This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

In recent weeks, U.S. authorities were alerted that Donald Trump was the target of an assassination plot by Iran. With heightened Secret Service security around Trump the result, many wondered how would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to take a shot at the former president on July 13.

But the Iranian plot to assassinate Trump is not new. WND spoke to Middle East expert and terrorism scholar Adrian Calamel, who noted that ever since the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces, was killed by a drone strike ordered by President Trump in January 2020 near a Baghdad airport, "several active assassination plots have been on the books."

The "kill list" includes Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton, former U.S. special representative for Iran Brian Hook, as well as other current and former officials of the U.S. government.

"Once you get on that list," Calamel, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Arabian Peninsula Institute, told WND, "You don't get off that list. You're marked for death." According to Calamel, "[The Iranian regime's] goal is to drop one of these people on American soil to show us that they can hit us in our own country, just like we hit Soleimani and Muhandis on their soil, in Iraq."

"While we can talk about Biden's open border policies and who might be coming across," Calamel said, "I am more concerned about MOIS agents who have already infiltrated the country." For example, he pointed to the FBI's ongoing search for Majid Dastjani Farahani, who is suspected of "[recruiting] individuals for surveillance activities focused on religious sites, businesses and other facilities in the United States, [and he may acting or is] purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS)."

"That story went completely dead," Calamel told WND. "No follow-up. No arrests." All the while, he added, Farahani and others like him continue to recruit others for their nefarious plots around the country, whether it be gathering intel, planning a future attack, or attempting to assassinate a high-profile government official.

"When they finally pull the trigger, they'll be looking for some form of plausible deniability," Calamel cautioned. "Iran cannot face the wrath of the United States, so they'll blame ISIS, al-Qaida, or another bad actor."

A strong U.S. response to sanctions against Iran would be catastrophic for the Middle Eastern country, Calamel insists. "Considering this, if Trump gets elected, things are going to change and the regime could topple." Iran's threats against Israel and the United States would come with a heavy price, as Calamel suspects Trump would put "maximum pressure on [Iran] the first day he comes into office."

In his first term as president, Trump "clamped down and drained them" of their foreign currency reserves to $4 billion, said Calamel. "Under the Biden administration," however, as Calamel pointed out, "through oil sales to China, they've been able to grow that to more than $100 billion."

And while Iranians continue to struggle with a broken economy, Calamel noted that the regime is still funding Hamas to Israel's south, Hezbollah to Israel's north, the Houthis in Yemen, various other terrorist organizations and proxies around the world, pursuing their nuclear program, building an alliance with China, and more. "That's over $100 million that goes to increasing their war capacity," he emphasized. "Iran doesn't want to lose that," he explained, adding that "it likely increases their motivation to take Trump out now more than ever."

To that end, he said, "I suspect they flipped the switch after they saw Biden's debate performance and realized Trump may win." He argued, "Tehran is probably screaming that Trump is an existential threat and someone they need to take care of sooner than later."

"Until this past weekend," Calamel told WorldNetDaily, "I thought that Trump was going to be nearly impossible to get, so [the Iranian regime] would continue their focus on the low-hanging fruit like Pompeo, Bolton, Hook, or someone else."

"But if you're [Iranian supreme leader] Sayyid Ali Khamenei, what's going on through your mind right now is that Trump is not an untouchable target," Calamel asserted. Considering that Trump is a target of both domestic and foreign threats, Calamel said the Secret Service must increase security around the former president as he continues to pursue a second term in the White House.