Presidential candidate Donald Trump was believed to be among Asif Merchant’s potential targets.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
A Pakistani national allegedly linked to Iran has been charged with plotting to assassinate American politicians or government officials, possibly including presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.
The criminal complaint filed in federal court in New York stated that Asif Merchant, 46, was a murderer for hire who had spent time in Iran, where he has family, before coming to the U.S.
A person he recruited in April to carry out the attacks welshed on him to the authorities and then became their confidential informant.
The charge sheet said that Merchant had found an accomplice in New York with whom he was plotting to carry out an assassination “of a political person” either later this month or in early September.
He was eventually arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country, thinking that he had set up a group of attackers, when in reality they were undercover agents, CNN reported.
Attorney General Merrick Garland alluded to a possible motive for Merchant, saying in a statement, “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.”
In 2020, the U.S. assassinated the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) senior commander, Qassem Soleimani, in a drone strike on his car near Iraq’s international airport.
Iran had threatened to punish anyone connected with Soleimani’s death. In 2022, the U.S. charged a an IRGC member with offering $300,000 to a hit man to assassinate the then-National Security Advisor, John Bolton.
While the complaint doesn’t mention the potential targets by name, it does state that Merchant had told the informant that there would be “security all around” one of them.
Trump, who had been president at the time and ordered the strike, is protected 24/7 by the Secret Service.
He was slightly hurt in an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally that took place just a day after Merchant’s arrest, but in commenting on the current case, Garland said that there was nothing to tie him to that gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead at the scene.
CNN reported that the FBI had told the Secret Service about Merchant’s potential threat, leading to Trump’s security detail being beefed up. This “raises new questions” about the Service’s negligence to secure the campaign rally properly, the media outlet said.
The court papers cited Merchant as saying that he had wanted to go after people in the U.S. who are “hurting Pakistan and the world, [the] Muslim world.”
In addition to the actual hitmen, the complaint details that the Pakistani national had searched for a woman to do “reconnaissance” and some two dozen others who would stage a protest “as a distraction after the murder occurred.”