President Donald Trump told a reporter on Sunday of the strike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.”
ABC’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl spoke with the president on Sunday night, and relayed the quote in an X post, explaining that it was a reference to a 2024 plot to kill Trump.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Farhad Shakeri was arrested in November 2024 in connection with the plot. Prosecutors alleged that the man had been instructed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in September to follow and kill Trump.
“The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump,” then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement at the time.
Two New Yorkers were also arrested and charged with murder-for-hire after being hired by Shakeri to assassinate Brooklyn human-rights activist Masih Alinejad, who has criticized Iran’s treatment of women. One of those men was sentenced to 15 years in prison in January.
The plot was thought to be a response to a 2020 drone strike, ordered by Trump, that resulted in the death of top IRGC General Qasem Soleimani.
Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike on Saturday, with a senior Israeli official confirming the news to Reuters before Trump could announce it.
Trump eventually confirmed Khamenei’s death in a Truth Social post, calling him “one of the most evil people in history” and calling the news “not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS.”
The 86-year-old Khamenei was the longest-serving leader in the Middle East at the time of his death. He had ruled Iran since 1989, having played a role in the 1979 revolution, and he controlled every branch of the Iranian government, military, and judiciary.
In a follow-up video posted to X, Karl provided more details of his phone call with the president, which included the revelation that the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran were so “successful” that they had killed several potential candidates to succeed Khamenei as leader.
Speaking to Karl about who might lead the country now, Trump reportedly said, “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
The 79-year-old also told Karl that someone within the Iranian government had reached out to him, declining to specify who, only telling the ABC reporter that the person had survived the attacks on Iran and was “no longer reporting to the Supreme Leader.”
Both the U.S. and Iran have stated that they will continue to conduct strikes throughout the region, with Iran already striking sites in Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, while the U.S. continues to strike locations inside Iran.
Reporting from CNN, Politico, and the Associated Press on Sunday revealed that the reason offered by senior Trump administration officials for the strikes—that Iran posed an immediate threat to U.S. forces or bases and thus the strikes were preemptive—was flawed.
All three outlets cited people familiar with briefings conducted in D.C. on Sunday in which Pentagon officials revealed that there was no clear evidence that an attack from Iran was imminent.
The president himself claimed that Iran was building intercontinental ballistic missiles that would allow it to conduct strikes on the U.S. itself, despite a May 2025 assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency finding that it would take almost a decade for Iran to produce ICBMs.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview last week that Iran was not developing long-range missiles, and that the country’s missiles were for self-defense only. “We have deliberately limited the range of our missiles to 2,000 kilometers,” he told India Today TV.
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