Justice Department charges three in murder-for-hire plot targeting Donald Trump
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice on Friday charged an Iranian man and two others in a murder-for-hire plot targeting then-candidate Donald Trump and others.
Iran’s government directed these actors to “target our citizens, including President-elect Trump, on U.S. soil and abroad,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a news release.
The three who were charged are Farhad Shakeri of Iran; Carlisle Rivera of Brooklyn, New York; and Jonathan Loadholt, of Staten Island, New York.
According to the criminal complaint, an official with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps allegdly told Shakeri in mid-to-late September to focus on surveilling and assassinating Trump.
Shakeri told the Iranian official that it would “cost a ‘huge’ amount of money,” the complaint alleges, adding that he understood that Iran was “willing to continue spending a lot of money in its attempt” to have Trump killed.
Around Oct. 7, the Iranian official tasked Shakeri with providing a plan within seven days to kill Trump, he told law enforcement in recorded interviews, the complaint says.
The Iranian official warned Shakeri that if he was unable to offer an assassination plot by the deadline, then the IRGC would “pause its plan to kill [Trump] until after the U.S. presidential elections” because the official assessed that Trump would “lose the election and, afterward, it would be easier to assassinate [Trump],” the complaint alleges. Shakeri told FBI officials that he didn’t intend to propose a plan to assassinate Trump in the timeframe set by the IRGC, it says.
Prosecutors allege Shakeri is “an IRGC asset” living in Tehran and is an Afghan national who immigrated to the U.S. as a child. Around 2008, he was deported from the U.S. after serving about 14 years in New York State prisons following a robbery conviction in 1994.
On Thursday, Rivera was arrested in Brooklyn and Loadholt in Staten Island.
Prosecutors also allege that they were recruited as part of a criminal network to silence and kill an American journalist known to be a strong critic of the Iranian regime and its human rights abuses.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
