Iran Assassination Plot – Federal indictments and court convictions reveal a sophisticated national security threat involving Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leveraging global criminal networks, prison gangs, and transnational syndicates to execute political assassinations on American soil. Targeting prominent leaders including Donald Trump, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo, these operations utilize a decentralized, murder-for-hire proxy strategy to maximize plausible deniability. Recent federal trials, including the March 2026 courtroom conviction of IRGC operative Asif Merchant and unsealed Department of Justice files, confirm a systematic, well-funded targeting campaign orchestrated by Tehran as asymmetrical retaliation for the 2020 strike on Qassem Soleimani.
July 11, 2026 (STL.News) Iran Assassination Plot – The intersection of state-sponsored intelligence and transnational organized crime has moved from the pages of fiction to the center of U.S. national security policy. Over the last several years, a series of unsealed Department of Justice (DOJ) indictments, FBI alerts, and federal court convictions have brought into sharp focus a persistent and highly dangerous campaign by the Islamic Republic of Iran to assassinate current and former American officials on U.S. soil. At the very top of Tehran’s targeting list sits Donald Trump.
Rather than deploying highly trained state intelligence operatives whose movements would instantly trigger Western counterintelligence networks, Iran’s elite military wing, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has turned to an alternative strategy: outsourcing. By operating through a global marketplace of hired guns, cartel contacts, and localized gang enforcers, Iran aims to strike deep inside the United States while insulating itself from direct state-on-state accountability.
The Genesis of the Blueprint: The 2011 Precedent
To understand the mechanics of current plots against Donald Trump, security analysts look back to a landmark case from 2011 that proved Iran was willing to bridge the gap between Islamic statecraft and South American drug cartels.
In October 2011, the DOJ unsealed charges exposing a plot by the IRGC Quds Force—the external operations wing of the Guard—to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. The operational plan involved detonating a bomb inside a busy Washington, D.C., restaurant frequently visited by the diplomat, with complete disregard for the mass civilian casualties it would cause.
The Iranian asset tasking the operation, a dual Iranian-American citizen named Manssor Arbabsiar, traveled to Mexico to recruit muscle. He attempted to hire what he believed was a high-level commander within the notoriously violent Los Zetas drug cartel. Arbabsiar offered the cartel network $1.5 million to carry out the bombing, wiring a $100,000 down payment directly from overseas bank accounts tied to the IRGC.
The plot collapsed because the “cartel operative” Arbabsiar approached was actually an undercover confidential human source working directly with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Arbabsiar was arrested, confessed, and was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. However, the case proved an alarming structural reality: the IRGC viewed Western drug trafficking networks and cartels as an operational talent pool.
The Vengeance Mandate: Post-2020 Escalation
While the 2011 plot was seen by some analysts at the time as an opportunistic anomaly, the strategy was fully institutionalized following January 2020. A U.S. drone strike in Baghdad ordered by then-President Donald Trump killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC Quds Force and the primary architect of Iran’s regional proxy network.
Following Soleimani’s death, Iran’s state leadership declared a permanent, public mandate for blood vengeance against the decision-makers in Washington. This institutionalized campaign has outlived changing political administrations and leadership changes in Tehran. It specifically zeroes in on a core group of American officials:
- Donald Trump: Former President and current executive leader.
- John Bolton: Former National Security Advisor.
- Mike Pompeo: Former Secretary of State and CIA Director.
- Brian Hook: Former U.S. Special Representative for Iran.
The Case Files: Unmasking the Proxy Killers
The sheer scale of Iran’s campaign has become clear through a succession of major federal prosecutions. These cases outline exactly how the IRGC attempts to manipulate the domestic criminal underbelly of the United States.
1. The Conviction of Asif Merchant (March 2026)
In a major milestone for U.S. counterterrorism efforts, a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, officially convicted Asif Raza Merchant, a Pakistani national with deep ties to Iran, on charges of murder-for-hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries.
Court records established that Merchant was a trained operative sent directly by the IRGC. After traveling to Iran to receive instructions from his handler, Merchant entered the United States in April 2024. His primary directive was to establish an active, localized network capable of doing the “dirty work” for Tehran on American soil.
Merchant met with individuals he believed were domestic criminal hitmen in New York, explicitly making a “finger gun” gesture during meetings to define the nature of the opportunity. His plot relied on a multi-stage distraction strategy:
- Theft: Stealing secure documents or digital media from the homes of targeted politicians.
- Agitation: Staging political protests to drain local law enforcement resources.
- Execution: Eliminating the high-profile political targets amid the chaos.
Merchant paid a $5,000 cash advance to his recruits, which was successfully wired via an overseas intermediary. Like the Arbabsiar case before him, Merchant’s recruits turned out to be undercover FBI agents, leading to his arrest in July 2024 as he prepared to flee the country. His conviction in early 2026 legally cemented the reality of Iran’s active domestic hit operations.
2. The Prison-Gang Pipeline: Farhad Shakeri
In November 2024, the DOJ unsealed a massive criminal complaint detailing a parallel IRGC plot that targeted Donald Trump just weeks before the presidential election. The lead defendant, Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, had been deported in 2008 after serving more than a decade in American prisons for robbery.
While back in Tehran, Shakeri became an asset to the IRGC. The Guard recognized his unique utility: Shakeri still possessed an extensive network of criminal contacts inside the American prison system. Shakeri was tasked with utilizing these cash-strapped American felons to build a web of surveillance and operational hit squads inside the United States.
According to court filings, Shakeri’s IRGC handler ordered him in September 2024 to set aside all other ongoing operations—which included tracking an independent Iranian-American journalist in New York—and focus entirely on formulating a plan to assassinate Donald Trump. Shakeri told investigators during recorded phone interviews that when he expressed concern over the difficulty and cost of hitting Trump, his handler replied, “We have already spent a lot of money… money’s not an issue.”
While Shakeri remains at large in Iran, his domestic co-conspirators, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathon Loadholt, were arrested and subsequently convicted in January 2026 for their roles in the surveillance wing of the network.
3. The Shahram Poursafi Case
The operational blueprint was further exposed by the indictment of Shahram Poursafi, an IRGC operative who attempted to orchestrate the murder of former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Operating entirely from encrypted apps overseas, Poursafi attempted to pay an American resident $300,000 to execute the hit in Washington, D.C., or Maryland, promising a $1 million secondary payout for a follow-up hit on Mike Pompeo.
Poursafi explicitly instructed his contact to communicate using “construction terms,” framing the assassination as a request to “build a structure,” while leaving the specific method of execution up to the local asset.
The Strategic Logic of Plausible Deniability
From a military and geopolitical standpoint, Iran’s choice to rely on cartels, prison networks, and street criminals rather than professional commandos comes down to asymmetric risk management.
Direct involvement by Iranian military personnel in an assassination inside the United States would be classified as an unambiguous act of war. The Biden administration formally warned Tehran in late 2024 that any attempt on Donald Trump’s life would be treated exactly as such, triggering catastrophic military retaliation.
By filtering operations through a marketplace of global criminals, Iran seeks to establish a buffer of plausible deniability. If a cartel gunman or a local gang member successfully executes a target, the initial news cycle frames the event as domestic gun violence, organized crime friction, or lone-wolf instability. By the time federal investigators trace the financial breadcrumbs and encrypted metadata back to handlers in Tehran, the geopolitical shockwaves are dampened, and the immediate window for an American military response begins to close.
Furthermore, these proxy operations are incredibly cost-effective. The IRGC operates an extensive shadow economy fueled by illicit oil smuggling and regional black market activities. Funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars through Hawala networks—shadow banking systems that bypass traditional Western monitoring—allows Iran to easily finance domestic criminals who are motivated strictly by profit rather than ideology.
Summary of Core State-Sponsored Assassination Networks
| Operative | Primary Strategy | Primary Targets | Current Legal Status |
| Manssor Arbabsiar | Sourcing Mexican Cartels (Los Zetas) | Saudi Ambassador to U.S. | Convicted; Serving 25-Year Sentence |
| Shahram Poursafi | Encrypted Online Sourcing of U.S. Nationals | John Bolton, Mike Pompeo | Indicted; Fugitive at Large in Iran |
| Asif Raza Merchant | Recruiting U.S. Street Elements via Pakistan/Iran | Donald Trump, U.S. Politicians | Convicted by Federal Jury (March 2026) |
| Farhad Shakeri | Utilizing U.S. Prison Contacts & Street Gangs | Donald Trump, Dissident Journalists | Indicted; Fugitive at Large in Iran |
Geopolitical Standoff: “Locked and Loaded”
The persistence of these plots has kept U.S.-Iran relations at a dangerous boil. In July 2026, Israel’s intelligence agencies delivered a fresh, highly specific dossier to U.S. national security officials warning of renewed operational taskings from Tehran aimed directly at Trump.
The political response inside the United States has grown increasingly severe. Trump has addressed the threat head-on, stating publicly that he is fully aware he remains the number-one target on Iran’s hit list. In an intense escalation of rhetoric, Trump warned that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded,” and that any successful or attempted strike by Iran would result in the immediate, total destruction of the regime’s key command infrastructure.
For federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, the challenge is structural. The threat does not emerge from a single, neat squad crossing the southern border. Instead, it arrives as a decentralized web of digital wire transfers, encrypted messaging apps, and opportunistic recruiters shopping for contract killers in the American underworld. As long as Tehran maintains its mandate of vengeance for Qassem Soleimani, U.S. intelligence remains on high alert to disrupt the next proxy alliance before the trigger is pulled.
