Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has moved out of his Washington-area home and onto a US military base because of Iranian threats against him, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
Three people told the Times that US officials concluded in recent weeks that Iranian plotting against current and former American officials had reached a more advanced stage, based in part on intelligence about threats to Bessent himself.
A senior administration official told Fox News the threats against Bessent’s life had reached “more than an advanced stage,” and declined to say when he moved.
BREAKING: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has moved to a military base after Iranian threats against his life reached “more than an advanced stage,” a senior administration official tells Fox News Digital.
The official says the threats prompted Bessent and his family to make… pic.twitter.com/Ei25bRHwRE
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 11, 2026
The Treasury Department, confirming the move, said Bessent “will not be deterred by the Iranian regime’s threats” and remains committed to the pressure campaign against Tehran.
Bessent has run Operation Economic Outcast since Aug. 24, a campaign he says is meant “to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.” Launching it, he declared: “America is no longer managing the Iranian threat. We are ending it.”
In September, Treasury sanctioned all of Iran’s remaining airlines, with Bessent warning anyone still doing business with them: “You are at risk of being cut off from the global financial system.” On Nov. 4, a day after Republicans were crushed in midterms widely seen as a referendum on the Iran war, he announced another round, as we reported: “As we have said many times, under Operation Economic Outcast, you are either with us or against us.”
Last week, as we noted, MEMRI flagged an Iranian video that calls Bessent “Captain Corruptor” and warns that he “has booked himself a first class ticket to Hell and his ride will soon arrive at his door.”
In a memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton warned that “Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel” and that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages” in the Middle East and certain other countries.
Bessent and Rubio rode a decoy Air Force One out of Ankara after the NATO summit in July while Trump secretly switched planes. A senior administration official told ABC News that Trump’s switch was driven by intelligence that an Iranian terror cell had slipped into Turkey with a shoulder-fired missile.
“Worse than fake news is fake intelligence,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X in response. And as we noted in August, a US official told the Washington Post the Turkey warning was “Israeli-derived, not US-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”
Bessent joins a growing list of Trump officials living behind base gates, several of whom moved into military housing last year over threats from the left. Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth live at Fort McNair, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved onto a base, Stephen Miller, now White House chief of staff, was relocated last year, and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi followed in March after threats from cartels and political critics.
That same month, unidentified drones were reportedly spotted over Fort McNair on a single night, prompting officials to weigh moving Rubio and Hegseth.
Rubio said Tuesday at a G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris that “the economic campaign (against Iran) is so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations.” His forecast for Tehran: “The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse.”
