Sean Hannity asserts U.S. operations "Midnight Hammer" and "Epic Fury" decapitated Iran's leadership, killing the Supreme Leader's son and 80+ successors, while President Trump controls the Strait of Hormuz via a "shoot to kill" order and oil blockade bankrupting the nation. With the new leader invisible and parliament fractured, Hannity claims America can destroy Iran's military in 14 days if no deal forms, contrasting this with alleged human shield tactics by Hamas and Hezbollah, before briefly condemning Virginia redistricting and Ilhan Omar's tax errors. Ultimately, the segment frames current Iranian chaos as a direct victory for American strategic dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Supreme Leader Power Struggle00:14:34
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It's 800 941 Sean if you want to join us.
There is a lot of news.
And I think that this is the media will never get this right, what I'm about to say.
All of the chaos that I'm about to describe in great detail to you.
About what is going on in Iran, all of it is the result of great military success and just a leadership there emerging, fighting, intramural fighting, etc.
It's all because we've been so successful.
It's all because of Donald Trump.
And it's all because they don't know how to deal with this guy.
That has become a big question mark for them internally.
Now, you can look at contradictory things.
Donald Trump pleads for the lives of eight women.
They say yes.
Why would they do that?
Tehran heeded the president's request and demand not to kill these eight women.
Four freed immediately, four will spend one more month in jail.
I'm sure it's living hell for them.
Our prayers are with them, and it is, I'm sure, just misery for them.
The Democrats, the radicals in this country, in the Democratic Party, they have been hoping that President Trump will fail.
You have also the legacy media mob hopes Donald Trump fails.
All those people that tried to persuade the president not to get involved in Midnight Hammer, Epic Fury, or Maduro for that matter, the isolationists in this country, they're angry too.
And they don't understand, nor do they want to understand the president's thinking.
They don't understand the Trump doctrine.
They don't understand or care, but I think their egos, more than anything, have been bruised, so they're upset.
You know, it was pretty funny.
I saw a political cartoon today, and you have a battered Ali Hamani, you know, with a bubble and Buffim saying, We are victorious.
And meanwhile, in the background, Iran is winning, is the new.
Biden is perfectly fit mentally and physically to do another four years as your president.
Because that's how insane it has now gotten.
But everything that I'm about to lay out for you, I want you to understand in the beginning that all of this is only because the U.S. military operation between Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury has been so successful.
Remember, they took out the top three tiers of leadership.
So there's a vacuum.
That shouldn't be surprising.
And there's a power struggle going on internally.
And as the president put up on Truth Social, Iran is having a very hard time.
Figuring out who their leader is.
They just don't know.
The infighting between the hardliners, quote, who have been losing badly on the battlefield, and the, quote, moderates, who are not very moderate at all, but gaining some respect, is crazy.
We have total control of the Strait of Hormuz.
No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the U.S. Navy.
It is sealed up tight.
And until such time as Iran is able to make a deal, thank you for your attention to this matter.
The president, by the way, has now given the U.S. Navy a shoot to kill order for Iranian boats that are laying mines.
He said this today that he has now ordered our Navy to shoot and kill any boat that is laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
There will be no hesitation.
The president added he is ordering U.S. minesweepers to continue clearing the Strait at a tripled up level.
And the post shows that the U.S. is ratcheting up tensions with Iran.
And some people say, well, this must be the president, taco president.
No, it's not taco president.
If the president does hit the infrastructure, Structure, they claim he's a war criminal.
All legitimate military targets.
If he doesn't hit them and he gives in to the Pakistani prime minister, saying, just please give us a little more time.
And they're having a hard time even communicating with each other.
And we still don't know who's actually in charge.
The U.S. Navy seized another Iranian tanker in the Indian Ocean.
Department of War shared that video on X Thursday morning.
We will continue global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran wherever they operate, the Department of War said.
Now, the president has just laid it out very boldly, claiming they have no idea who their leader is or who the hell can speak for its government as a fragile ceasefire continues and diplomatic efforts remain stalled.
This kind of goes to my conversation that I explained to all of you with the president that I had two nights ago.
And he said, Sean, I could make the decision and wipe out their economy in five or ten minutes.
Now, if there are two factions, I thought Mark Thiessen and Donald Trump re truth this.
If there are two factions in Iran that one wants a deal and one that doesn't, kill the ones that don't want the deal.
The president put that out.
Mark Thiessen had put it up first.
And that may be how this ultimately ends.
Now, the New York Times is reporting that the Iranian Ayatollah, this is the new supreme leader.
The son of the old Supreme Leader is now dead, along with his top leaders.
And those 80 plus people that were meeting to pick the successor, they're all dead.
And then we picked off most of the third tier leadership, too.
Anyway, so now we're getting more confirmation that Duran's Ayatollah Khamenei, the son of the late Ali Khamenei, who he never wanted to be the Supreme Leader, is, quote, managing the country as though he's the director of the board, according to a politician who served as a senior advisor to Mahmoud Ali.
Ahmadinejad, when he was president, who knows the younger Hamani.
He relies heavily on advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions, so he's not in charge anyway.
And then they talk about Hamani was gravely wounded, and one leg has been operated on three times.
He is awaiting a prosthetic, meaning he's probably going to lose that leg if he hasn't already.
He's had surgery on one hand, slowly regaining function, and apparently his face has been burned severely in that initial strike that killed his father.
It is easy for the president.
The president can wipe this thing out in no time.
However, there are severe consequences to that way beyond us just winning the conflict, which obviously is first and foremost.
And maybe some will fault the president for this.
I do not, because that option is available at any moment.
But if the president wants to see if they can work this out and give them the little added bit of time, To work it out while successfully preventing them from taking in four or five hundred million dollars a day in terms of the lifeblood of their economy, which is a 90 based oil economy.
Oil economy, I don't really have a problem with that, giving the Iranian people the maximum odds of being able to pick up the pieces and build their country back and hopefully return to the once great Persian culture that they were.
Now, Trump has been right about this issue of regime power struggle.
You have a special representative for Iran, Elliot Abrams, said Thursday that Donald Trump has been correct, highlighting this political fracture.
And a political void and a leadership void.
He served in the role during the president's first term, said the president was right to give the regime some time to figure this out.
He said the president's right.
They're having a power struggle.
He said it on Fox.
He said it used to be that any power struggle would be resolved by the supreme leader, the late supreme leader.
Now they don't have a supreme leader.
They got his son, but he's invisible, never speaks on the radio.
Nobody's ever seen him.
He can't really be leading.
And I think the president's idea, giving them a little bit of time because they're fighting it out, you know, he's right.
Now, there might be a way to do this incrementally where the president can start taking out 10%, 20%, 30% of their oil producing capability in perpetuity and then say, Are you ready to make the deal now after each successive attack?
I don't know if it's going to be possible to break it up that way, but I'm pretty sure that our military is sophisticated enough to do whatever they want, to be honest.
In many ways, the regime is falling apart.
The head of the Iranian parliament apparently has now just resigned.
He's out.
There were simultaneous messages, according to Zero Hedge, the same person controlling Iran's top X accounts.
They published the identical post, two identical posts, one minute apart.
Well, that means that none of it's real.
It's not even worth going into.
But the speaker of Iran's parliament has now left the negotiating team.
And this is this guy, Galabov, who's reportedly left the country, the country's negotiating team, as Tehran and Washington struggle to even get together a team that they'd meet in Islamabad.
Now, the report from Channel 12, which the Times of Israel relayed, indicated this guy left due to interference from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And he's been a leading member of the negotiating team in Islamabad.
President Trump posted on Truth Social, Iran is having a hard time figuring out who their leaders are.
Now, there is the easiest, the clearest path to preventing them from being able to reconstitute their nuclear weapons program and build back their ballistic missile systems and their drone systems and foment terror around the world and in the region.
The quickest, cleanest, most effective way is to wipe it all out.
Okay, and in war, that's what you do.
But notice, we don't fight wars the way people like the Iranians do, do we?
We haven't been targeting civilian areas.
We haven't.
We've been targeting military targets, as has Israel.
They have been targeting densely populated areas in Gulf states, in Tel Aviv especially, and they go after people.
Radical Islamists, I don't care if they are Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah, or the Iranians themselves, when the president was going to bomb the bridges and infrastructure, they put up human shields.
Out of Gaza, they would fire from schools and hospitals because they knew the Israelis would be hesitant to fire back because there'd be too much collateral damage, civilian damage.
But that is how they play that game.
There are no rules in their level of warfare.
And you might say there shouldn't be.
And I think that's a fair argument.
You know, all's fair in love and war.
However, I'm not going to argue with a country who puts a value on human life.
And right now, this would be the easiest military decision and operation in terms of all that we have done up to this point to wipe out their economy in perpetuity.
But do we really want to be the country that also doesn't factor in the impact on 90 million plus people?
The people have been victims for 47 years.
The people don't want any part of this radical regime.
The people have been begging for help.
The people are grateful that their liberation may be at hand.
So, whatever amount of time this is going to take, I don't think it's going to be as long as people are predicting because the president's not going to be part of a forever war.
You know, Iran's leaders are going crazy.
The New York Post is reporting that the Iranian regime is going nuts over the president's blockade because they don't have any money in their economy, according to an insider, as the leadership still refuses to come to the negotiating table.
A source who spoke to the Iranians summed it up The Iranians are going crazy about the blockade.
Not a single ship with oil has gotten through.
They've either been turned back or we've escorted them back.
Anyway, even MSDNC said President Trump seemed to agree.
They're all messed up.
They have no idea what they're doing at this point.
So if you look at the updates, you have Israeli soldiers now up to their eyeballs.
The Israelis have been cooperative with the president.
But now the shoot to kill Iranian boats that are laying mines will have an immediate impact.
That will buy time.
We have this issue of, according to Democrats, I don't think it should be an issue.
I don't believe it's constitutional.
No president has abided by it.
But, you know, there are articles coming out.
Democrats are going to put their hope on the 1973 War Powers Act, which they would argue would limit the ability to wage war without congressional approval to 60 days.
They didn't apply that to Obama.
They didn't apply that to past Democratic presidents.
It shouldn't be applied here.
And the president is.
You know, he's giving this time.
Scott Besson had a great analysis of this, and I'll give you that on the other side.
800.
941 showing us a number.
By the way, Linda brought her young son Liam.
It seems like it was yesterday when he was born.
How old is he now?
10?
He is 10.
We're going to solve this french fry issue once and for all today.
Although the problem is, you're going to be in the room and he won't be able to speak freely.
So it's going to be under duress, whatever he says to me.
Under duress, he got a day off from school.
He came to New York.
He's in here.
He ordered lunch.
He's having a lovely day.
He's in New York.
You should have stayed home where you do the show usually.
Well, this is fun for him.
All right.
So basically, this is going to unfold.
And I don't know.
Battered Nation Oil Production00:09:29
Maybe I just know at any moment the switch is going to flip and the president will have had enough if they don't make a deal.
Now, with that said, if you listen to the likes of Scott Besson, the embargo is so effective, we are ostensibly bankrupting this country.
And the New York Post confirming it.
It is driving the Iranians insane.
Well, if they want to get out of their insanity.
Now, after Midnight Hammer, 12 days later, they decided enough is enough and they backed off.
But, you know, when you look at how beaten and battered and now close to bankrupt this government is, And with bankruptcy will come a lot of social unrest.
People have nothing to lose.
Their currency is zero, 200% inflation rate.
They're losing $400 to $500 million a day.
Half the workforce is out of work.
So these people in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or more on the political side, that are now putting out the exact same ex posts saying that there is no split in Iranian leadership.
Okay.
Yeah.
Just don't believe your lying eyes.
They're a unified response.
But their deal needs to be no nukes, no terrorism, no attacks on the straight, hand over the nuclear dust.
And it's not a difficult or complicated thing, except that this is what you're dealing with.
You know, if you think throughout history, and we've been referencing this quite a bit, how did so many people buy into this radicalism?
You know, when you think of 1979, the Islamic Revolution coming into power in Iran, and out of exile comes the Ayatollah Khomeini, Americans held hostage for 444 days, you know, an embarrassment on the world stage.
Jimmy Carter, so incompetent, his one rescue mission was a disaster.
We've been able to rescue our guys.
We have inflicted the maximum amount of damage in the shortest period of time.
And now it's a question of not if what the outcome is going to be, it's going to be what they decide the outcome is going to be.
Iran is going to end up at some point.
Now, there might be a third way to do this, which is incrementally showing Iran that we mean it.
And that means taking out 20% of their oil production capability and then 40%.
And then after each strike, you say, Do you want us to go any further?
Although that may be more complicated than it sounds because, kind of like once you strike, you know, with Karg Island in any way, shape, manner, or form, I mean, you might just blow up the whole island in the process.
You know, Karg Island is pretty much defenseless, it's 90% of Iran's oil exports.
There's nothing coming in or going out there.
Now they're going to have to shut down.
Oil production.
And by the way, at the end of the day, when you shut down their oil production, a lot of times that will disrupt their ability to extract oil for a long, long time to come.
That is not an easy thing to do.
Once they fill up every ship that they have and every place they have to store it, then at that point they have to shut it down.
And that becomes problematic.
The truth is simple Iran needs the deal more than the president does.
They're blinded by their indoctrinated radicalism.
Nazis indoctrinated with a hatred for the Jews and anybody that was not like them.
And the same with any other ism.
You know, any of the 100 million people slaughtered in the last century, you know, dying under whatever ism is because of maniacal, insane, brainwashed, stubborn, power hungry, Egotistical madmen.
And that's why you neutralize a threat before potentially millions would die.
I spoke to many of my sources.
The highest level of government, let me tell you what they're telling me.
They said, and to a fault, every one of them, and we're talking about people that would see the presidential daily briefing every day, which is a threat assessment, usually based on the intelligence that's acquired.
They've all said the same thing.
Without giving me any information that they're not allowed to give me, for the record.
The president didn't have a choice.
That's how real, clear, present danger this was.
The president didn't have a choice.
Now, Steve Witkoff said as much on this program and on my TV show.
They have the thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium.
Anyway, the country now is battered militarily.
You know, it's been 40 plus days of unrelenting strikes.
95% of Iran's commerce goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran can't get its oil out of the Strait.
Now, they're going to have to start storing it.
The regime only has about two weeks' storage capacity.
51% of Iran's oil export revenues go to support their armed forces, which means the regime will soon run out of money to pay the military, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
When the ceasefire went into effect, Admiral Bradley Cooper, commander of CENTCOM, still needed about 14 days, he said, to finish the strike list.
That he was assigned at the start of Operation Epic Fury.
So, if Iran continues to refuse the terms of the president, it would take about 14 days, and that would wipe them out completely.
I know what the president's thinking is.
The president's thinking, are you really going to force me to do this?
The president has tried, and he's so consistent on this point.
If anyone in the legacy media, any radical Democrat, or any isolationist cared to listen to the guy, they might learn something.
Because he says the same thing all the time.
He prefers peace.
And he's definitely, it's in the forefront of his mind that there will be 90 million people that are going to be impacted by all this.
But if they continue to refuse, it's going to be that final 14 days.
And together with Israel, they will eliminate the Iranian leaders resisting any deal.
They'll capitulate, or the U.S. will destroy Karg Island, through which 90% of their oil flows.
The world will find alternate routes.
For the free flow of oil at market prices around the world, we have the ability to do that relatively quickly.
They already have made the provisions to do so.
We have B 2 bombers now literally standing by.
We have not only, we have way more firepower than we had at the start of Epic Fury in the region.
We've been able to rearm while this, you know.
Interlude, if you will, has taken place.
Now, the president says if there's going to be talks, they would likely start tomorrow.
We'll see.
Iran must surrender the enriched uranium.
The administration's not backing down.
The president also confirms there's not a rush for him to make the deal.
That's what he was saying to me.
He actually made the statement.
I don't think he's wrong on this that the blockade scares them at least as much, if not more, than the bombing.
Now, Senator Rick Scott, others are saying finish the job.
Don't blame them.
I see it.
McLaughlin poll voters back the president overwhelmingly in this effort.
Most Americans understand a nuclear armed Iran is just bad for the entire world.
It's not a threat that we should pass on to our children and grandchildren.
Then you got this, it's sort of like the schizophrenic.
You got one side of the Iranians, they want to show a bold face and present their resolve.
Then why did they agree not to execute the eight women and hang them yesterday as they had planned?
And you got the hardliners like Vahidi, who's now apparently the major general ahead of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
You know, does that mean he's next on the list of targets that we need to take out?
I would imagine.
I saw one picture today of the president of Iran walking around.
He was at some sports event.
I'm like, okay.
Once we know where you are, you're likely not going to be able to hide very easily.
But remember at the end, I don't see any potential outcome short of, you know, there could be symbolic, quote, victories.
And that means if the Iranians hit anything, then it's viewed as a win for them.
At least that's the way they would spin it.
That's the way that the media would spin it.
That's the way that the isolationists would spin it.
Screw Trump Act Virginia Vote00:02:34
But it really doesn't mean that.
We have, what else do we have?
Oh, this is good news.
So we had the vote Tuesday.
What was I saying in the lead up to this gerrymandering vote in Virginia?
I was telling you that if in fact it passes, because I'd spoken to all the attorneys involved.
That number one, it's unconstitutional.
A judge has already ruled Virginia's redistricting referendum is unconstitutional.
Pretty clear.
There's no ambiguity here.
The judge entered the injunction blocking certification of the election.
Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney, said the legal fight was right from the beginning, not just the language, the language is so abusively biased that in a constitutional amendment, that raises a ton of questions in and of itself.
You know, should the Constitution be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections?
Well, by the way, restore fairness.
We get 10 seats, you get one, even though Donald Trump got 46% of the vote, and then resume all future redistricting and go back to the current standards after Trump is gone.
It's basically the Screw Trump Act.
And Puccinelli made the point the referendum faces massive legal challenges.
In addition to the one that was just decided.
And he said, you know, the three of the lawsuits challenged the referendum on procedural grounds, arguing Democratic Party lawmakers did not follow their constitution and the law regarding the timing requirements and legislative steps that were needed to pass the measure, to place the measure even on the ballot.
That's number one.
The fourth argument is about how electoral districts were drawn and challenges in terms of the maps.
Requirements.
Requirements.
And by the way, that's 90% of Virginians that will be disenfranchised.
And tens of millions of dollars were spent to pass the redistricting referendum, and their political action programs were involved in people financing it, all these left wing groups financing it, et cetera, et cetera.
But if you just look at it, you know, they're supposed to have an interim election as part of the process.
It's supposed to go through not one House of Delegates, but two separate and apart House of Delegates.
So they have all these rules.
Electoral Map Disenfranchisement00:02:27
They didn't adhere to any of it.
They just thought they could just ram it through, lie about it.
I don't think it's going to hold muster.
Anyway, so the Republican National Committee pointed out the referendum, et cetera.
We already have a case in the courts right now.
And he said the suit is waiting until after the referendum is over.
We'll suit to stop them.
And we won that case.
We have another one in Fairfax County.
But the Virginia court did declare the state's redistricting vote was unconstitutional and a legal win for the Republicans, as we predicted.
By the way, my free state of Florida, they may have four more Republican seats by the time Ron DeSantis is done.
And by the way, if they underestimate Ron DeSantis, they know nothing about Ron DeSantis.
He means what he says.
That's not an idle threat on his part.
So we'll have to wait, watch, and see what happens there.
Now, We have all things simple man Bill O'Reilly coming up.
Oh, on the investigator front, I got to bring this up too.
I want to make sure I get this in.
It seems like Congresswoman Omar only made a minor accounting error, and I think that everybody's being too tough on her.
Linda, you're being too tough on her.
No, you're kidding because I can't stand that woman.
No, no, no, I'm serious.
I think you're being hard on her.
Anybody, let's be honest, if you've ever done a tax form in your life, Anybody could make a little $30 million error.
It's a rounding error for her.
Well, it's difficult when you have, you know, 13 different husbands and some of them might be related.
It's weird.
How funny is the Southern Poverty Law Center?
Haven't they gone after me over the years?
They've gone after me many times, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, apparently they were, you know, they found these shell corporations and they were feeding money to groups like the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalists, and other extremists.
Even one of the organizers of Unite, right, that Charlottesville case in 2017.
And they wanted to keep it alive, so I guess they used it for fundraising.
Well, now they're facing multiple charges, which I find very, very interesting.
I can't wait to see how that turns out.
Oh, I can't wait to see how it turns out, too.
I would say the Southern Poverty Law Center's days sound to me like they're numbered.