Two attempts on the life of a former president, less than two months apart, is unprecedented in American history. And yet it’s not entirely surprising given that the country’s most powerful institutions and industries have spent the last eight years weaponizing the most suggestible and mentally ill of our citizenry to target Donald Trump and his supporters. Now it seems the FBI may be recruiting from abroad as well.
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.”
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