Trump says America may launch “another little Epic Fury” against Iran, as an intelligence memo warns Iranian plots against Americans have reached advanced stages

President Trump raised the prospect of renewed war with Iran in front of a campaign crowd in Fort Myers on Friday. “We may do another little Epic Fury, or they’ll agree,” he said, using the name of the operation that opened the war on February 28. “If they’re smart, they’ll just say, let’s get down to business. But, you know, I doubt they’ll do that because perhaps they’re not smart.”

Picture is an illustration of American warships and jets over the Gulf at dusk.

Hours earlier, Tom Barrack, the American ambassador to Turkey, told an interviewer that a strike could come as early as this weekend. “Absolutely,” Barrack said, while adding that the president is open to a deal and that the two sides have been at the table for months. When a reporter put the comment to Trump and asked whether he had dropped his plan to hold off until after the November 3 midterms, the president answered, “That was my ambassador? He’s a pretty powerful man, I guess,” and said he did not know about any such plan.

The harder evidence sits in a one page unclassified memo dated October 23 from Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Clayton wrote that Iranian efforts to target American citizens abroad have grown substantially and that the lethal plotting has reached advanced stages in the Middle East and in certain other countries. The memo did not name specific targets or places. Clayton offered to lower the classification level on the underlying intelligence so Rubio could warn a wider circle of personnel at risk. The Associated Press and Axios obtained the memo, and CNN first reported the embassy staffing cuts that followed from the same threat picture.

The State Department has ordered nonessential staff and family members to leave the American embassy in Riyadh and the consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia. Embassies in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Qatar and Jordan will stay open with reduced staffing. An official told Axios the department acted because of the threat of Houthi attacks and Iranian terror plots, and officials said they fear the Houthis, who have spent Friday attacking targets inside Saudi Arabia, could widen their campaign to other Gulf countries.

Talks between Washington and Tehran have been stalled since the two sides met during the United Nations General Assembly in September, divided over the terms for ending the war. Trump said Friday that the earlier strikes had obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and defeated the country militarily and financially. Iranian officials have said in recent days that any new attack will be answered with equal or greater force. Oil markets are already pricing the risk. Brent crude settled at 116.72 dollars a barrel on Friday, as of the October 23 close.