The United States Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against three individuals for an Iranian plot to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump while he was campaigning, an attempt thwarted by an FBI investigation, the Government reported this Friday. Justice considers that it was a contract murder to take down Trump before decisively taking down his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris.
A criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court alleges that an unnamed official linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard instructed an agent in September to develop a plan to track and surveil Trump with the goal of ultimately killing him. .
It was that same month when US intelligence services informed Trump of an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate him, according to his campaign. The notice also coincided with , although the warning, issued by the office of the director of National Intelligence – one of fifteen government information agencies – referred to a plan unrelated to the two failed attempts to attack him, and the aforementioned , . The intelligence information came in the wake of Republican complaints about the possibility that Iran was carrying out a hacking of his campaign.
Trump’s team then said the briefing concerned “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate [al candidato] in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States” on the eve of the elections.
FBI investigators learned of the plot to kill Trump while interviewing Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan citizen identified as an asset of the Iranian government who was deported from the United States after being imprisoned for robbery. Shakeri told FBI agents that a contact in the Revolutionary Guard, the elite corps of the Ayatollahs’ regime, instructed him last September to develop a plan in seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump. Two other men who authorities say were recruited to participate in other murders, including that of Masih Alinejah, a prominent Iranian-American journalist who is highly critical of Tehran, have been detained, according to the Associated Press agency. Shakeri remains in Iran, while the two detainees are reportedly in the custody of the federal court for the Southern District of New York, according to a source close to the investigation.
“There are few actors in the world that pose as serious a threat to the national security of the United States as Iran,” said US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a statement.
The plot reflects what federal officials have described as Iran’s ongoing efforts to attack U.S. government representatives, including Trump, inside the country. Last summer, the Justice Department charged a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot. The second assassination attempt on Trump in September that had prompted the first failed attack, so the FBI redoubled its scrutiny of possible threats, almost always pointing to Iran. In early August, the Justice Department accused the Revolutionary Guard of trying to assassinate John Bolton, the National Security Advisor during Trump’s first term, to avenge the death of General Qasem Soleimani.
Last month, a Revolutionary Guard general and three other Iranians were charged in New York with participating in an alleged plot to assassinate a dissident Iranian-American journalist. The target’s name was not mentioned in court documents, but all sources agree that it is Alinejah.
