Two Americans and an Iranian were arrested in the Iranian government’s plot to stalk and kill President-elect Donald Trump during the final weeks of his 2024 presidential campaign, the New York Post reports, citing an indictment unsealed by Manhattan federal prosecutors on Friday (November 8).
Iranian Farhad Shakeri, 51, and New Yorkers Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, were charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy, according to the indictment. The three suspects were hired by an unnamed official in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to “focus on surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating, former President of the United States, Donald J. Trump” during the final weeks of his successful presidential campaign.
Shakeri reportedly told the IRGC that the plot would “cost a ‘huge’ amount of money” and an official responded that “we have already spent a lot of money…[s]o the money’s not an issue,” according to prosecutors. Shakeri told an FBI agent that the IRGC instructed him to have a plan in place to assassinate Trump “within seven days” of October 7 and was told by the IRGC contact that if he did not meet the deadline the attack would be postponed until after the election, which the group presumed Trump, 78, would lose “and, afterward it would be easier to assassinate [him,]” the indictment states via the New York Post.
Shakeri claimed that he didn’t propose a murder plot against Trump by the deadline, according to the complaint. The charges were unsealed three days after Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote since former President George W. Bush in 2004.
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