Trump pulls multimillion security detail from Iran hawks Pompeo, Bolton

The US president said Washington cannot spend upwards of $2 million a month to protect his former senior officials 'for the rest of their lives'  

News Desk   - The Cradle 

US President Donald Trump lifted the security protections for former senior officials Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Brian Hook, who reportedly face “credible death threats” from Iran.

"When you have protection, you can't have it for the rest of your life. You want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives? There are risks to everything," Trump said during a trip to North Carolina last week. “I can give them some good numbers of some very good security people,” the president added. 

Trump soured on Pompeo in the run-up to his latest electoral victory, saying publicly that his ex-state secretary would play no role in his new government. In a social media post this week, Trump fired Hook from his presidentially appointed position on the board of the Wilson Center think tank.

In a March 2022 report to Congress, the state department said it was paying more than $2 million monthly to provide Pompeo and Hook with 24-hour security.

Trump's relationship with John Bolton, his former national security advisor, went south before the end of his first term. Bolton later wrote a book whose publication the White House unsuccessfully sought to block on the grounds that it disclosed national security information.

According to US intelligence reports, Pompeo and Bolton are “targets of assassination plots by Iran” for their involvement in the assassination of Iranian anti-terror commander Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi resistance leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis outside of Baghdad airport in January 2020.

Washington charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 2022 with plotting to murder Bolton. Authorities in Tehran promised revenge after Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Soleimani.

Nevertheless, since Trump returned to the White House, Iranian officials have restarted talks with European parties to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump jettisoned in 2018.

“No clear message has been sent or received between the two countries; what is being said is only in the media,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on 29 January regarding possible contacts with the US.

“Our criterion remains the past distrust that continues to dominate relations between the two countries. We previously reached an agreement; Iran implemented it, but they were the ones who disrupted it,” Araghchi added.

Despite surrounding himself with ultra-Zionist officials in his cabinet, such as State Secretary Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, on 23 January, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the “only thing” he insisted on was that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon,” failing to mention anything regarding Iran’s regional policies or its conflict with Israel.