On November 7, 2024, in downtown Tehran, Iran, an Iranian man picked up a newspaper with a photo of US President-elect Trump on it.
Morteza Nikubazir | Noor Photos | Getty Images
The Justice Department on Friday charged an Iranian man and two others with conspiring to assassinate then-candidate Donald Trump.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release that the Iranian government directed these actors to “target citizens here and abroad, including President-elect Trump.”
The three charged are Farhad Shakeri, of Iran; Carlisle Rivera, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Jonathan Lodholt, of Staten Island, N.Y. .
According to the criminal complaint, an official from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps allegedly told Shaqri in mid-to-late September to focus on monitoring and assassinating Trump.
Shaqri told Iranian officials it would cost “a ‘huge’ amount of money,” the indictment said, adding that he understood Iran was “willing to continue to spend a lot of money” to kill Trump.
The indictment states that Shaqri told law enforcement in a taped interview that around October 7, Iranian officials tasked Shaqri with providing a plan to kill Trump within seven days.
Iranian officials warned Shaqri that if he failed to meet the deadline to come up with an assassination plot, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would “suspend plans to assassinate (Trump) until after the U.S. presidential election,” as the official assessed that Trump would “lose election “then it would be easier to assassinate (Trump),” the complaint says. Shaqri allegedly told FBI officials that he did not intend to come up with a plan to assassinate Trump within the time limit set by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Prosecutors accuse Shaqri of being an “Islamic Revolutionary Guards asset” living in Tehran and an Afghan national who immigrated to the United States as a child. Convicted of robbery in 1994, he served about 14 years in a New York state prison before being deported from the United States around 2008.
Rivera was arrested Thursday in Brooklyn and in Lord Haute, Staten Island.
Prosecutors also claim they were recruited as part of a criminal network to silence and kill an American journalist who was a strong critic of the Iranian regime and its human rights abuses.
