Three people have been charged in a plot linked to Iran that aimed to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump. The suspects include an Iranian-American activist and two Jewish Americans from New York, as revealed in a criminal complaint made public on Friday.
Farhad Shakeri, Carlisle Rivera, and Jonathan Loadholt are facing murder-for-hire charges, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Rivera and Loadholt have been arrested, but Shakeri, who the FBI says is connected to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is thought to be in Tehran.
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The complaint states that the IRGC assigned Shakeri to watch and kill Trump as revenge for the death of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020.
“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran. The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald J. Trump,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement announcing the charges.
Shakeri moved to the United States but was deported in 2008 after serving time in prison for robbery, according to the Justice Department. While he was in prison, he met Rivera and Loadholt and hired them to target an Iranian-American activist living in Brooklyn, as stated in the complaint.
Although she is not named in the complaint, the activist fits the description of Masih Alinejad, a well-known journalist and human rights activist who has been critical of the Iranian government and has faced several assassination plots. Last month, federal prosecutors charged IRGC Brig. Gen. Ruhollah Bazghandi in connection with an alleged plot to murder Alinejad.
Alinejad later shared on social media that she was one of the targets, writing, “I am shocked. I just learned from the @FBI that two men were arrested yesterday in a new plot to kill me at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to give a talk.”
In mid to late September, Shakeri informed the FBI that the IRGC official had given him instructions stated “to put aside his other efforts” and “focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating former President of the United States Donald J. Trump,” the complaint said. When Shakeri told his handler it would cost a lot of money, the IRGC official is quoted as responding “we have already spent a lot of money … so the money’s not an issue.”