First Draft: Did Israel Fake the Iran Threats Against Trump’s Life?
Mehdi on how unverified intel from Tel Aviv forced the U.S. president into the back of a catering truck, while exaggerating the threat from Tehran. Plus: Trump's DC is Pyongyang, again.
On this day in 2023, Donald Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and 17 others were indicted on felony charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. The case collapsed in 2024, after Trump won re-election. Now he seems to want to commit those alleged crimes all over again.
Happy Friday! Mehdi here, still recovering from my Wednesday interview with Count Binface – yes, Count Binface, that’s his name! Have you not seen it yet?
Last night, Count Binface won 9,455 votes in the UK parliamentary by-election in Clacton, provoked by the resignation of sitting MP and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in a weird and desperate attempt to distract from a hugely contentious financial scandal. Farage was re-elected with 22,239 votes, so the parliamentary investigation into his donations now picks up where it left off. So… what was the point of all this?
But let’s turn this morning to the man Nigel Farage defers to, Donald Trump, who has been in a spot of bother recently because of the man he defers to: Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘Israeli-Derived’
Did you know that all those Iranian threats against Trump’s life that we’ve been hearing about recently come from… Israeli intelligence? And did you know that they aren’t considered all that credible by the U.S. intelligence community?
SURPRISE!
Reuters dropped this blockbuster story from reporter Eric Banco yesterday:
The U.S. has received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate President Donald Trump, including before a secret Air Force One ruse in Turkey, that U.S. intelligence officials could not independently verify, according to a current U.S. official and two former officials.
That Reuters piece came off the back of earlier reporting from the Washington Post, which revealed how “U.S. intelligence officials were skeptical of an Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump that was relayed by Israel.”
According to the Post, one U.S. official described the intel on the threats against the president’s life as “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”
So Trump secretly left Air Force One, hid in the back of a catering truck – with Natalie Harp – and got onto an alternative plane to fly to London from Ankara, as the Washington Post revealed on Monday, because of an “Israeli-derived” and “low confidence” piece of intel?