EKO HOT BLOG reports that President Joe Biden recently announced that the United States has killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior al-Qaeda figure who acted as Osama bin Laden’s deputy in the ongoing operations against the United States.
But according to a 2020 NBC report, previous President Donald Trump was given the chance to act similarly but declined because he didn’t know the name of al-Zawahiri.
Early in 2020, NBC News reported that intelligence authorities repeatedly briefed then-President Trump on the most concerning terrorist threats, including al-Zawahiri explicitly.
Trump would eventually consent to kill Qasim al-Rimi of Yemen and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS. Other notable individuals on the CIA’s list, however, went unnoticed.
Trump “was more interested in a young and less influential figure much farther down the list, according to two people familiar with the briefings, because he recognized the name,” the report said at the time.
“He would say, ‘I’ve never heard of any of these people. What about Hamza bin Laden?'” the former official told NBC.
A Pentagon official agreed, noting, “That was the only name he knew.”
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