On Friday, U.S. prosecutors unveiled charges in an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate former President Donald Trump and a prominent Iranian-American dissident journalist.
The Justice Department stated that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) planned the attack as retaliation for the 2020 U.S.-ordered killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, which Trump authorized.
According to the Justice Department, 51-year-old Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national reportedly based in Iran, was directed by the IRGC to devise a plan to assassinate Trump.
These charges were announced just days after Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday.
In addition to the plot against Trump, Shakeri and two other men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, both of New York, were charged separately for conspiring to kill an Iranian-American dissident journalist based in New York. Rivera and Loadholt have been taken into US custody and appeared in court on Thursday.
“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target US citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders, and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The Justice Department described Shakeri as an “IRGC asset residing in Tehran.” It was revealed that he had immigrated to the United States as a child and was deported around 2008 after serving a 14-year prison sentence for robbery.
This latest revelation follows two previous assassination attempts on Trump this year, including an incident at a campaign rally where a bullet grazed his ear.
“In recent months, Shakeri has used a network of criminal associates he met in prison in the United States to supply the IRGC with operatives to conduct surveillance and assassinations of IRGC targets,” the Justice Department said.
It said Loadholt and Rivera, at Shakeri’s direction, spent months conducting surveillance on a US citizen of Iranian origin who is an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime and has been the target of multiple prior kidnapping and murder plots.
She was not identified in court documents but appeared to be dissident journalist Masih Alinejad.
US prosecutors charged a general in the Revolutionary Guards in late October in connection with a separate plot to assassinate Alinejad, who lives in New York.
According to the criminal complaint against Shakeri, he allegedly disclosed the plot to assassinate Trump in telephone conversations with FBI agents in recent months.
Shakeri held the conversations with FBI agents because he was hoping to obtain a sentence reduction for a person who is imprisoned in the United States, it said.
Shakeri told the FBI he was approached by an IRGC official in September about organizing the assassination of Trump.
He allegedly told the IRGC official it would cost a “huge” amount of money, to which the official responded: “Money’s not an issue.”
On October 7, Shakeri said he was asked to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days.
The IRGC official allegedly said that if Shakeri was unable to come up with a plan in that timeframe, the IRGC would seek to kill Trump after the election because it assessed he would lose and it would be easier to assassinate him after the vote.
The United States has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to assassinate US officials in retaliation for the killing of Soleimani. Tehran has rejected the accusations.
A Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran pleaded not guilty in New York earlier this year to charges he tried to hire a hitman to kill a US politician or official.
The State Department has also announced a $20 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the alleged Iranian mastermind behind a plot to assassinate former White House official John Bolton.
