Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the recently-flattened Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been named Iran's new Supreme Leader, a move that will undoubtedly not be acceptable to President Trump, who told ABC News on Saturday that any new leader who doesn't get approval from the U.S. will have a short term:
"He’s going to have to get approval from us. If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it."
Iran's Assembly of Experts announced the news just after midnight Tehran time.
"By a decisive vote, the Assembly of Experts, appointed Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third Leader of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran."
Mojtaba Khamenei owns an extensive and troubling real estate portfolio in the U.K., including two luxury apartments in London overlooking the Israeli Embassy and "a stone's throw" from Kensington Palace, home of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Bloomberg News reported in late January after a year-long investigation. He purchased the apartments in 2014 and, according to the probe, the funds for the purchases came from Iran's oil program.
In addition, Khamenei "owns 11 mansions in Hampstead, North London, through a front man and a shell company registered in the Isle of Man." The properties are part of a "global property empire" worth "hundreds of millions of pounds," according to Bloomberg.
Khamenei, 56, was reportedly wounded "during an assassination attempt made by Israel" during Operation Lion's Roar on February 28. His wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, was killed in the same air strikes that killed her father-in-law.
In 2019, he was sanctioned under Executive Order 13867, with the U.S. Treasury Department finding that he had been "representing the supreme leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father."
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
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