The U.S. Department of Justice is moving forward with criminal charges against Iran over a plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump that was thwarted by the FBI, the government announced.
The federal government is dealing with what the Justice Department says was a murder-for-hire plot to remove President Trump ahead of this week’s presidential election, which he decisively won over Democratic rival Kamala Harris. The criminal charges were dismissed.
A criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court alleges that an unnamed senior official in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards Corps instructed associates in September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately kill President Trump. I am doing it.
Investigators learned of the plot during interviews with Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national identified by authorities as an Iranian government agent who was imprisoned on robbery charges and deported from the United States.
According to a criminal complaint, he told investigators that he was instructed in September by officials in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to surveil President Trump and develop a plan to assassinate him within seven days.
Two other men who authorities say were recruited to take part in other assassinations were also arrested on Friday, including a prominent Iranian-American journalist. Shakeri remains in Iran.
“Few forces in the world pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as Iran,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Friday.
The campaign said U.S. intelligence officials informed Trump in September of a suspected Iranian plot to kill him.
The briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is believed to have focused on a plot unrelated to the two domestic assassination attempts on then-Republican presidential candidates, and is believed to have focused on plans unrelated to the two domestic assassination attempts against then-Republican presidential candidates, indicating that Iran is continuing its assassination plot. It was carried out amid reports suggesting that the Hacking of the Trump campaign.
The campaign said at the time that the press conference was about “real and concrete threats from Iran to assassinate (President Trump) with the purpose of destabilizing and sowing chaos in the United States.”
The plot reflects what federal officials described as an ongoing effort by Iran to target U.S. government officials, including Trump, on U.S. soil. Last summer, the Justice Department indicted a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
