The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Thursday slammed President Donald Trump for leaving three of his former foreign policy advisors open to a potential Iranian attack.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that Trump pulled ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s security detail as well as that of his aide Brian Hook on Wednesday, after removing former national security advisor John Bolton’s Secret Service detail hours after his inauguration.
The conservative, Murdoch-owned paper’s opinion writers conceded that “falling out of President Trump’s good graces is an occupational hazard” for his staffers but called the move a “new low.”
“If Iran commits violence against any of these men, Mr. Trump won’t be able to escape some responsibility,” the Journal’s editorial board said, referencing a foiled assassination plot against Bolton by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Bolton and Pompeo fell out with the former president in 2019 and 2021 respectively, the former for his foreign policy views and the latter for criticizing Trump’s attempted election overturn.
All three men received protections beyond their tenure because of credible threats of violence from the Iranian government following the first Trump administration’s killing of Qasem Soleimani. Iran’s revenge schemes for Soleimani’s killing included a plan to assassinate Trump himself, a November DOJ report alleged.
The WSJ plea contends, possibly somewhat naively, that Trump “doesn’t seem to be taking this all [potential violence] that seriously,” urging him not to make security decisions based on “some vindictive whim.”
The security detail removals come alongside other actions that critics say increase the specter of violence for President Trump’s political opponents. Trump pardoned over 1,500 Jan 6 rioters including Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, each sentenced to over a decade in jail for leading violent militias, and anti-abortion demonstrators who injured a nurse with a blockade on a reproductive care clinic.
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