We already know from US intel agencies that Iran had planned to assassinate Donald Trump. That data came in before before the Secret Service allowed a lone nut to get on a roof within 130 yards of Trump and get several shots off, injuring Trump, several others, and killing Corey Comparetore. The July 13 attempt was not related to the Iranian plot, so presumably that plan is still on for Tehran, especially after the display of complete incompetence by the USSS in Butler County, PA.

Iran also has a Plan B in case they can't get direct revenge for the death of Qasem Soleimani. The same intel agencies now report that Iran has begun operations to interfere with the election process to prevent Trump from winning the election. The Wall Street Journal reports that their earlier assessment that Iran just wanted to sow chaos is no longer their operating premise:

U.S. spy agencies have “observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid” increased tensions with the U.S., an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said during a press briefing. 

The assessment of Iran’s election preferences marked a shift from a view shared by American intelligence agencies just a few weeks ago, when they said that Tehran was chiefly focused on acting as a “chaos agent” in the election. 

The officials didn’t assert directly that Tehran was seeking to undermine Trump, but said that its current operations aligned with its goals before the 2020 election, when it sought to harm Trump’s candidacy. “We haven’t observed a shift in Iran’s preferences” since 2020, the intelligence official said.

The "chaos agent" theory likely expired about the time that the intel community got wind of the assassination plot. That's a little too direct to just be a "chaos agent" plan. It's an act of war and the US has a precedent for acting upon such a cassus belli. Bill Clinton bombed Baghdad in his first term when the US discovered Iraqi agents in the US plotting to kill former president George H.W. Bush.

The Iranians want revenge for Soleimani, of course, but they also want to ensure that Trump's "maximum pressure" policies don't return too. During Trump's term in office, the mullahs in Tehran were broke or close to it, thanks to tight sanctions that cut off most of their oil revenues. Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, though, the mullahs are rolling in cash -- and funding their proxy wars against Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen:

Tehran exported a total of "$15.7 billion worth of oil in the first four months in the Iranian calendar" year, which lasted from March 21 to July 22, Mohammad Rezvanifar, the head of Iran’s Customs Administration, said on Monday. Most of this crude oil was offloaded in China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and India, according to the country’s state-controlled press.

Iran’s illicit oil trade, which is heavily sanctioned by the United States and other Western nations, has hit a boom period under the Biden-Harris administration, topping around $90 billion as of March. This cash has helped to keep the hardline regime afloat amid economic uncertainty and helps Tehran fund its network of terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

China has long been Iran’s top oil client, with exports routinely crossing 1 million barrels per day. While sanctions are in place to stop this trade, the Biden-Harris administration has come under fire for turning a blind eye to Tehran’s oil exports as part of a bid to ease diplomatic tensions with the hardline regime. The United States also has granted several sanctions waivers that permit Iraq to pay Iran upwards of $10 billion in backed electricity payments, cash that lawmakers and experts say is fueling Tehran’s proxy war against Israel.

So yes, the mullahs have plenty of incentives to prevent Trump from returning to office. 

Assassination is the riskiest of these options, of course, although one has to wonder whether the Biden-Harris co-presidency would actually do anything about it. After their disgraceful Kabul bug-out and running interference for Hamas, does anyone think that either Biden or Harris has the cojones to stand up to Tehran? Even over an actual act of war? They did respond to intercept Iran's missile attack on Israel, but that was to prevent Israel from launching a full-scale war against Tehran. 

Still, an assassination attempt poses more existential risk than corrupting an election would. Just how much can they do on the election-interference track? Normally, one would have dismiss the impact, given the widely distributed nature of presidential elections in the US. It would take a lot of boots on the ground to have any real impact. 

But hey, the Biden administration's border policies have allowed over ten million illegal aliens into the US from around the world -- including a not-insignificant number from the terror watch list. As Jazz highlighted in a previous post, that's still ongoing, and this time the captured aliens are from neighboring ... "Palestine." 

The risk seems real enough, especially with Iran getting tons of revenue to spend on a large-scale election-interference plot. Will the media treat this the same way they treated the alleged Russian interference operation in 2016 -- by blaming the opposing candidate for it? Especially since the opposing candidate is the sitting VP and arguably the regent for a cognitively impaired president? Will we hear "Iran, Iran, Iran" as the explanation for any irregularities like we heard "Russia Russia Russia" ih 2016-2020, and are likely to hear again in this cycle?

What's Farsi for "don't hold your breath"?