Two prominent Republican senators have split with President Trump over his decision to sever government security for former officials who are in Iran’s crosshairs.
Last week, Trump, 78, cut off funding for security for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton and others.
Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, both outspoken GOP backers of Trump, are now encouraging the president to reevaluate that move.
“I would encourage the president to revisit the decision for those people who are being targeted by Iran,” said Cotton, 47, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, to “Fox News Sunday.”
“I’ve reviewed the intelligence in the last few days. The threat to anyone involved in President Trump’s strike on Qasem Soleimani is persistent. It’s real. Iran is committed to vengeance against all of these people,” he added.
In early 2020, Trump ordered a strike to kill Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who had been the leader of Tehran’s Quds Force. Since the assassination, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has vowed to pursue revenge.
Two years later, Khamenei’s website showed an animation of Pompeo being targeted by an aircraft that looks like a bomber or drone on one of Trump’s golf courses.
That same year, the Justice Department slapped charges against Shahram Poursafi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member who allegedly schemed to kill Bolton in 2021 and 2022.
“If people are going to work for the president now on Iran or China or North Korea or the Mexican drug cartels, they might hesitate to do so” because of the security withdrawal, Cotton warned.
Graham, 69, who revealed that he had spoken with Cotton on the security issue, was more pointed about his opposition to Trump’s move.
“You don’t want to leave people hanging. There’s no doubt in my mind the Iranians have been out to kill President Trump. I’ve been briefed about it. I know he’s been briefed about it. I’m glad he has protection,” Graham told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“Whether you like Bolton or anybody else, we need to make sure that if you serve in our government and you take a foreign power at the request of the administration, that we do not leave you hanging,” he added.
“The Senate needs to look at what happened and sit down and figure out what’s the best way forward. Everybody doesn’t deserve a detail all their life. It needs to be as needed.”
Trump has had a particularly frosty relationship with Bolton, 76, since the hawkish foreign policy chief departed his national security adviser role in 2019. Bolton has been harshly critical of Trump in public.
“I think there was enough time,” Trump told reporters Tuesday about stripping Bolton’s security away. “We take a job, you take a job, you want to do a job, we’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives. Why should we?”
Relations between Trump and Pompeo, 61, haven’t been quite as strained. Pompeo has largely refrained from criticizing the president too much in the public eye.
However, Trump made clear after his 2024 election victory that he would not be bringing Pompeo back on board, delighting elements of his base who loathe foreign policy hawks.
The president has also noted that most of the former government officials for whom he cut security are wealthy and able to afford private security out of their own pockets.
As for Iranian threats against Trump, over the summer, around the time of the July 13, 2024, Butler, Pa., assassination attempt against Trump, the feds questioned Pakistani man Asif Merchant, who had communicated with Iranian handlers about potentially assassinating the then-candidate.
Iran finds itself in a dramatically weakened position now relative to Trump’s first term, given that Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria has fallen and its proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas have been significantly weakened.
