WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Friday charged an Iranian man and two others in an assassination-for-hire plot targeting then-candidate Donald Trump and others.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, said in a press release that the Iranian government directed these actors to “target our citizens in the United States and abroad, including President-elect Trump.”
The three accused are Iranian Farhad Shekeri; Carlisle Rivera of Brooklyn, New York; and Jonathan Loadholt, Staten Island, New York.
According to the criminal complaint, an official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that between mid-to-late September, Shakeri was told to focus on tracking down and killing Trump.
The complaint alleges that Shakeri told the Iranian official that it would cost “a lot” of money, adding that he understood that Iran was “willing to continue to spend a lot of money” in trying to kill Trump.
Around Oct. 7, an Iranian official told Shakeri to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days, he told law enforcement in recorded interviews, the complaint says.
An Iranian official warned Shakeri that the IRGC would “stop the plan to kill” if he failed to come up with an assassination plan by the deadline. [Trump] until after the US presidential election” because the official estimated that Trump “will lose the election and after that it will be easier to assassinate him”. [Trump]”, the complaint states. Shakeri told FBI officials that he had no intention of proposing an assassination plot to Trump during the SEPA’s time limit.
Prosecutors allege that Shakeri is an “Army Guard asset” living in Tehran and an Afghan national who immigrated to the United States as a child. Around 2008, he was deported from the United States after serving nearly 14 years in New York state prisons for robbery in 1994.
On Thursday, Rivera was arrested in Brooklyn and Loadholt was arrested in Staten Island.
Prosecutors also allege they were recruited as part of a criminal ring to silence and kill an American journalist known as a vocal critic of the Iranian regime and its human rights abuses.
This is a developing story and will be updated.