An alleged ISIS-linked operative was thwarted in a plot to kill George W. Bush last year, according to FBI papers.
The US secret service bureau filed a search-warrant application on March 23, which was unsealed this week in the Southern District of Ohio court and which details the case.
It comes after Bush made an embarrassing slip of the tongue when he slammed Vladimir Putin's “unjustified and brutal” invasion of Iraq - when he meant to say Ukraine.
The ex-president's Dallas, Texas, home had even been surveyed by the alleged plotter in November 2021, with video taken, while a "death squad" of compatriots were recruited and smuggled into the country over the Mexican border.
The FBI said it uncovered the scheme thanks to a pair of confidential informants, as well as infiltrating the suspect's WhatsApp account.
The would-be assassination orchestrator, who is based in Columbus, Ohio, is said to have wanted to wipe out Bush due to his killing of Iraqis and breaking apart the country after the 2003 US invasion, says the warrant.
The suspect had been in the US since 2020 and had an asylum application pending.
No charges have been filed and it's unclear if he has been arrested, reports Forbes.
Freddy Ford, chief of staff for the Office of Bush, told the publication: “President Bush has all the confidence in the world in the United States Secret Service and our law enforcement and intelligence communities.”
The case shows how federal investigators are still monitoring ISIS threats despite the group having been severely weakened in recent years.
And also that the FBI was able to work around WhatsApp security despite claiming it had been prevented from probing major crimes due to platform owners Meta's use of encryption.
In November last year, the suspect had asked one of the sources if he knew how to "obtain replica or fraudulent" police or FBI IDs or badges, according to the warrant.
He had also enquired as to the possibility of smuggling the other plotters out of the country the same way they came in once the assassination was complete.
The suspect is understood to have also been keen to assassinate an ex-Iraqi general who helped the US during the war and who he believed was living in the States under a fake name.
The alleged plotter said he was a member of the 'Al-Raed' unit, which was until recently led by a former Iraqi pilot who had been based in Qatar until his death.
A conversation described in the warrant suggests seven plotters would have been sent on the mission to kill Bush.
The suspect them self was to "locate and conduct surveillance" on Bush's residences and "obtain firearms and vehicles to use in the assassination".
He travelled to Dallas with one of the informants to capture video footage of Bush's home, as well as allegedly at George W. Bush Institute, according to FBI agents.
The orchestrator was said to have also identified four Iraqi nationals in Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Denmark - all supposedly former Baath Party members and now political exiles - with plans to smuggle them into the US at the cost of $15,000 each.
He would then have obtained Mexican visitor visas for the ISIS operatives via one of the FBI informants, before getting them over the border.
Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Forbes: “ It’s clear this was a sophisticated counterterrorism operation with a lot of moving parts.
"It was both far reaching and unique in its targeting."
He went on to say it also proves while overcoming encrypted data is "labour intensive" it is "possible".
Mr Hughes added: “Also, we haven’t seen a plot of this scale in a number of years.
"It shows that while domestic terrorism rightly takes a good amount of counterterrorism focus, the threats are not there alone.”
