According to the Trump campaign, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently briefed the Republican candidate on "real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States." The Secret Service was alerted to the threat before the July 13 attempt on Trump's life and reportedly increased his security because of it. But that was not enough to stop Thomas Matthew Crooks from shooting Trump in the face, killing Corey Comperatore, and wounding two other attendees.
There's little doubt the Iranians are targeting Trump, say former intelligence officials with whom I spoke. "The Iranians are promiscuous assassins, and they hate Trump more than anyone else on earth," says Peter Theroux, a retired CIA officer who worked on Iran and related issues during his tenure at Langley. "Trump enforced sanctions against Iran. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He was the most antithetical to everything Tehran wants, including the triumphal visit to Riyadh he made for his first presidential trip in 2017."
But above all, there's the fact Trump ordered the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, onetime chief of the Quds Force, the external operations unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and second in command only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Iranians have vowed to avenge the terror master's death and have threatened not only the former president but also former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Iran envoy Brian Hook, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and his successor Robert O'Brien. In August 2022, the Justice Department charged an IRGC officer for plotting to kill Bolton.
The Islamic Republic definitely has it out for Trump, but it seems this most recent Iranian plot to kill the Republican candidate was hatched by the FBI.
Last month the DOJ announced it had charged a Pakistani national with ties to Iran in connection to a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil. According to reports, Trump was the target.
The suspect, Asif Merchant, entered the country in April and was arrested on July 12 as he prepared to leave the country. It appears that Merchant was the Iranian threat the Secret Service was briefed on before the July 13 rally in Butler, PA.
The FBI arranged his entry into the U.S. According to an August Twitter post from Fox correspondent Bill Melugin, Merchant "was admitted into the U.S. via parole for 'significant public benefit' when [Customs and Border Patrol] encountered him at the airport in [Texas] in April after he flew in from overseas." The sponsor of his parole, Melugin reported, "was the FBI's Dallas office, for 'security interests.'"
Melugin's sources told him the FBI had intelligence on Merchant "before he arrived in the U.S. and needed him to physically come into the country to develop the case on him and arrest him, and that if they had arrested him at Customs, they would not have been able to gather evidence and information about his plot."
But to date there's little evidence the FBI developed a case based on intelligence collected before Merchant's entry. Rather, it seems more likely that federal law enforcement imported a terrorist entrapment target for the purpose of fabricating a plot. Former FBI agent turned whistleblower Steve Friend says the Bureau's playbook is simple: "Identify a vulnerable person. Establish fake friendships with undercover agents and informants. Encourage him to agree to commit a terrorist act he is otherwise incapable of committing. Arrest him."
Friend says that if the FBI really had probable cause for an arrest, it would make sense to facilitate Merchant's travel rather than going through a lengthy and possibly contentious extradition process. But what's curious, he says, "is that he was in the country for several months before they executed the arrest."
If the FBI had intelligence on Merchant's plan to kill Trump before he arrived in the United States, there's no evidence of it in the affidavit for his arrest. "It was all information about his actions while in the United States," says Friend. "That doesn't mean that he hadn't done anything before then. But it confirms that they didn't have enough to arrest him when he arrived here."
Neither the affidavit nor the indictment make a strong case that Merchant is an experienced operative. The "use of coded language, use of multiple cellular telephones, and removal of cellular telephones to attempt to avoid surveillance" cited in the affidavit do not, contrary to the arresting agent's contention, exemplify expert "tradecraft and operational security measures." "It's laughable," says Friend. "Like complex tradecraft is telling an accomplice to put his phone in a box? A corner drug dealer's tradecraft is more sophisticated than that."
Nor is there any evidence of Merchant's ties to the Iranian regime. In the affidavit, the arresting agent cites his experience working on investigations related to Iran and the Quds Force, but all that connects Merchant to Iran is the fact he has a wife and family there as well as another wife and family in Pakistan. He traveled to Iran before coming to the U.S., but there's no indication of what he did there, who he met with, how the plot originated, or on whose behalf it was to be executed.
In fact, according to the affidavit, Merchant told undercover agents that the "people who will be targeted are the ones who are hurting Pakistan and the world, [the] Muslim world." The FBI resolves this major discrepancy by explaining it away. "In my training and experience," the arresting agent states in the affidavit, "individuals engaged in plots originating overseas to commit acts of violence in the United States often obscure the sponsor or broader purpose of the plot."
But that's not what DOJ records documenting previous Iranian plots show. For instance, DOJ's 2022 filings regarding the arrest of Iranian national Shahram Poursafi for plotting to kill Bolton specifically identify the suspect as a member of the IRGC. DOJ documents concerning the 2011 arrest of Manssor Arbabsiar for conspiring to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S. show that Arbabsiar confessed that he met with Quds Force officials who recruited, funded, and directed him to blow up a Washington, D.C. restaurant where the Saudi ambassador regularly ate. There's nothing in the Merchant filings tying him to official Iranian channels.
There are other signs that there's something not quite right about the Merchant plot. Arbabsiar was ready to pay $1.5 million for killing the Saudi ambassador. Poursafi put a $300,000 bounty on Bolton's head and said he had an additional job for which he'd pay $1 million, presumably to kill Trump. But Merchant offered only $5,000 to kill Trump. And he didn't even have the money. He had to travel from New York to Boston to make arrangements to have $5,000 sent from a foreign country, which, according to the affidavit, was likely Pakistan.
But perhaps the most bizarre detail is Merchant's assertion that the assassination was to be only the first in an ongoing series of high-profile crimes. How, after killing the former and likely future president in broad daylight, did Merchant expect to evade law enforcement authorities long enough to embark on a sustained crime spree targeting heavily guarded politicians and officials?
Historically, the Iranians don't send their best when targeting their enemies abroad. Arbabsiar, for instance, reportedly suffered from bipolar disorder and was known for being disorganized. But Merchant stands apart. From the court filings alone, it's plain that he's delusional. It seems pretty obvious that the so-called Iran plot, or at least the Merchant component of it, is an FBI fabrication.
Why would the FBI invent a plot to kill Trump? First, by claiming the Iranians are responsible for this effort deflects attention from the fact that the real two would-be assassins, Crooks and Ryan Routh, are Democratic Party supporters. Further, says Friend, it boosts FBI statistics. "If they had just been aware of some sort of a plot and brought it to light then it would have been a disruption of a domestic terrorist plot. But because they arrested him, it's dismantlement, which is a very rare and very valuable statistic."
Disruption interferes with an organization's ability to function, like arresting a member of a drug gang. It disrupts the gang in a way that is going to impede them. But dismantlement, says Friend, "means taking down the entire organization. With the Merchant plot, the FBI can argue that he was forming an organization and now [they've] dismantled it — even though he was able to create it only because [they] facilitated his entry." And because the other members of the plot are informants or undercover officers.
The Merchant plot is reminiscent of the alleged Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping and murder plot in 2020. Court proceedings showed that the entire scheme was cooked up by federal law enforcement officers and informants.
The danger with these kind of entrapment schemes, Friend explains, isn't that someone as obviously incompetent as Merchant was going to kill Trump, but that, as a mentally unstable target committed to righting perceived wrongs against the Muslim world, he might have selected easier targets.
"This is a low intelligence person that they were able to cultivate here," says Friend. "What if he just at one point had a moment of clarity and said, 'Hey, this is a huge lift? I don't have the logistics. I don't have the financing. Why don't I just grab a giant knife and stab an infidel?' But that's not something the FBI ever takes into consideration because they don't think about the people they're supposed to be protecting."
The FBI's problem isn't just that it's fudging statistics to boost its budget and win accolades, raises, and promotions all around for "solving" a high-profile case. The much bigger issue is timing. After all, Merchant was arrested a day before the first attempt on Trump's life in Butler. There's no evidence that the Secret Service's failures that afternoon can be attributed to anything but incompetence. But the fact that the FBI is importing foreigners and encouraging them to plot against Trump raises questions that both the Secret Service and FBI would prefer to ignore.
Typically, the Bureau hides facts by claiming they are part of an active investigation and can't be divulged to the public. This time, FBI Director Christopher Wray, notoriously stingy with facts he is bound to share with the American public, must come clean.
About the author
Lee Smith is a bestselling author whose new book, Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, will be published on October 22.
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