Inside Iran’s Alleged Plots to Kill Donald Trump

DEEP DIVE — For years, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has tried and failed at all sorts of half-baked schemes to eliminate enemies living in the United States. And despite its past failures, Tehran hasn’t abandoned its most ambitious plot yet — to assassinate former and future President Donald Trump, in retaliation for approving the drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassim Soleimani on January 3, 2020.

That’s the bottom line coming from multiple sources, high and low. A career criminal-turned-Iranian operative named Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan expatriate who spent his teen and young adult years in the U.S. and committed a brutal armed robbery and kidnapping on Long Island at age 20, has been charged with leading a murder-for-hire team of ex-cons to kill people opposed to the regime in Iran. According to a federal complaint filed on November 8, Shakeri served 14 years in a New York prison, was deported from the U.S. as a criminal alien in 2008, bounced around the Mideast, Turkey and South Asia, where he bungled an attempt at heroin trafficking, and wound up in Tehran, where he signed on as an IRGC asset. A few months ago, according to the complaint, Shakeri was “tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump.”