Nearly two years after they left office, the Biden administration has concluded that Iranian threats against former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and one of his top aides are still accurate and exist.
Last week, the State Department informed Congress that Pompeo and Brian Hook, who worked as the Trump administration’s special envoy for Iran, were still under “serious and credible danger from a foreign power or agent of a foreign power” as a result of their official duties.
According to the notifications obtained by The Washington Post, Deputy Secretary of State for Management Brian McKeon signed the findings on November 8 and forwarded them to Congress on November 9.
This means that Pompeo and Hook will continue to receive federal security.
I, at this moment, find that the specific danger against Michael Pompeo, a former secretary of state, still exists, McKeon stated.
He described the threat against Hook in the same terms.
According to an AP article from March, the State Department reportedly paid more than $2 million a month to provide Pompeo and Hook with round-the-clock protection.
The most recent decisions, Hook’s eighth and Pompeo’s fifth since they left government in January 2021, did not specify how much the protection would cost.
Although Iran has long expressed its ire at Pompeo and Hook for abandoning the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, which included designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “foreign terrorist organization” and subjecting it to unprecedented sanctions, the notifications do not specifically name Iran as the source of the threats.
Additionally, some Iranian officials have charged them with authorizing the January 2020 drone attack in Baghdad that resulted in the death of IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani.
Regarding the alerts, the State Department was silent right away. Hook declined to comment, and a call to Pompeo’s press office went unanswered.
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