The most powerful country on earth is now treating a foreign death squad’s plot to kill a former president as a live, ongoing threat — not a movie script.
Story Snapshot
- Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been tied to multiple plots to assassinate Donald Trump and other U.S. figures.
- Federal prosecutors say one IRGC asset was ordered to plan Trump’s murder within seven days, and another has already been convicted for a related murder-for-hire scheme.
- Israel now reports fresh intelligence that Iran recently devised a new plan to kill Trump, raising the stakes again.
- The Pentagon says the leader of the unit behind an earlier plot has been hunted down and killed, but Iran still denies everything.
Iran’s long campaign and why Trump became a prime target
Iran’s ruling regime has spent four decades sending killers and spies across borders to silence enemies and strike at Western targets. The United States government has linked Iran to plots from Washington, D.C. to Europe, including a plan in 2011 to bomb a restaurant in the capital to murder the Saudi ambassador. That history matters, because it sets the stage for what came next. When the United States killed powerful Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Tehran publicly vowed revenge against top American leaders, including Donald Trump. From that moment on, Trump was not just a political figure to Iran’s rulers. He was a marked man.
Within American conservative values, this pattern looks less like random chaos and more like a hostile regime using terrorism as foreign policy. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Washington labels a terrorist organization, is not a loose band of rebels. It is a state-backed armed force with a budget, training, and a command chain. That makes its alleged plots against Trump something far more serious than crank threats on social media. The regime has both motive and track record. That is why U.S. officials treat these plots as real, not as political theater.
The 2024 murder-for-hire plot and the Shakeri network
The clearest hard evidence comes from court documents and sworn statements in a federal case out of New York. Prosecutors say Iranian asset Farhad Shakeri worked for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and was ordered to plan the assassination of President-elect Trump as part of a murder-for-hire scheme. The Justice Department says Shakeri admitted that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told him to come up with a plan to kill Trump within seven days. Two American associates, Carlisle Rivera and Jonathon Loadholt, were charged alongside him for helping recruit people into the network. Authorities tie the motive directly to payback for Soleimani’s death.
Shakeri’s own statements introduce a twist, and this is where skeptics latch on. In a complaint filed in federal court, he told Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents that he did not intend to actually carry out an assassination plan within that seven-day window, and that he thought Trump would lose the election. He claims he tried to delay the plot. Taken alone, that sounds like a softening factor. Taken with the rest of the record, it looks more like a man trying to limit his exposure after admitting the order existed. From a common sense, law-and-order view, the key fact is that a hostile foreign force told him to help kill an American president. His personal stalling strategy does not erase that.
A second operative, a jury verdict, and a dead plot leader
Shakeri is not the only case. In 2026, a federal jury convicted Asif Merchant, a trained Iranian intelligence agent, of murder for hire and terrorism charges in connection with a foiled plot inside the United States. Merchant testified that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent him here to recruit “Mafia” figures to carry out political assassinations and steal sensitive documents. Jurors heard the evidence and still convicted him, which gives the government’s story more weight than any cable news debate. That verdict signals that this is not just rumor; it is an operational campaign reaching U.S. soil.
The military side has also moved. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a public statement that U.S. forces tracked down and killed the Iranian leader of the unit behind a plot to assassinate Trump. Reporting describes that man as the mastermind of the earlier operation. His exact identity and rumored unit name, “Mukhtar,” appear mainly in foreign media and have not been fully confirmed by official U.S. releases, so those details sit on weaker ground compared with the court documents. What is solid is this: the Pentagon is willing to say, on camera, that it hunted and killed the head of an Iranian unit that tried to kill a former American president. That is not language used lightly.
The new Israeli intelligence and a fresh assassination plan
Now the story moves from past plots to a current warning. Israel has reportedly shared fresh intelligence with Washington that Iran recently devised a new plan to assassinate Trump. Multiple news outlets say this information came through official channels and that it outlines a specific threat, not just vague chatter. U.S. media describe it as a “heightened threat level” and link it directly to the long-running promise of revenge for Soleimani. At the same time, Iran’s foreign minister has gone on air to deny the accusations and call them false. That denial fits the regime’s usual playbook: reject, deflect, and paint the United States as the aggressor.
🚨 STATEMENT:
🇺🇸 Reporter: "Israel says Iran tried to assassinate Donald Trump."
🇮🇷 Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi: "They also said we were days away from a nuclear bomb. Then they started a war."
When asked how credible the assassination claim was, Araghchi replied:… pic.twitter.com/X9DzYCWHri
— MiddleEast Live (@MeLive007) July 10, 2026
For Americans who care about basic security and sovereignty, the stakes are simple. If a foreign regime uses its military and spy services to hunt a former U.S. president on American soil, that crosses every red line of national dignity and self-defense. The evidence from Shakeri and Merchant’s cases shows that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is willing to plant operatives, recruit locals, and move money to make it happen. The new Israeli intelligence suggests the campaign is not over. Even if some details remain murky, the broader pattern is clear. Iran’s rulers play a long game of revenge. The question for the United States is whether we still remember how to play defense.
Sources:
feedpress.me, nypost.com, usatoday.com, news.sky.com, youtube.com, homeland.house.gov, whsv.com, cbsnews.com, investigativeproject.org, justice.gov, thehill.com, facebook.com, ge.usembassy.gov, washingtonpost.com
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