The United States charged an Iranian man on Friday for allegedly participating in a plot orchestrated by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump, the Department of Justice announced.
Farhad Shakeri, 51, told law enforcement officials that he received instructions on October 7, 2024, to provide a plan for killing Trump.
According to the DOJ, Shakeri confessed that he did not intend to carry out the plan within the specified time frame set by the IRGC.
In response, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei called the claim a “repulsive” fabrication, accusing Israel and Iranian opposition groups outside the country of creating the plot to “complicate matters between America and Iran.”
The DOJ described Shakeri as an asset of the Revolutionary Guards, currently residing in Tehran. Shakeri immigrated to the U.S. as a child but faced deportation around 2008 after a conviction for robbery. Prosecutors believe he remains at large in Iran.
The case also involves two New York residents, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt, who met Shakeri in prison. They face charges for assisting him in plotting to kill a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent in New York. Prosecutors did not name the target, but the description fits Masih Alinejad, a journalist and activist who has been a vocal critic of Iran’s laws requiring women to wear head coverings. In 2021, four Iranians faced charges related to a plot to kidnap Alinejad, and in 2022, authorities arrested a man with a rifle outside her home.
Rivera and Loadholt remain in custody pending trial. Their lawyers have not yet commented on the charges.
