Journalist and ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan says there's a hard lesson buried in Trump's secret escape from Air Force One during a recent Turkey stopover, and it has everything to do with who's been feeding him intelligence on Iran.
Hasan cited reporting from Reuters' Eric Banco, who wrote that the U.S. has received Israeli warnings over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate Trump, including one before Trump was secretly moved off Air Force One and into an alternate plane in Ankara. Those officials, Banco reported, could not independently verify the threats.
That reporting followed an earlier Washington Post story, which found U.S. intelligence officials were skeptical of the assassination warnings Israel passed along, with one official describing the intelligence as "Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence."
“So what are the lessons of this latest PR debacle for Donald Trump?” Hasan wrote in an analysis published Saturday in Zeteo.
“Number one, Israeli intelligence simply cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to Iran, where the Israelis have their own warmongering agenda. In fact, the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been providing bogus intel to an easily manipulated Donald Trump from the get-go.”
Hasan also connected the threats to the Trump administration's own actions, noting Banco's reporting that intelligence officials have long assessed that Iran wants revenge for the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, as well as this year's killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a strike CNN presidential historian Tim Naftali called the first open U.S.-backed assassination of a sitting foreign head of state in modern history.
“And yet here we are, the president of the United States now humiliatingly having to hide inside of a catering truck, at the mercy of Israeli intel and Iranian threats,” Hasan wrote. “What was that sowing/reaping meme again?”
