A Pakistani businessman sat in a Brooklyn federal courtroom this week and confirmed, without apparent emotion, that he traveled to the United States to hire killers on behalf of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. The targets his handler named: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley.
Potential targets of the 2024 scheme included now-President Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden, and former presidential candidate and ex-U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the man told jurors at his attempted terrorism trial in New York. The supposed hit men he paid were undercover FBI agents. The whole operation collapsed before a single shot was fired.
An FBI special agent showed the courtroom in Brooklyn the images posted by Merchant, who is standing trial on charges of attempting to commit an act of terrorism and engaging in a murder-for-hire plot. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Merchant, 47, had a roughly 20-year banking career in Pakistan before pivoting into a range of businesses. He openly has two families, one in Pakistan and the other in Iran, where he said he was introduced around the end of 2022 to a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative.
According to CBS News, Merchant testified that his periodic visits to the U.S. for his garment business piqued the interest of his Revolutionary Guard contact, who trained him on countersurveillance techniques. What started as hawala discussions escalated quickly. The handler's instructions grew darker with each exchange.
Merchant said the handler told him to seek U.S. residents interested in working for Iran. Then came another assignment: look for a criminal to arrange protests, steal things, do some money laundering, "and maybe have somebody murdered."
He did not tell me exactly who it is, but he told me — he named three people: Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Nikki Haley.
That was Merchant's testimony, delivered through an Urdu interpreter, describing the moment his handler laid out the target list. He did not hesitate when the prosecutor confirmed the purpose of his trip.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta asked him directly:
You traveled to the United States for the purpose of hiring Mafia members to kill a politician, correct?
"That's right," Merchant replied, his demeanor as matter-of-fact as his testimony was unusual.
Merchant's courtroom strategy rests on compulsion. He says he was not a willing operative. He says his family was threatened. He says he had no real choice.
My family was under threat, and I had to do this. I was not wanting to do this so willingly.
Merchant said he "had no other option" than to play along because the handler had indicated that he knew who Merchant's Iranian relatives were and where they lived. He even reported back to his Revolutionary Guard contact, sending observations, fake ones, Merchant said, tucked into a book shipped to Iran through a series of intermediaries.
He also claims he expected to get caught. Merchant said he had anticipated getting arrested before anyone was killed, intended to cooperate with the U.S. government, and had hoped that would help him get a green card.
Prosecutors are not buying it. In a court filing this week, prosecutors noted that Merchant didn't seek out law enforcement to help with his purported predicament before he was arrested. Prosecutors also said that in his FBI interviews, Merchant "neglected to mention any facts that could have supported" an argument that he acted under duress.
U.S. authorities were on to him. The supposed hit men he paid were actually undercover FBI agents, and he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Merchant did sit for voluntary FBI interviews, but he ultimately ended up with a trial, not a cooperation deal.
A man who says he planned to cooperate with authorities, yet never mentioned duress during his interviews, researched rally locations, sketched a shooting plot, and handed $5,000 to supposed killers. The defense is asking jurors to hold two incompatible things at once.
Merchant told jurors that he didn't think agents would believe his story, because their questions suggested "they think that I'm some type of super-spy." His defense lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz, leaned into it.
"And are you a super-spy?" Moskowitz asked.
"No. Absolutely not," Merchant replied.
Perhaps not. But he was trained in countersurveillance by a designated foreign terrorist organization, routed intelligence reports through intermediaries to Tehran, and personally paid men he believed were contract killers. The jury will decide what that makes him.
The trial is unfolding amid the less than week-old Iran war, which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a strike that Trump summed up as "I got him before he got me." Jurors are instructed to ignore news pertaining to the case.
Good luck with that instruction. The courtroom drama in Brooklyn is inseparable from the wider picture: a regime that denied plotting to kill American officials while, according to federal prosecutors, tasking an operative to do exactly that. The U.S. deems the Revolutionary Guard a "foreign terrorist organization." Formally called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force has been prominent in Iran under Khamenei.
When Merchant was indicted in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case was "straight out of the Iranian regime's playbook." Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland portrayed it as an example of "Iran's lethal plotting against Americans."
The Iranian government has denied plotting to kill Trump or other U.S. officials. They denied it while their Revolutionary Guard, according to testimony now on the record in a federal court, named Trump, Biden, and Haley as assassination candidates to a recruited operative who then researched Trump rally locations and drew up a shooting plan.
Let that sink in.
The left spent years insisting that concerns about Iranian hostility toward American leadership were overstated, that diplomacy and sanctions relief were the path forward, and that talking to Tehran would reduce the threat. The Merchant trial is a direct rebuttal delivered under oath in a federal courtroom.
Iran's regime was not moderating. It was recruiting. It was training. It was naming targets. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the U.S. government formally designated a foreign terrorist organization, was running a murder-for-hire operation against sitting and former American officials while the diplomatic community debated the finer points of engagement.
Authorities said Asif Merchant plotted with Iran to kill U.S. politicians in 2024, illustrating Iran's threats against the United States that stretched back years before Trump launched strikes against the country beginning Saturday.
The Iran that supposedly just needed the right incentives to come to the table was simultaneously handing a Pakistani banker a target list with three names on it. The same regime now faces the military consequences of that posture. The trial in Brooklyn is the paper trail of what that regime actually was.
Merchant faces life in prison. The man who gave him his orders is dead.
