The United States Justice Department on Friday charged three people in a murder-for-hire plot by Iran targeting president-elect Donald Trump. DOJ said in a release that the three charged are Farhad Shakeri – an Iranian operative who is still at large in Iran. Carlisle Rivera and Jonathon Leadholt, two US citizens, was charged for assisting the Iranian government for helping surveil a US citizen of Iranian origin. They were arrested from New York.
As per a release by the DOJ, Shakeri is a 51-year-old Iranian citizen. Rivera, also known as Pop, is from Brooklyn, New York, while Loadholt, 36, is from Staten Island New York. While the authorities in the US believed that Shakeri is now in Iran, both Rivera and Loadholt were arrested from their respective residences in New York on Thursday.
“The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who 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," Attorney General Merrick Garland was quoted saying in the DOJ statement.
"We have also charged and arrested two individuals who we allege were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime," Garland added.
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In September, the US uncovered a foiled plot, allegedly by the Islamic Republic of Iran, to assassinate Trump, who was then the Republican candidate in the recently concluded US elections on November 5. The details of the plot were unearth after an attempted assassination attempt on the president-elect at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13.
The Trump campaign said in September itself that the 78-year-old was briefed on the assassination attempt by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The briefing was about “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate [Trump] in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, had said then.