NEW YORK (AP) — While the U.S. fights a widening war in Iran, American prosecutors are airing claims that Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was entangled in a foiled 2024 assassination plot that eyed then-candidate Donald Trump as a possible target.
The alleged scheme is at the center of a criminal trial that started in a federal court in New York last week, days before the Mideast combat that now looms in the background.
“This trial is happening
in interesting times,” Judge Eric Komitee told lawyers this week in the case of Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national accused of trying to hire hit men to kill a U.S. politician. Merchant didn't name a target but searched online for Trump rally locations, according to prosecutors, who introduced evidence Tuesday that Merchant’s laptop contained photos of both Trump and then-President Joe Biden at a time when they were rivals for the presidency.
An FBI agent testified Tuesday that Merchant told her he had a Revolutionary Guard “handler” and believed the handler would help bankroll the plan. Merchant's lawyer suggested the purported statements might not be accurate.
Merchant, 47, has pleaded not guilty to attempted terrorism and other charges. His attorneys say prosecutors are trying to wedge evidence into a narrative that doesn't fit.
Merchant has children in Iran and has traveled there. His lawyers have portrayed his trips as religious pilgrimages and family time. But federal authorities have long suggested that he had ties to Iran's theocratic government.
When Merchant was indicted in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case was “straight out of the Iranian regime’s playbook.” Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland portrayed it as an example of “Iran's lethal plotting against Americans.”
In court Tuesday, an FBI agent opened a window — though a narrow, constrained one — on the government's basis for pointing a finger at Tehran.
It stems from what Merchant allegedly told agents in a July 2024 interview. The session wasn't recorded, and the agents' report on it is sealed. Only a few questions about it were allowed in court.
According to agent Jacqueline Smith, Merchant said one of his cousins introduced him to a Revolutionary Guard handler at some point in Iran. Formally called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force has been prominent in Iran under the country's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S.-Israeli attack this weekend. The U.S. deems the Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Merchant said he expected his handler would reimburse $5,000 that Merchant had gotten from his cousin and had given to the supposed hit men, who actually were undercover FBI agents, Smith told jurors. She said Merchant also relayed some advice from the handler: “If he noticed he was being surveilled, he should act normal."
Defense lawyer Avraham Moskowitz underscored that the interview wasn’t recorded, and he described the agents’ report as “someone’s impression of what was said.”
“I disagree with that characterization,” Smith said, but acknowledged the sealed document wasn’t a verbatim account.
The interview was what's known as a proffer session, generally a time when defendants or suspects and their lawyers explore the possibility of cooperating with authorities. Moskowitz noted, while jurors weren't in the room, that proffers can produce a mix of things "that may be true and other things that are said that may not be true.”
While getting only a glimpse of that interview, jurors have seen and heard recordings of Merchant interacting with undercover FBI agents and with an acquaintance who flagged him to the agency in the first place.
In one June 2024 recording that was played in court this week, Merchant told the undercover agents that he and associates in Pakistan were looking for people to steal documents, create protests at political events, “and the last thing is: Maybe you can, say, kill someone.”
“The third thing you wanted, like, that could be a big deal,” one of the agents observed. He dangled the possibility that “you want somebody’s wife killed?”
“No, no.... maybe it’s some political person, maybe some other person,” said Merchant, who later explained that he didn’t yet know exactly whom.
“Wow,” the agent said, adding: “That’s gonna cost.”
About a week later, Merchant was recorded meeting the agents at a Manhattan rooftop restaurant and then, in a nearby car, handing them $5,000 in rolled-up, rubber-banded $100 bills.
Merchant was arrested in Texas on July 12, 2024, as he was packing to fly back to Pakistan, authorities said in court documents.
A day after Merchant's arrest, a Pennsylvania man made an attempt on Trump's life at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
The president alluded to the alleged Iranian plots Sunday as he discussed Khamenei's death.
"I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC News.
