Iranian Agents Plotted to Kill Trump, U.S. Says in Unsealed Charges

The allegation came in a complaint that said Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn activist, had been the target of a second assassination attempt

By Benjamin WeiserDevlin Barrett and Christopher Maag

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said on Friday that Iranian plotters had discussed a plan to assassinate Donald J. Trump before he was re-elected as president this week.

One of the plotters said that he was assigned in September to carry out the plan by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, the prosecutors said in court papers.

An Iranian operative said he was told to put aside other efforts he was undertaking on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards and “focus on surveilling, and ultimately, assassinating” Mr. Trump, according to a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.

The operative told a Revolutionary Guards official that such a plan would cost a “huge” amount of money, the complaint said. In response, the official said, “We have already spent a lot of money,” adding that “money’s not an issue.”

The new allegation about a plan to kill Mr. Trump is the latest alarming development for U.S. security officials, who have been concerned since the summer that Iran appeared to be escalating plans for violence inside the United States, including against the president-elect, who has been Tehran’s nemesis.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied the allegation. The ministry’s spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, called the accusations baseless in a statement.

In his first term as president, Mr. Trump abandoned a nuclear deal that required Iran to limit its nuclear capacity. He levied 1,500 sanctions, including on oil sales and banking, debilitating the Iranian economy. And he ordered the assassination of a military leader, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who had been designated as a terrorist.

This year, Iranian hackers breached Mr. Trump’s campaign and spread disinformation about the election. Officials said Friday that Tehran was willing to go further.

“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” said Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I.

The newly unsealed complaint also contains allegations that the authorities had disrupted another plot to assassinate Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn human-rights activist who has long criticized Iran’s repression of women.

The man prosecutors said was tasked with the plot to kill Mr. Trump and Ms. Alinejad was Farhad Shakeri, 51.

Mr. Shakeri, following a guilty plea to robbery, spent 14 years in New York state prisons, according to the complaint. Mr. Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the United States as a child, was deported in 2008 after serving his prison sentence, the complaint says.

Prosecutors said Mr. Shakeri was at large and was believed to reside in Iran.

Two men also charged in the plots were arrested and are in custody in New York. They are Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island.

The three men each face charges of murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and money laundering conspiracy. Mr. Shakeri was also charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, identified as the Revolutionary Guards, and conspiring to do so, as well conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Mr. Rivera and Mr. Loadholt were each presented before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan on Thursday and ordered to be detained pending trial. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Shakeri’s time in prison overlapped with Mr. Rivera, who was convicted in 1994 for second-degree murder, the complaint says.

The document also says that beginning in September, Mr. Shakeri, who was in Tehran, spoke voluntarily by telephone with F.B.I. agents on five dates, including as recently as Thursday. His stated reason for agreeing to be interviewed, the complaint said, was to seek a sentence reduction for another federal prisoner.

Mr. Shakeri told the F.B.I. that he was directed to provide a plan within seven days to kill Mr. Trump during a meeting with a Revolutionary Guards official on Oct. 7. The official told Mr. Shakeri that if he could not, the Revolutionary Guards would pause until after the U.S. presidential elections, according to the complaint.

Mr. Shakeri said the official told him that Mr. Trump would lose and that afterward “it would be easier to assassinate” him, according to the complaint.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said: “This has to stop. Today’s charges are another message to those who continue in their efforts — we will remain unrelenting in our pursuit of bad actors, no matter where they reside.”

The plot against Ms. Alinejad, an Iranian American writer, was just the latest that U.S. authorities had disrupted against her.

Prosecutors have charged a senior Revolutionary Guards official and several other men connected to the Iranian government in a plot to assassinate Ms. Alinejad in 2022. In that case, a man was arrested outside her house with a loaded AK-47-style assault rifle.

In 2021, four Iranians were charged with conspiring to kidnap Ms. Alinejad to Iran.

Ms. Alinejad, after learning of the new arrests on Thursday, said, “My activism seems to hurt them so much that they tried to get rid of me for the third time.”

“This is about how they are very determined to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil,” she added.

Masih Alinejad said Iran’s government was “determined to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”Credit...AP Photo/Lawrence Neumeister

The complaint said that Mr. Shakeri had directed Mr. Loadholt and Mr. Rivera to spend months surveilling Ms. Alinejad. Mr. Shakeri had promised them $100,000 to find and kill her.

In an April voice note, Mr. Shakeri told Mr. Rivera that Ms. Alinejad spent most of her time in a third-floor study and a second-floor recording studio. “You gotta wait and have patience to catch her either going in the house or coming out, or following her out somewhere and taking care of it,” Mr. Shakeri said,

”Don’t think about going in,” Mr. Shakeri added, describing that as a “suicide move.”

“Finish the work and pick up,” Mr. Shakeri told Mr. Rivera in a later text message, the complaint says. Prosecutors said that meant that if Mr. Rivera murdered Ms. Alinejad, he could receive the payment, the complaint says.

Mr. Shakeri, in his interviews with the F.B.I., said the Revolutionary Guards official told him that the organization would pay $1.5 million to have Ms. Alinejad killed. The official said the Revolutionary Guards wanted the act done immediately — “nighttime, daytime, anywhere” — the complaint says.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly. More about Benjamin Weiser

Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times. More about Christopher Maag