An Iranian plot to kill former U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have centered on a Pakistani man with ties to Tehran who hoped to also target other high-profile politicians and officials.
The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed charges against 46-year-old Asif Merchant, saying he traveled to the U.S. this April in search of hitmen willing to take on multiple jobs.
But according to the criminal complaint, the plot fizzled after the person Merchant contacted in his effort to carry out the scheme reached out to law enforcement.
"This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in [Tuesday's] complaint allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
"A foreign-directed plot to kill a public official, or any U.S. citizen, is a threat to our national security and will be met with the full might and resources of the FBI," he said.
The criminal complaint unsealed in New York does not identify any specific target for Merchant's plot, but the release comes just weeks after U.S. officials said they had increased security for the former president due to a threat linked to Tehran.
And the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that the threats were one and the same.
"I was previously briefed concerning the Iranian threat and the circumstances of Mr. Merchant's arrest and questioned then-Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on whether she had reviewed the intelligence concerning the Iranian threat," Republican Representative Mike Turner said in a statement.
"She confirmed to me that she read the intelligence and was aware of this Iranian murder-for-hire plot," Turner added, referring to a July 22 hearing on the failures to prevent an unrelated assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 during a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania.
Tuesday's charges are the latest in a growing list of foiled plots designed to kill Americans and other enemies of Iran on U.S. soil.
This past January, the U.S. charged three men, one of whom was based in Iran, in a plot to murder two U.S. residents in the state of Maryland.
The U.S. has also brought charges in plots targeting Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American human rights activist and VOA Persian TV host and a murder-for-hire scheme targeting former U.S. national security adviser Ambassador John Bolton.
Many of the recent threats, including the ones targeting Bolton and Trump, stem from Tehran's desire to seek revenge for the Trump-ordered January 2020 drone strike in Baghdad that killed Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force.
"We have said many times that we've been tracking Iranian threats against former politicians. We've been very clear about that," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday.
"We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority," she said. "We have invested extraordinary resources in developing additional information about these threats, disrupting individuals involved in these threats, enhancing protective arrangements and potential targets of these threats, engaging with foreign partners and directly warning Iran."
The court-appointed lawyer for the defendant in this latest plot targeting Trump, and others, declined comment when contacted by VOA.
But the charging documents allege Merchant traveled from Pakistan to Turkey and then to Houston, Texas, in April, after spending about two weeks in Iran.
Once he landed in the U.S., the criminal complaint states, Merchant immediately began recruiting individuals to assist him with the plan, telling the informant that he could earn up to $100,000 and that the scheme would target multiple individuals.
"[The] people who will be targeted are the ones who are hurting Pakistan and the world, [the] Muslim world. These are not normal people," Merchant said, according to the charging documents.
Steal, plan, kill
During meetings in New York in June, Merchant allegedly sketched out a three-part plan that involved stealing documents or computer files from a target's home, planning protests and then killing the targets on U.S. soil.
Merchant is charged with giving two undercover agents posing as hitmen a $5,000 advanced payment in late June to carry out the plot, adding more money would be coming after he returned to Pakistan.
U.S. law enforcement officials arrested Merchant on July 12, before he was able to leave the U.S.
"For years, the Justice Department has been working aggressively to counter Iran's brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani," said Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement Tuesday.
"The Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran's lethal plotting."
U.S. officials expect there will be no let-up in Tehran's attempts to get revenge.
"We need to recognize the brazenness of the Iranian regime," the FBI's Wray told U.S. lawmakers during a hearing late last month. "I expect we're going to see more of it. I expect there will be more coming on that."
And some experts warn that even if some of the Iranian attempts appear amateurish, they need to be taken seriously.
"Much like Iranian projectiles, sometimes quantity has a quality of its own," said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"On the one hand, some of these things may sound cartoonish or too far-fetched, but on the other hand, there's a persistence behind it, which is worrisome," he told VOA. "My fear is that it's going to be throwing everything or what it can at the wall and seeing what sticks."
Patsy Widakuswara and Lynn Davis contributed to this report.
