The Department of Justice has laid federal murder-for-hire charges against three people involved in a recently foiled plot organized by Iran to kill Donald Trump before the presidential election. They are an Iranian (Farhad Shakeri) and two Jewish residents of New York (Carlisle Rivera and Jonathan Loadholt), all three of whom hold U.S. citizenship. The latter two have already been arrested, while Shakeri is reportedly still at large in Tehran.
According to federal court documents, Shakeri had been called by authorities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to carry out murders against U.S. and Israeli citizens. In 2008 he was expelled from the United States and deported to Iran, after serving a short stint in prison where he is supposed to have met Rivera and Loadholt. Last Oct. 7 he had been recalled to deal only with Trump’s bodyguards and his assassination to avenge the death of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force leader killed in a U.S. raid on Baghdad in January 2020. Shakeri was to be given seven days to come up with a plan, otherwise the assassination would be moved on until after the Nov. 5 elections. But he was stopped before proceeding.
The other two defendants, Rivera and Loadholt, were in charge of surveillance of an Iranian-born U.S. activist living in Brooklyn, according to documents filed. They are in jail awaiting the start of their trial, but on Thursday they attended court for the first time.
