President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly planning to ramp up the U.S. pressure campaign on Iran by enacting crippling sanctions on the Islamic regime immediately after taking office.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the plans include “drastically increasing sanctions” on the country and killing its oil industry as part of an “aggressive strategy to undercut Tehran’s support of violent Mideast proxies and its nuclear program.”
Trump is expected to move rapidly to cut off Iran’s oil revenue, including by going after “foreign ports and traders who handle Iranian oil.”
The report said that Trump’s new “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran will also factor in the fact that the regime has repeatedly tried to assassinate him and some of his top officials from his first administration.
“People tend to take that stuff personally,” said Mick Mulroy, a top Pentagon official during Trump’s first term. “If he’s going to be hawkish on any particular country, designated major adversaries, it’s Iran.”
Prosecutors unsealed an indictment this week against Farhad Shakeri, 51, of Iran, on multiple charges, including murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, money laundering conspiracy, conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and sanctions against the Government of Iran.
Prosecutors said that he hired two individuals to kill an Iranian dissident and two Jewish Americans.
However, with the elections approaching, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) told Shakeri to pause his efforts to kill the dissident and the two Jewish Americans because they wanted him to focus on killing Trump.
“SHAKERI indicated to IRGC Official-1 that this would cost a ‘huge’ amount of money,” the indictment said. “In response, IRGC Official-1 said that ‘we have already spent a lot of money [s]o the money’s not an issue,’ which SHAKERI understood to mean that the IRGC previously had spent a significant sum of money on efforts to murder Victim-4 and was willing to continue spending a lot of money in its attempt to procure Victim-4’s assassination.”
During a meeting just one month ago with the IRGC official, Shakeri was instructed to have a plan in place to assassinate Trump within a week and that if he could not do it, Iran would put the plan on hold because they believed Trump “would lose the election and, afterward, it would be easier to assassinate.”
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