Two arrested and one remains at large over alleged scheme to kill former president, who is expected to expand sanctions on Tehran and give Israel a ‘blank cheque’.
The United States has brought charges over an alleged plot by Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to assassinate Donald Trump.
The freshly unsealed charges were brought before a Manhattan court on Friday, three days after Trump won the US presidential election. They detail allegations that Farhad Shakeri, a 51-year-old Afghan national, had been ordered by Tehran on October 7 this year to devise a plan to kill
Trump, 78.
Two other men, both based in the US, were named by the justice department as being part of the alleged plot: Carlisle Rivera, 49, from Brooklyn, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, from Staten Island.
In the legal documents, prosecutors allege that in September an official with the corps instructed Shakeri, who is at large and believed to be in Iran, to come up with a plan to kill Trump within a certain time frame. He was told by his handlers that they were prepared to pause the plan to kill Trump until after this week’s election, according to the court documents, believing that Trump would lose to Kamala Harris and it would be easier to assassinate him after the campaign.
The plot has no connection to the shooting in July that narrowly missed killing Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania, or the arrest in September of a man who was allegedly preparing to kill him as he played golf in Florida.
A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, rejected accusations that Iran was involved in assassination attempts on US officials, describing the claims as “completely baseless”. He said the claims were a “malicious conspiracy” aimed at “further complicating the issues between the US and Iran”.
Trump has promised to apply “maximum pressure” on Iran in a return to his first-term strategy in which he tore up a nuclear agreement, squeezed Tehran with crippling sanctions and ordered the assassination of a top general.
The country has put on a brave face after Trump’s re-election, with President Pezeshkian saying it “makes no difference”. However, the president-elect is likely to return to office with an even bigger grudge and Israel’s government, which feels the Biden administration tied its hands in responding to Iran’s missile attack last month, will welcome a new approach. Leon Panetta, chief of the CIA under Barack Obama, said this week that he believed Trump would give Israel a “blank cheque” in the region.
Israel is likely to encourage the idea that Elise Stefanik, a New York congresswoman and Trump loyalist, is on the shortlist to be the incoming administration’s ambassador to the United Nations. The job is a cabinet-level position in the US and the office-holder can have a big role in shaping foreign policy.
Stefanik has repeatedly criticised the UN’s treatment of Israel, saying: “American taxpayers have no interest in continuing to fund an organisation that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have allowed to rot with antisemitism.”
The alleged Iranian plot against Trump’s life appears to have hardened the incoming president against Iran, as the threat of war looms over the Middle East and Tehran signals it may move to building a nuclear bomb. “President Trump understands that the chief driver of instability in today’s Middle East is the Iranian regime,” Brian Hook, his former Iran envoy, told CNN.
Trump and his leading foreign policy advisers are likely to move against Iran’s oil income. The Biden administration has issued sanctions, especially targeted at what Washington described as Iran’s fleet of “ghost ships”, the tankers that transport Tehran’s already sanctioned illicit oil around the world. Those close to Trump expect a tougher crackdown, however.
“I think you are going to see the sanctions go back on, you are going to see much more, both diplomatically and financially; they are trying to isolate Iran,” a former Trump White House official told the Wall Street Journal. “I think the perception is that Iran is definitely in a position of weakness right now, and now is an opportunity to exploit that weakness.”
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly asserted that war in the Middle East, which began after Hamas’s attack on Israel last year and which has drawn in Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias, would not have happened if he had been in charge.
Some in the region are concerned, however, by Trump’s record in office last time. In 2019, Iran launched a missile and drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s largest crude-oil processing facility in Abqaiq, temporarily knocking out half of the kingdom’s oil production. “The Trump administration didn’t do anything”, said Michael Wahid Hanna, US programme director for Crisis Group, an NGO. “That’s one of those great ironies of the Trump administration: when things got actually real the Trump administration was nowhere to be found.”
The attacks prompted both Saudi Arabia and the UAE to sue for peace with Iran, and they have both sought to assure Tehran in recent months of their neutrality as it traded blows with Israel.
Before Trump’s re-election, Iran had signalled it wanted to re-engage with the West on a new nuclear deal. Tehran has always been divided on whether it needs a nuclear bomb, with the threat having been useful as leverage to extract sanctions relief. Experts say it has the means to build a rudimentary one in less than a year, but Iran would carefully weigh the repercussions of going nuclear, something that would invite further sanctions and reinforce its pariah status in the West.
Trump has been strongly supportive of Israel, which has long advocated action against Iran and its nuclear programme. In 2020, Trump went even further than his country’s ally, ordering a drone strike to kill the Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, who managed Tehran’s network of regional proxies. He later said Israel had agreed to join before it got cold feet.
The office of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he had discussed the “Iranian threat” with Trump in a phone call after the election this week.
Arab governments will be gambling on Trump’s close ties with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to offset the impulse to squeeze Iran too hard. The Saudis, who are primarily focused on trillion-dollar projects to attract investment and tourism to reform their economy, will argue the region needs stability — and ending the war in Gaza, as Trump has promised he would do, would defuse the crisis with Iran.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a think tank, said: “Gulf states in particular will not be supportive of maximum pressure. The last time we saw maximum pressure play out in the region, Iran began its maximum-resistance strategy.”
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The Department of Justice released images from Carlisle Rivera’s cloud account of firearms and knives -DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
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