Pakistani man on trial in Brooklyn for Trump assassination plot says he was recruited by Iran

Pakistani man on trial in Brooklyn for Trump assassination plot says he was recruited by Iran Asif Merchant testified that Revolutionary Guard coerced him into scheme by threatening his family in Tehran A Pakistani businessman accused of plotting to kill Donald Trump told a federal jury on Wednesday that he was coerced into the scheme by Iran ’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he said had threatened his family to secure his participation. Asif Merchant, 47, took the unusual step of testifying in his own defense at Brooklyn federal court, where he faces terrorism and murder-for-hire charges. Speaking through an Urdu translator, he told jurors he went along with the plot only out of fear for his wife and adopted daughter in Tehran. “I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” he said. Merchant testified that his Iranian handler, a Revolutionary Guard official named Mehrdad Yousef, had directed him to travel to the US in 2024 and recruit criminals to carry out a four-part operation: staging protests, stealing documents, laundering money and arranging a murder. In conversations in Tehran, Yousef supposedly didn’t give an order to kill one specific person, but did name three potential targets – Trump, then president Joe Biden and the former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. The supposed hitmen Merchant eventually paid $5,000 in rubber-banded cash were undercover FBI agents. A recording played in court captured him telling them he needed someone to “maybe, you can, say, kill someone” – a political figure whose identity, he said, he had not yet been given. Merchant told jurors he knew the game was up almost immediately after landing in the US. When immigration agents pulled him aside in Houston, searched his bags and combed through his devices, he said he knew he was already being watched. He pressed on anyway, he claimed, because he believed Iranian intelligence was monitoring his every move and would harm his wife and adopted daughter in Tehran if he wavere...