Iran, Trump, and the Third Assassination Plot

Asif Merchant was arrested on July 12. He had just loaded his luggage into his ride to the airport, commencing a journey either to his wife and children in Iran or to a different wife and children in his native Pakistan. In weeks of secretly recorded conversations with a federal informant, Merchant had confided that he had families in both countries. He also, according to an FBI affidavit, said he had come to America to arrange the assassination of “a political person.”

The identity of that person was not explicitly stated, either by Merchant or by his handler in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to a leaked document that was posted online by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley on Sept. 5 after, the Iowa Republican said, it was provided to him by a whistleblower. But, along with other evidence, the documents all but confirm that Donald Trump was the person Merchant was authorized to offer up to $1 million to kill.

In the leaked document, Merchant described remotely scouting a Trump rally, then sending a written report on event security—how many guards, how many body scanners—back to Tehran. In secretly recorded meetings described by the FBI after his arrest, Merchant “games out the assassination” with the informant. The plan he details involved a crowd, a staged demonstration intended to serve as a distraction, a target at a podium, and “security all around.” Alerted to the Iranian plot well before Merchant’s arrest, the Secret Service increased protection of Trump—context that only amplified the agency’s failure when an assassin’s bullet grazed the former President at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13.

Federal authorities say they have found no evidence that the slain shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted with the assistance of anyone else, let alone Iran. Nor has any evidence emerged connecting Iran to Ryan Wesley Routh, who was apprehended after the attempted ambush of Trump earlier this month on a golf course in Florida—though Routh displayed sympathetic interest in Iran. In a self-published 2023 book about Ukraine, he mentions Iran dozens of times, and states that he repeatedly attempted to obtain a visa “to join my Iranian friends in Iran” and protest U.S. sanctions on its government. In a passage expressing regret for voting for Trump, Routh addresses Tehran directly: “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the [nuclear] deal. No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work, or even unnatural selection.”

Prosecutors made note of the passage in a Sept. 23 court filing, in which they also singled out a reference to Iran in a “Dear World” letter Routh had left behind, explaining his reasons for trying to kill Trump. “The handwritten letter above goes on to state in part: “He [the former President] ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled."

Every aspect of Routh's peculiar life is under scrutiny, from the vainglorious social media postings, to his quixotic trip to Ukraine, where he wanted to bring Afghan anti-Taliban fighters who had been living as refugees in Iran.

Merchant’s arrest, by contrast, has drawn relatively little attention. Of the three assassination plots exposed in as many months, it is the only one detected in advance, and described in detail by a U.S. government already acutely aware of the threat. Iran’s leaders have been vowing to kill Trump for years, since he ordered the January 2020 death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The documents released after Merchant's arrest tell a story of how serious that vow has proved to be.

To the U.S., Soleimani was an enemy, the chief of Iranian operations outside Iran—a portfolio that takes in Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and the Houthis. By sending particularly lethal IEDs into Iraq, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. But inside Iran, Soleimani was the most popular figure in an unpopular regime, described as “James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one,” and “like a son” to Iran’s Supreme Leader. After his assassination by a drone strike, the Islamic Republic singled out Trump and every U.S. official involved for “justice.”

The threat was sincere. Iran maintains a state apparatus expressly dedicated to assassinating perceived enemies overseas. For most of the last 45 years, it was used chiefly to kill Iranian dissidents who reside abroad. After Soleimani’s death, however, Tehran directed its assassins to murder some of the most prominent political figures in America—a remarkable shift that carries the potential to throw U.S. politics into crisis.

Merchant, according to the leaked document, “understood that the killing was related to Iran’s retaliation for the death of Qasem Soleimani.”

Little is known of Merchant’s life beyond his Pakistani nationality, and that he traveled frequently from Pakistan to Iran. After the news of his arrest, an Indian news site wrote that he had grown up in a wealthy Karachi family, and controlled a $70 million portfolio. But according to the leaked document—a proffer, or summary of information a suspect offers while negotiating for leniency—he told the FBI that he got involved with IRGC for the money. This April, he flew to Texas, where he appears to have family, then on June 3 on to New York, where he was met at LaGuardia airport by the person who would turn out to be the informant. In a Long Island hotel, according to the publicly filed arrest affidavit, Merchant announced that their partnership would not be in clothing imports but assassination, which he illustrated by making a “finger gun.”

He allegedly instructed the informant to introduce him to assassins for hire. Anticipating that they would ask who they were expected to kill, Merchant had already put that question to his IRGC handler, identified in the leaked document as Mehrdad Yousef, when they spoke in a safe house in Iran in January. Merchant told the FBI that Yousef first replied that Merchant should tell the hired guns that the target was Trump, “then paused” and rattled off a range of other possible targets: “Joe Biden or Nikki Haley, or politicians, military people or bureaucrats.” Merchant “interpreted Yousef’s pause to mean Trump could be the target.”

The plans appear to point nowhere else. It was after the conversation with Yousef that Merchant traveled to the U.S., researched the Trump campaign rally, then secreted his report—“30 guards,” “four to five scanners”—in a package mailed to the handler. By the time he reached New York, the plan had grown elaborate. The FBI affidavit includes a photograph described as Merchant in the hotel room explaining the plan to the informant, referred to as a “confidential source” (CS). Time-stamped 7:34 p.m. on June 4, the screen grab shows a slender, mustachioed man leaning intently forward, brow furrowed and left shirt sleeve pulled above the elbow to reveal a forearm tattoo. “Merchant began planning potential assassination scenarios on [a] napkin and quizzed the CS on how he would kill the target in the various scenarios,” the affidavit states. “Merchant pointed to the target and repeatedly asked the CS to explain how the target would die. Merchant told the CS that there would be ‘security all around’ the person.”

He explains that the assassination will require a distraction—a noisy demonstration, he says, arranged in advance. Merchant also wants someone—he specifies “a woman”—to do reconnaissance. That would bring the number of people who would need to keep the plot secret to nearly 30, including the actual assassins, whom Merchant reminds the informant he needs to line up. At this point, the scale of the plot has surpassed any previous known Iranian assassination mission, while retaining a signature seat-of-the-pants quality: The next day, Merchant will suggest he and the informant drive around Brooklyn to “scout clubs” where they might find willing accomplices.

“It’s funny. But at the same time, the clumsiness doesn't mean that they're not determined to get rid of their opponents, or to get rid of American officials,” says Masih Alinejad, an Iranian dissident Tehran has targeted repeatedly. In 2021, federal prosecutors charged Iranian agents with plotting to kidnap her from her home, then carry her by speedboat to Venezuela for transfer to Iran, and either imprisonment or death. A year later, a thug allegedly waited outside the same Brooklyn house in his car with an assault rifle and 66 rounds of ammunition. 

Word of a specific Iranian threat to Trump leaked to news reports amid the intense scrutiny of the Secret Service’s performance in the Butler shooting. By then, Merchant had already been arrested but the details remained secret because on July 14 a U.S. magistrate in Brooklyn had sealed the arrest affidavit at the request of prosecutors seeking time for investigators to pursue leads. Three days later, Merchant sat down with prosecutors and FBI agents. The information he provided was compiled in a five-page file labeled as a proffer: the document that would soon be leaked.

Law enforcement regards this kind of document as confidential. Several days after Grassley posted this one online, it was taken down at the request of the Justice Department, according to Grassley staff, who added that negotiations were underway for more information. The Justice Department told TIME it had no comment, but in previous reports did not dispute the authenticity of the document while protesting its being made public.

Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, expressed incredulity. “What proffer? Mr. Merchant is not cooperating,” Moskowitz wrote TIME by email after the document was posted. Three weeks earlier, the attorney emphasized that Merchant enjoys the presumption of innocence: “My client looks forward to his day in court and to the due process that our constitution guarantees him.”

The leaked document all but affirms the implication of the FBI affidavit filed when Merchant was arrested, and finally unsealed on Aug. 5: that the logical target was Trump. “I think that's the assumption,” says Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official who tracks Iran’s assassination program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, adding, “You don’t put everything in an indictment.”

Since 1979, when the clerical regime came to power, Iran’s agents have killed more than 440 Iranians outside its borders, by the count of the Abdorraham Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (named for a democratic activist stabbed to death in the lobby of his Paris apartment building by agents of the Islamic Republic in 1991). The count does not include nonfatal attacks like the March wounding by knife of a journalist for a dissident satellite television channel outside his London apartment.

“I’ve moved to almost 20 safe houses in three years,” says Alinejad, the dissident. She declined an offer to enter the Federal Witness Protection Program, she says, because doing so would prevent her from criticizing the Islamic Republic, where her social media profile (8.5 Instagram followers) drives her activism. And for the Iranian regime, the goal is silence.

 “They have managed to decapitate the opposition,” said Roya Boroumand, a daughter of Abdorraham and executive director of the center. “They have killed networkers. They have killed people who bring people together. Their killings are targeted to prevent any organized dissent. I remember when the news came out about Masih,” she says. “There were meetings on Clubhouse. People were crying, in, like Canada, saying, we are safe nowhere.”

But until recently, U.S. officials tended to be, at most, collateral damage: In 2011, according to a federal indictment, an Iranian agent called it “no big deal” if U.S. Senators also died in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington by bombing a D.C. restaurant. Things changed with Soleimani’s death.

Assassinating Trump could be interpreted as an act of war, and provoke a U.S. military response endangering an Iranian regime that, till now, has made its own survival its top priority. The risk appears enormous.

“Yeah, but I don’t know that the regime sees it that way,” Levitt, the former Treasury official, says. “The regime believes in reciprocity, what it sees as reciprocity.” He pointed to a video posted on the website of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in January 2022. Titled “Revenge Is Definite,” the animation envisions Trump being killed, on a Florida golf course, by Iranian drones shortly after receiving a text message reading: Soleimani’s murderer and the one who gave the order will pay the price.

“They came out with this video, and they produced a list of people they believe were involved,” Levitt says. “And it starts at the top with Trump, and it goes down, and they believe those people are legitimate targets.”

Iran’s U.N. Mission did not respond to a request for comment. But while Tehran’s foreign minister claimed in a CNN interview that Iran’s quest for “justice” is “legal and judicial,” senior regime officials make no bones about “killing Trump,” as one put it on state TV. Tehran has even signaled its preference for locally hired assassins. At a ceremony marking the second anniversary of Soleimani’s death, his successor as head of the Quds Force of the IRGC, Esmail Ghani, declared: “We take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes, without our presence."

As Ghani spoke, an effort to assassinate Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was well underway, though Bolton was no longer in government when Soleimani was killed. That plot, with a fee of $300,000, was also monitored by the FBI, which captured weeks of communication between a go-between and an increasingly impatient handler in Tehran. The handler floated a $1 million fee for the assassination of another former official, later revealed to be former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, says that in private conversation before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 opened a new powder keg, two senior U.S. officials told him the greatest danger of open conflict with Iran would be a successful assassination avenging Soleimani. A third U.S. official, he says, recently told him the U.S. had warned Iran through back channels of how severely it regards the assassination efforts, “but Iran does not seem to take these threats seriously.”

Levitt this month unveiled a web page detailing every known “external operation” attempted by Iran, a definition that includes assassination attempts. More than half—at least 116 —have been launched since Soleimani’s death. “The tempo is up,” says Levitt. “I mean, there’s a lot going on.”

Maybe too much. Iran’s espionage efforts have never been consistently impressive, but the sheer number of recent assassination attempts can look like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. In the U.S., at least, not much has.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, the men who arrange assassinations are under pressure of their own. As the plot to kill Bolton dragged on, the Quds Force officer attempting to steer events from Tehran confided to his recruit that, having missed the anniversary of Soleimani’s death, he “was worried the job would be taken from them” if not completed soon.

By contrast, going by the affidavit, Merchant brought a salesman’s confidence. At the hotel, he put the informant’s cell phone in a drawer when they spoke, and told the purported hit men that they should get untraceable cells. Even on those, he said, they were to speak in code, pretending to be part of the clothing business that would serve as a front. Merchant jotted the key on a rectangle of paper that was still in his wallet when he was arrested: “T shirt” would refer to the protest (“the lightest work”), “flannel shirt” was stealing, and “fleece jacket,” meant the assassination (“commit the act of the game”). He added one more, “denim” as code for “sending money.” As a start, he handed the two undercover agents $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills.

“Now we know we’re going forward,” one of the agents said. “We’re doing this.”

“Yes,” Merchant replied, according to the sworn statement. “Absolutely.”