Feds: Man With Ties to Iran Plotted US Assassination

A Pakistani man with alleged close ties to Iran has been charged in connection with what FBI Director Christopher Wray says is an assassination plot "straight out of the Iranian playbook."

• Asif Merchant, 46, has been charged with "murder-for-hire as part of a scheme to assassinate a politician or US government officials on US soil," the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York said in a news release Tuesday.
• Federal prosecutors did not disclose the alleged target or targets, but sources tell CNN that the FBI believes Donald Trump was among them. There is not believed to be any link to the attempt to assassinate Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania last month.

• Merchant was arrested as he tried to leave the country the day before the July 13 rally shooting, NBC News reports. Prosecutors said he attempted to hire people to carry out an assassination in late August or early September.
• Prosecutors said Merchant sought to hire men to do the killing, a woman for "reconnaissance," and 25 people "who could perform a protest as a distraction after the murder occurred," per CNN.
• "Fortunately, the assassins Merchant tried to hire were undercover FBI agents," said Christie Curtis, acting assistant director of the FBI's New York Field Office. Prosecutors said Merchant arrived in the US in April after spending time in lran, NBC reports. They said he contacted "a person he believed could assist him with the scheme." That person contacted law enforcement and became a confidential source, prosecutors said.

• "This dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today's charges allegedly was orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook," Wray said in a statement. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department has long been "working aggressively to counter Iran's brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian General Soleimani." The general was killed in a drone strike ordered by then-President Trump in 2020.
• A spokesperson for Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations told CNN they had not received any reports on the matter from the US government. "However, it is evident that the modus operandi in question contradicts the Iranian Government's policy of legally prosecuting the murderer of General Soleimani," the spokesman said.

(More assassination stories.)