WSJ: Israeli Intel Foiled Iranian Plot to Assassinate Trump After NATO Summit
The threat included an attempt to use “shoulder-to-air missiles to target Air Force One.”
Israel warned the U.S. about an Iranian plot to assassinate President Donald Trump on his flight back from last month’s NATO Summit in Turkey, The Wall Street Journal confirmed, quoting a U.S. official. President Trump eluded the Iranian assassins by secretly switching to a smaller C-32A military aircraft after appearing to board Air Force One in front of the press.
The attempt on the president’s life was to take place on July 8, a day before Ayatollah Khamenei’s burial in Iran.
In my post yesterday, I also concluded that the “timing of the incident suggests that Israel may have alerted the U.S. to the Iranian threat.” On July 10, we reported that Israeli intelligence had warned of an Iranian plot to assassinate President Trump.
The WSJ revealed on Tuesday:
President Trump was secretly flown out of Turkey last month on a military jet after the U.S. government was told of an Iranian threat against the president and Air Force One, according to a U.S. official and another person briefed on the matter.
The U.S. official said Israel briefed the Trump administration on the intelligence, which included a threat to use shoulder-to-air missiles to target Air Force One. Some of the president’s top aides stayed on Air Force One, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the official said.
The Washington Post broke the story on Monday, stating that President Trump was forced to take a secret flight home after credible intelligence revealed an Iranian plot to shoot down Air Force One.
“An Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump prompted an extraordinary operation last month in which he flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One,” the daily reported. “The maneuver meant that Trump’s actual location was concealed from the American public and many senior U.S. officials for hours.”
President Trump, on Tuesday evening, confirmed that Iran tried to target Air Force One. “I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk,” he told reporters. “I think it was at greater risk because that would be the plane I think that we — that they would be more likely to go for.”
Trump: “I don't trust Iran. Why? Are you saying I trust Iran? I'm the last person that trusts Iran. They've lied to me constantly. We have total control over the Hormuz Strait right now. They don't have control. We have total control. But we right now, we're in a very good… pic.twitter.com/6tZyFRV4Ht
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) August 12, 2026
President Trump has been in the crosshairs of Iran since he first took office. Iran’s slain Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, first called for his assassination after a U.S. drone strike in early 2020 eliminated the wanted Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani.
U.S. law enforcement foiled a 2024 plot by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to assassinate President Trump on American soil. In 2025, Iran issued a fatwa, or an Islamic edict, calling for the killing of President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The fatwa declared the president an “enemy of Allah” and offered rewards in the afterlife to his would-be assassins.
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Well, no. In hindsight we now know that there were no assassins going after the plane, because we know it reached its destination without incident. Since the Iranians didn’t know Trump wasn’t on board, that couldn’t be the reason they didn’t hit it. Therefore there must have been some other reason. Either the intel was wrong and they never planned to do it at all, or they changed their mind, or something else stopped them. But what’s certain is that had Trump remained on board he would have been safe. He couldn’t have known that at the time, but we know it now.
You seem… disappointed.
Are you nuts or just on drugs? Screw you.
😘
I’m not the one ranting about this non-story.
You, on the other hand, seem to think it’s the biggest thing since the Beatles broke up.
And yeah, he is disappointed. Surprised he didn’t yelp about the human “decoys.”
Go eff yourself, isfoss, you lying piece of filth. Shut your filthy mouth and stop slandering me.
Must be that time of the month.
For you? Maybe. You can all go eff yourselves. Anyone who participates in this vile smear, or thinks it’s funny. You’re all evil.
IKR? He sounds like he took a wrong turn on his way to Democratic Underground.
We know he switched planes as a precaution.
We know Israel knew about it and either they or the US stopped the attempt.
Both can be true because intelligence never assumes it is omniscient, which is why precautions are taken.
I’m not sure I follow the semantics you are arguing.
It’s very simple. The article says he eluded the assassins by switching planes. The plain fact is that we now know, in hindsight, that he didn’t. Either they never existed, so he couldn’t have eluded them, or they were there but never took the shot, so again his switch didn’t achieve anything. Had he remained on the plane he would have been safe. But of course we only know this now. He and the Secret Service did the right thing and I’m glad they did it, even if it turned out to have been unnecessary. I’m also glad we didn’t lose the plane, and the officials who were on board. Losing the reporters would have been a plus, but not worth the loss of the plane and the others.
Or one of the media people on air force one found out he wasn’t there and reported the fact to their terrorist contact and the Iranians weren’t able to switch to the new target.
Or one of the media people on air force one found out he wasn’t there and reported the fact to their terrorist contact
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or the israelis eliminated the threat entirely–without compromising anyone and revealing how they came to know of the threat via their assets or direct intel, would be the simplest / most effective course
Not possible.
First of all, if any of them had found out he wasn’t on board with them we would all have heard about it immediately, not a month later.
Second, any reporter who had such a contact, and knowledge of a plot against the plane, would not have been on board! Therefore those on board could not possibly have had such a contact, or such knowledge.
Which would mean that Trump switching planes achieved nothing. Again, this is only in hindsight. It was a completely legitimate precaution at the time, we just know that it turned out to have been unnecessary.
So would the media contact been on the plane if the President was? Kinda a dumb media contact, but then again?
Entirely possible Milhouse. Especially if he’s a terrorist first and journalist second. They wouldn’t have wanted to expose their source.
I’m sorry you’re disappointed Trump lived. Deal with with it.
You can go eff yourself too. A whole bunch of you outing yourselves as evil-minded pieces of excrement.
Mr. President, we have credible evidence of an Iranian threat to Air Force One with shoulder fired missiles.
Understood. What is your recommendation?
Well, sir, since we didn’t really see anyone there is no need to take evasive action. But on the other hand, other sources think they saw men with shoulder fired missiles. But we don’t know if they intend to use them. So I suggest we just stay on the plane. We’re safe.
You’re Fired.
And the point of that rambling bit of nonsense?
“Had he remained on the plane, he would have been safe.”
— You know that because…it was all “unnecessary”from the get go, right? —
I know that because the plane landed safely. Therefore it would have landed just as safely with him aboard. This is something I can know, because it’s in the past. We know how it turned out. As is completely obvious to any normal person. Just not to you, because you’re an evil lying hate-filled bastard with no principles whatsoever.
Maybe Iranian o tell knew he wasn’t on the plane
Like all the leaks in the government
I think Trump needs to look into this, like yesterday
Stupid. Who would have known about this? If they had a source that deep in, then the source would have told them about the second plane too, so why didn’t they shoot that down? Obviously either it was a false alarm, or they changed their minds, or the plot was foiled; those are the only three options, and whichever one is true the outcome would have been the same had he stayed on the first plane.
That’s the great thing about hindsight. Once you know how things happened, you no longer need to speculate.
Trump needs to look into what? Nothing happened. Is he supposed to look into why nothing happened?! If we or the Israelis foiled the plot, then he already knows. If not, then there probably was no plot, so what’s there to investigate?
Note how in some lefty fantasies a catering truck has been transformed into a catering cart. Soon we’ll have “journalisms” reporting with a straight face that he was crouching inside a catering cart, like that joke cartoon that’s circulating.
This reminds me of the “plastic turkey” that Bush supposedly served soldiers in Afghanistan, supposedly at some ridiculous hour of the morning. According to serious press reports, Bush brought a plastic turkey with him from Washington, landed in the dark of night and had soldiers woken up so he could get a photo of him pretending to serve them dinner with this fake turkey, and then got back on his plane to go home.
None of that was true, and none of the people reporting it were there. Bush arrived at dinner time and served actual Thanksgiving dinner to the soldiers. He picked up a centerpiece from one of the tables — a real turkey, which was decorated for display purposes rather than for eating — and posed for a picture. The soldiers who were there were all happy to meet him and to pose with him. But the “journalisms” figured “display turkey” meant “plastic prop”, reasoned that a plastic prop wouldn’t be found in Afghanistan so Bush must have brought it with him, and looked at the time it was in Washington rather than in Afghanistan, because they’d evidently never heard of time zones.
To Millhouse’s comment that a terrorist posing as a reporter on the plane would not have been on the plane, we’ve had too much history of individuals who see killing others while they kill themselves as a pathway to heaven. All pure speculation.
we just know that it turned out to have been unnecessary.
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about the equivalent of arguing seatbelts don’t save lives
Huh?! You’re not making any sense.
If you drive somewhere and arrive at your destination safely, without having experienced any crash or violent stop, then you know that your seatbelt didn’t save you from anything, and that had you neglected it you would have been perfectly okay, apart from perhaps a ticket. That’s how hindsight works.
I think Milhouse’s analysis is spot on !
Further evidence that Milhouse’s analysis is correct is that SecState Rubio and SecTreas Bessent, and White House aides remained on what became the decoy flight, along with White House aides Stephen Miller, Will Scharf, Steven Cheung, Mike Needham, Ross Worthington and Monica Crowley. So, the purported Air Force 1 flight was still a very attractive target.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-secret-flight-turkey-pete-hegseth-marco-rubio-scott-bessent/
So, it appears that that moving POTUS to the alternate aircraft, while a very wise move, was not a matter of “elusion.”
Unless,
(i) the intelligence about the upcoming assassination attempt was correct,
(ii) the attempt was only going to be made if POTUS could be taken out,
and
(iii) the assassins were somehow informed that POTUS was not on board the target Air Force 1.
Well, if CBS reported this, then it most certainly is what took place. /s.
No, it’s not
Clearly there were Iranian spies that got intel he was t on the plane but didn’t know exact where he was
You’re nuts! What kind of moronic thought process leads you think that these spies of yours even existed? There’s literally nothing supporting such a conclusion. Occam’s razor tells us there was no plan to shoot the plane down, and that’s why it wasn’t shot down.
Occam’s Razor is often wrong, But perhaps the most likely explanation was that the intelligence was something like either they plan to shoot it down but they have some impediments to their ability to execute or there is a plan to shoot it down but it has not yet been given the green light . . . and then no missile was actually fired because the assassin could not get close enough or he got cold feet or he was told at the last minute to call it off and in that last case no one knows whether it was called off because the Iranians thought it too risky or because they found out that Trump had been moved.
Do the Iranians care about risk? Well, maybe not in the conventional sense.; thus, a rational actor would have considered shooting down a plane with a lot of people but not the President to be a PR disaster but the Iranians might consider it to be a valuable notch in the belt. But given the apparent brewing rivalry between Turkey and Iran for leadership in the warped Muslim worldview, the Iranians might very well have decided that there is not enough benefit to doing something like this in Turkey (and that is before considering that the US might have invoked the NATO treaty to demand that every NATO country immediately join an all-out fight against Iran on pain of the US threat to pull out of NATO).
The irgc is not without smart counter intel people. They know they were penetrated at high levels of the government, military and irgc. This could have been an operation to smoke out the spy/spies. The USSS and military had to err on the side of caution. At the same time President Trump and his trusted aides could have run an op to smoke out leaks from our end too. The CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies in the government are known to contain elements that are working against the President.
AF1 is supposed to have defensive weapons so I’m kind of wondering how it would have fared against a shoulder fired portable missile. This is something you don’t test until you actually need it.
I wondered the same thing. Also doesn’t the Presidential aircraft have other military planes as escort?
https://thegunzone.com/does-air-force-one-fly-with-military-escort-overseas/
Air Force One does not typically fly with a dedicated military fighter escort when traveling overseas.
Why Not a Fighter Escort?
The absence of a regular fighter escort is not due to a lack of resources or concern for security. Rather, it reflects a more strategic and effective approach.
Click for more
AF1 uses “black hole” systems that use lasers and radar jamming to spoof missiles. Radar or heat seeking. The AF1 the President was using was the donated one from Qatar. It had not been fitted with those systems yet. BUFFS, B-1 and B-2’s all use the same systems. The systems are to large for Fighters, C130’s and that is why they use chaff and flares
Interesting. I would have guessed that they have chaff and flares in addition to electric warfare systems. I also wondered if they had anti-missile capabilities. I suspect they’ll add lasers as soon as they prove effective.
Still it would have been cool to have AF1 fly over DC and launch a large spread of flares before landing at Edwards. Sort of to announce his arrival.
No, it wasn’t. It was the old one, which does have the anti-missile system. He switched to the new one in the UK.
I’m having a good time trying to imagine DJT stuffed into a beverage cart and passing flight attendants peanuts and Cheez-Its as he’s pushed down the aisle.
“It’s the most luxurious beverage cart in the world, it’s unbelievable, really” Trump recalled as a White House staff chiropractor tried unsuccessfully to straighten the president’s legs. “I think with some velvet and some gold leaf on the inside, it might be something I’d do again in the future. Or at least it’ll give me somewhere to put Pocahontas if she ever needs to fly with us”
quite a downsizing from his garbage truck.
See my earlier comment on exactly this. This is a joke that some/many leftists are now assuming to be true, because they’re stupid morons. He was on a catering truck, not a cart!
Thanks for the comment. I now have a smile imagining the same. Gotta love DJT
He “faux press” – don’t like being live decoys charter your own plane. It’ll save taxpayers a few bucks of the memorabilia you steal from Air Force 1 to show around and pretend you’re important, which you aren’t.
The President is priority 1, you’re all tied for last for protection. Plus had the SS told even one of you the story would have X and the other social medias ten minutes before AF 1 took off.
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