Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday that if he were in the White House, he would send a clear message to foreign nations that the U.S. would blow their country to “smithereens” if they threaten the life of a current, former, or prospective president.
Mr. Trump, the GOP nominee, delivered the remarks after U.S. intelligence officials briefed his campaign on Iranian threats against him.
“If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country — in this case, Iran — that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” Mr. Trump said at a campaign stop in Mint Hill, North Carolina. “Right now, we don’t have that leadership.”
The Trump campaign said Tuesday that the meeting with intelligence officials included information about “real and specific” threats to “assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.”
White House spokesman John Kirby said Iran’s threats against Mr. Trump are “something that we’ve been monitoring for quite a while.”
“It’s not just the former president, but it’s other former officials in his administration,” he said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.” “This is something the Iranians have expressed interest in. … We’re monitoring it closely.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump’s remarks also came hours before Vice President Kamala Harris was set to deliver a high-profile speech in Pittsburgh laying out her vision for the economy, which is the chief issue for the voters.
Mr. Trump said the FBI and Justice Department must get to the bottom of whether Iran was involved in the two assassination attempts against him.
“We really don’t know” if Iran was involved, Mr. Trump said. At the same time, he said Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is in New York City for the annual United Nations gathering and has a “large security force guarding him, and yet they are threatening our former president and the leading candidate to become the next president of the United States.”
“Certainly a strange set of circumstances,” Mr. Trump said. “Around the world, our enemies are desperate to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House because they know I will make America great again. They don’t want that,” he said.
Mr. Trump said law enforcement should be working with Apple to open “three potentially foreign-based apps” that he said were found on the computer of the first would-be assassin, and the “six phones from the second lunatic.”
“They could be Iran-based,” he said. “They could also be something else, but we’ll never know until they’re open.”
Mr. Trump also questioned whether investigators had lost their way.
“In the old days, the FBI and the DOJ used to capture people before anything happened,” he said. “In current days, the upper echelon of the FBI is all talk while they focus on the sitting president’s political opponents. That’s what they’re doing.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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