Only valid response to attacks fromIran, Russia and China is to impose enormous costs on them
Mike Pompeo warns Iranian hack is 'dangerous for our democracy'
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expresses 'deep' concerns about the Iranian hack into the Trump campaign and discusses the second round of device explosions in Lebanon.
The Iranians have made their choice in our presidential election and, no surprise, it is Kamala Harris.
After four years of reversing our policy of maximum pressure and instead coddling Iran and allowing them to enrich their economy with oil sales and direct U.S. cash transfers, the Biden administration has endeared itself to one of the most anti-democratic regimes in the world.
The payback? A hack of the Trump campaign by the Iranians fed directly to Biden-Harris campaign operatives.
Former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris (Getty Images)
Foreign meddling in our elections is nothing short of an attack on our democracy, yet the Biden-Harris administration is once again proving it is unequipped to defend America. By favoring a weak response rather than one that punishes our adversaries, they invite further attacks and, if anything, threaten to undermine the rights of the American people and our very democracy.
The Democrats cast themselves as the supposed protectors of democracy? Perhaps more accurately, they are the protectors of autocrats and dictators.
Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a joint statement acknowledging that the Iranian regime has been working to undermine former President Trump’s re-election campaign in several different ways.
This follows reports that China and Russia have also been pushing their own influence efforts affecting both national races and down-ballot elections across the country.
This threat goes far beyond deep-fake videos and "memes" on X, and it is a bipartisan issue. During the 2022 midterm elections, the Chinese Communist Party sought to undermine or support certain candidates – on both sides of the aisle – depending on their policy positions around China and Taiwan, and this same thing is occurring in our current elections.
As Iran continues to wage war across the Middle East against American interests, it is focusing its efforts to ensure Harris and the Democrats’ absurd policies of Iranian appeasement remain in the Oval Office – even going so far as to try and assassinate President Trump, as well as former Trump officials.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has developed a sophisticated and deep network through which to push its propaganda into every corner of the American media. The real threat to our democracy is from these nefarious foreign actors, and it could come through much worse acts than a few memes or mean tweets on the internet.
I saw these threats up close during the Trump administration’s tenure, and we responded to them by taking actions that reinforced a model of deterrence which kept Americans safe.
During my time as secretary of state, we shut down the largest spy ring in American history when we kicked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) out of their consulate in Houston, which they had been using to coordinate massive levels of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft.
BIDEN'S WISHFUL THINKING VS. IRAN'S TRAIL OF TERROR AND DECEIT
Confucius Institutes pushing CCP propaganda had proliferated on college campuses; we responded by designating the organization that ran them as a foreign mission, which led to the closure of nearly every Confucius Institute in America.
We didn’t tolerate Iran’s attacks and influence peddling within America; we put maximum pressure on the regime, nearly bankrupted it by driving its oil exports down to around 400,000 barrels a day, and took out Qasem Soleimani, its top general.
In short, we established deterrence with America’s adversaries using every tool at our disposal and made sure that our adversaries understood no interference in our elections would be tolerated or go without retribution.
Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has proved unequal to the task of defending America. Within months of them taking office, Russian-aligned groups successfully attacked the Colonial pipeline, which carries gas to communities all across the Southeastern United States. Biden’s response? He said that 16 potential sectors of our economy were "off limits" while leaving many more open to future attacks.
IRANIAN NETANYAHU ASSASSINATION PLOT FOILED, ISRAELI MAN CHARGED
In response to Iran’s belligerence and threats, the Biden-Harris team went right back to negotiating a new nuclear deal, making ransom payments, and appeasing the regime. Iran’s oil exports hit a five-year high in 2024, with over 1.5 million barrels of oil a day being exported to China.
This economic windfall has gone right into funding Iran’s terror network and is a direct cause of the Oct. 7 attacks – as well as Iran’s fomenting of antisemitic vitriol on our college campuses. So much for establishing deterrence and keeping America safe.
It gets worse. In 2020, the Biden campaign openly lied about the Hunter Biden laptop, enlisting over 50 former national security officials and the mainstream media in their false narrative that it was "Russian disinformation."
In 2019, Kamala Harris stated that "if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community." By "you," she meant American citizens and companies, and by "community," she meant entrenched bureaucrats in the federal government deciding what Americans can and can’t say.
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More recently, her running mate, Tim Walz, stated that our Constitution provides "no guarantee to free speech." It is a good thing Walz taught geography and not civics. His understanding of our First Amendment is severely lacking.
The truth is that our adversaries have always and will always look for opportunities to hurt America, whether at home or abroad, and these alarming influence efforts are no exception.
To keep them from doing so, we don’t need an ever-expanding set of safeguards enforced by the federal bureaucracy, and we should always resist undermining our constitutional freedoms in order to respond to foreign threats.
Instead, we should remember that the only valid response to attacks from the likes of Iran, Russia and China is to establish deterrence. We should impose enormous costs on them.
Only Donald Trump has shown he has the capacity and will to actually do this, and if the American people wish to keep our country safe and strong in an increasingly dangerous world, they should vote for him in November.
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Mike Pompeo served in the Trump administration as the sixth director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the 70th U.S. secretary of state. He previously represented Kansas’ 4th Congressional District.
