The Biden administration is now negotiating to reenter the deal that the Trump administration withdrew from in May 2018. Despite some recent hand-wringing, it seems unlikely that Iran’s efforts to kill Americans will derail Biden’s negotiators. The Obama team eagerly embraced the Iranian nuclear program while ignoring Tehran’s terror plots and will almost certainly do so again under Biden. Robert Malley, the key negotiator for Obama’s Middle East team, now serves as Biden’s Iran envoy.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/infiltration-secret-service-iranian-plot-kill-john-bolton