Politics
Justice Department brings criminal charges in thwarted Iranian plot to kill Trump
By ERIC TUCKER and LARRY NEUMEISTER Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Friday disclosed an Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trump , charging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with planning the assassination of the
By ERIC TUCKER and LARRY NEUMEISTER
The Justice Department on Friday disclosed an Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trumpcharging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with planning the assassination of the Republican president-elect.
Investigators were told of the plan to kill Trump by Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots.
Shakeri told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.
The official was quoted by Shakeri as saying that “We have already spent a lot of money” and that “money’s not an issue.” Shakeri told investigators the official told him that if he could not put together a plan within the seven-day timeframe, then the plot would be paused until after the election because the official assumed Trump would lose and that it would be easier to kill him then, the complaint said.
Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men were arrested on charges that Shakeri recruited them to follow and kill prominent Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejadwho has endured multiple Iranian murder-for-hire plots foiled by law enforcement.
“I’m very shocked,” said Alinejad, speaking by telephone to The Associated Press from Berlin, where she was about to attend a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the tearing down of the wall. “This is the third attempt against me and that’s shocking.”
In a post on the social media platform X, she said: “I came to America to practice my First Amendment right to freedom of speech — I don’t want to die. I want to fight against tyranny, and I deserve to be safe. Thank you to law enforcement for protecting me, but I urge the U.S. government to protect the national security of America.”
Lawyers for the two other defendants, identified as Jonathan Loadholt and Carlisle Rivera, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
In Tehran, Esmail Baghaei, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, rejected the report and called it a plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-U.S. relation more complicated, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Similar accusations in the past were rejected by Iran as their “erroneousness” were proved, he said.
“Repeat of the accusation in the current time span is a disgusting plot by the Zionist and anti-Iran circles that has aimed at making US-Iran problems more complicated,” Baghaei said.
Shakeri, an Afghan national who immigrated to the U.S. as a child but later was deported after spending 14 years in prison for robbery, also told investigators that he was tasked by his Revolutionary Guard contact with plotting the killings of two Jewish-Americans living in New York and Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka. Officials say he overlapped with Rivera while in prison as well as an unidentified co-conspirator.
The criminal complaint says Shakeri disclosed some of the details of the alleged plots in a series of recorded telephone interviews with FBI agents while in Iran. The stated reason for his cooperation, he told investigators, was to try to get a reduced prison sentence for an associate behind bars in the U.S.
According to the complaint, though officials determined that some of the information he provided was false, his statements regarding a plot to kill Trump and Iran’s willingness to pay large sums of money were determined to be accurate.
The plot, announced by the Justice Department just days after Trump’s defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, is part of what federal officials have described as ongoing efforts by Iran to target U.S. government officials, including Trump, on U.S. soil. Last summer, for instance, the Justice Department charged a Pakistani man with ties to Iran in a murder-for-hire plot targeting American officials.
“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Friday. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case shows Iran’s “continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens,” including Trump, “other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran.”
Iranian operatives also conducted a hack-and-leak operation of emails belonging to Trump campaign associates in what officials have assessed was an effort to interfere in the presidential election and harm Trump’s campaign.
Intelligence officials have said Iran opposed Trump’s reelection, seeing him as more likely to increase tension between Washington and Tehran. Trump’s administration ended a nuclear deal with Iranreimposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimanian act that prompted Iran’s leaders to vow revenge.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the president-elect was aware of the assassination plot and nothing will deter him “from returning to the White House and restoring peace around the world.”
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Neumeister reported from New York. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump is blaming fellow Republicans as his endorsed candidate, Ken Paxton, appears to be in a fierce struggle for a Senate seat in Texas with Democratic challenger James Talarico in a state the GOP has long taken for granted.
Trump, in a lengthy post to Truth Social Thursday, singled out longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove and Sen. John Cornyn, the incumbent who failed to secure the president’s endorsement in a heated primary.
Rove and Cornyn, Trump said, are doing “everything possible” to make it harder for Paxton to defeat Talarico, a state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian who is making a suprisingly strong run for Senate in deep red Texas.
“They are hurting Texas and, more importantly, hurting the United States of America!” Trump wrote. “If Ken Paxton loses, it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”
Cornyn, a longtime fixture in Texas politics, lost his bid for reelection in a contentious Republican primary in which he and his supporters portrayed Paxton as a deeply flawed candidate. As Election Day approaches, public polling over the past two months has shown Talarico with a narrow edge against Paxton, the state’s attorney general.
Trump urged his supporters to back Paxton.
“Your favorite President (ME!) is asking all of those who supported Senator John Cornyn to UNITE, and immediately switch your support to Ken Paxton,” Trump said. “He will be a Great Senator, just like he is a Great Attorney General. “
The race has also become one of the most expensive non-presidential battles. Talarico raised $64 million this summer — the largest third-quarter haul of any Senate candidate in history. He has raised more than $134 million since launching his campaign last year.
Paxton raised $18 million in the third quarter of 2026 and last month announced a new $20 million ad buy. Earlier this month, though, a Trump operative told POLITICO that MAGA Inc. and its affiliates are could spend nearly $45 million on direct mail, TV and digital advertising in Texas through Oct. 12.
Already, $235 million has been spent by outside conservative groups and party committees against Talarico as national Republicans scramble to boost Paxton.
Some Republicans have grown concerned that the cost of the Texas race is diverting money needed in other states and have expressed frustrations with Paxton after leaked audio showed him blaming Trump for his woes.
Trump easily won Texas in 2024, winning just over 56% of the vote. But concerns about Republicans’ chances this November have surged as the president’s approval rating plummets.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said he thinks Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans are wrong to move away from the party’s traditional embrace of free-market economics — and that their shift could create an opening for a “pro-freedom” movement.
“I think they are in error,” Daniels said in an interview when asked about Vance’s criticism of economist Milton Friedman, who championed free-market capitalism.
“I think what Vance is saying is that there are aspects to the free market which can be disruptive of culture and tradition. I mean, that’s what the free market does. It’s dynamic,” he told Blue Light News. “It’s the only mechanism, in my view, for preserving the American dream, and that’s the most important element of our culture.”
The vice president’s intra-party critics have argued that Vance has been moving away from free-market economics and toward a larger role for the government in shaping the economy in his defense of the Trump administration’s economic policies, especially its wide-ranging tariffs.
“What the president is doing is changing 40 years of a failed bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C., that has sold out American workers and destroyed the underlying economic strength of the United States of America,” Vance said in a Fox News interview last year.
The move is seen by some as Vance testing a more populist and protectionist message as he eyes the Republican presidential nomination in 2028.
But the two men were at one point closer politically. In Vance’s bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described Daniels as his “political hero.” Daniels has said that Vance sought his counsel on running for office in 2018 and Daniels advised against it because it was likely to be a bad year for Republicans.
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Daniels’ remarks.
Daniels recently released his new book, “Impatience Is a Virtue.” In it, the veteran of Indiana politics — who also led the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush — detailed his career championing the free market.
Daniels told Blue Light News that President Donald Trump was both a “symptom” and “a propellant” of voters’ discontent, pointing to their “feeling of being patronized, condescended, looked down on, ignored, disrespected.” And Trump’s political success came from his ability to unite and represent these discontented voters.
Still, Daniels argued the evolution of the Republican Party under Trump has created room for a “pro-freedom party” that champions economic freedom and individual autonomy.
“Whether that is the next iteration of this Republican Party or you find some other vehicle, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think that there’s a need, and as I say, there’s certainly, I think, a market for that viewpoint waiting to be expressed by somebody.”
The former governor, now back at Purdue University as the interim president after leading the school for a decade until 2022, sidestepped a question about his party identification and another one on whether he sees Vance emerging as the “pro-freedom” candidate.
“It’s all TBD; I don’t know,” he said of Vance.
Daniels also defended his view on another 2028 hopeful, Democrat Pete Buttigieg, who was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, during the tail end of Daniels’ governorship.
In his book, Daniels said Buttigieg is smart, but his principal asset that excites Democratic activists is his sexual identity.
Buttigieg became the first openly gay person confirmed to be a Cabinet secretary when he was tapped to lead then-President Joe Biden’s Transportation Department. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This differentiates him in a way that would be appealing to large portions of the core Democratic electorate,” he said. “Absent that, he would be a less likely national figure.”
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Two women this week sued former GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and two others — including a former state legislator — in federal court and accused the men of engaging in an alleged sex trafficking scheme during a time when Gaetz was still in Congress.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages from Gaetz and other defendants, was filed in Orlando by two women who were in their early 20s when they first met Gaetz. The women are not named in the lawsuit. The details mirror allegations that were at the center of a House Ethics Committee probe that found Gaetz had sex with a minor, solicited prostitutes and used illegal drugs.
“The defendants collectively used their public office, power, and wealth to prey on the economic vulnerability of the plaintiffs to commit the acts outlined below,” states the 38-page lawsuit.
That House probe helped derail Gaetz’s bid to become attorney general under President Donald Trump. He resigned from his Northwest Florida congressional seat to seek the post but decided to withdraw his name ahead of a potentially messy confirmation battle in the Senate.
Gaetz, who has repeatedly denied he ever had sex with a minor, said he would vigorously contest the allegations in the lawsuit.
“I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” Gaetz said in a text message. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional committee report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”
The civil suit is the latest development in the long-running scandal involving Gaetz, a former ally of Trump who has continuously denied any involvement in underage sex or trafficking of women after news broke in 2021 that the Justice Department was investigating him.
The lawsuit this week by Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 was first reported by the Miami Herald. It alleges that Gaetz and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg “coordinated the recruitment, payments, drugs and travel to obtain commercial sex acts from young women.” The lawsuit includes former Florida legislator and lobbyist Chris Dorworth because his Central Florida home was the site of a party where he allegedly “participated in the activities alleged there.”
Greenberg is serving an 11-year federal sentence after he pleaded guilty to multiple federal offenses including underage sex trafficking of a minor and wire fraud. Greenberg cooperated with federal investigators who were probing Gaetz but the U.S. Department of Justice closed the investigation without filing charges.
The lawsuit says it “arises from the recruitment and sexual exploitation” that occurred from 2017 through January 2019 and included trips to various locations such as Las Vegas, New York City and the Bahamas. It accuses Gaetz and Greenberg of making promises to help the two women financially or with college bills.
“They led her to believe they would resolve her financial needs as long as she continued to perform sexual acts for them and their associates,” the lawsuit states about Jane Doe 1. “They used the age, wealth and political power gap between themselves and Jane Doe 1 to keep her compliant and silent.”
Jane Doe 2, the lawsuit states, was “paid less” than promised and “through this pattern defendants caused Jane Doe 2 to believe she would lose her education and serious financial harm if she stopped performing sexual acts.”
Stencer Kuvin, a West Palm Beach attorney representing the two women, said in an email that federal law designed to protect sex trafficking victims has a 10-year statute of limitations “which potentially could run [out] next year based upon the allegations in the complaint.”
Gaetz, a firebrand and ally of Trump, was once seen as a potential candidate for Florida governor or attorney general. Since he left Congress, he has hosted his own show on the One America News Network and he was appointed to the board of a nonprofit charged with distributing proceeds from a settlement Florida received after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill along the Gulf Coast.
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