Show Notes
All the news coverage about the elimination of the Iranian leadership masks another less-noted aspect to President Donald Trump’s decision to join with Israel to attack the Iranian mullahs – Iranian assassination plots.
Investigative reporter Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers of the Government Accountability Institute delve into those details on the most recent episode of the On Background podcast.
“War Secretary Pete Hegseth said this week they had killed Farhad Shakeri, an Iranian, who was behind a plot to kill President Trump in 2024 and likely ongoing plots,” Crabtree says. “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.”
Crabtree covers the activities of the US Secret Service for RealClearPolitics and has written extensively about uncovered plots by Iran to hire assassins to kill Trump and other American politicians. She has learned from sources inside Secret Service that they were aware of Iranian plots against the president for some time. “There were also threats from Iran against [former national security advisor] John Bolton,” she says.
“That was because Trump bombed and killed their top general, Qasem Soleimani, for attacking, hurting, and killing U.S. troops in Iraq,” she adds.
She recalls that last summer, in a heated conversation between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and commentator Tucker Carlson, Cruz said the US was actively going after people within the Iranian government it believed were behind such efforts. He could not name them, which frustrated Carlson.
But it was likely Shakeri US forces were then pursuing. Another culprit was already in custody, Crabtree notes.
During the final weeks of the 2024 campaign, whistleblowers warned members of Congress that Trump was facing multiple “assassination teams,” including three inspired by Iran and other governments. The FBI arrested Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national with ties to Iran, one day before the Butler, Pennsylvania campaign rally where Trump was shot through his ear and another man was killed by an American named Thomas Crooks, who was killed at the scene by Secret Service snipers. There is no evidence Crooks had any connection to Iran.
Asif Merchant was charged with murder-for-hire as part of an alleged scheme to assassinate Trump on US soil. The Justice Department in November announced separate charges against an “Iranian asset” and two Americans in a murder-for-hire scheme against Trump. Last week, the now-named Merchant’s trial began in New York.
The Merchant trial is uncovering what US intelligence services have learned about Iran’s efforts. According to testimony at his trial, Merchant used objects on a hotel napkin to illustrate a scenario for shooting a political figure at a rally, then staging a protest as a distraction for the killer to get away, according to an intermediary’s testimony and a video played in court Wednesday.
A witness at the trial testified that in conversations over two days, Merchant had asked him to line up hit men. Prosecutors played recordings that the witness surreptitiously made for the FBI.
Merchant, who eventually met the supposed hit men and gave them $5,000 as an initial payment, was arrested before he gave them a name to target, but he said it would be “someone who was hurting Pakistan and the Muslim world,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta said in an opening statement, according to the Associated Press.
“I don’t think [Merchant’s trial] is connected to our attack on Iran this week, because that’s been warned about for quite some time,” she says. “But this is why this new information is coming out about him.”
She reported that the FBI agents who were trying to get close to Merchant in order to catch him in plotting activity, “were plying him with not only drinks in order to get close to him, but also strippers.”
Secret Service has long been attuned to Iranian threats. Crabtree notes that in Alex Eisenstadt’s book about the 2024 campaign, he reported that at one point the Secret Service was so concerned about the Iranian threat that “they opened the moonroof of ‘The Beast’ [a heavily armed vehicle that travels with presidential motorcades] that they were driving Trump in, and shot at a drone because they thought it was an Iranian drone trying to attack the president.”
“Thankfully, that was not the case,” she continues. But that’s how real this threat was and continued to be up until now. Who knows if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, now under direct attack by US missiles, will regroup.”
Or if they still have other assets in the US. The Trump administration’s National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent said in December that there are 18,000 known and suspected terrorists in the US.
Kent’s phrase summing up the situation was “the border is secure, but the country is not.”
