By José Niño
Asif Merchant is not the face of a sophisticated Iranian terror network. He is a 47-year-old Pakistani businessman who spent two decades in banking before branching into clothing sales, automobile dealerships, banana exports, and insulation imports.
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He maintained two families—one in Pakistan, one in Iran, where he met his second wife on a religious pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq—and traveled frequently between the two countries, as well as Syria and Iraq, according to Department of Justice (DOJ) court filings.
Yet this man became a key figure in the Donald Trump administration’s justification for launching a military campaign against Iran that has already killed thousands and reshaped the Middle East and perhaps the world.
In August 2024, the DOJ charged Merchant with murder-for-hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism. The details of the alleged plot read less like a sophisticated intelligence operation and more like a dark comedy directed by the FBI.
According to prosecutors and testimony confirmed at trial, Merchant sketched his assassination plan at a motor lodge in Queens, placing an orange vape pen on a napkin to represent his target. He made a “finger gun” gesture and asked his contact in Urdu, “This is the target. How will it die?”
That contact, a Pakistani-American named Nadeem Ali who had previously served as a U.S. military translator in Afghanistan, immediately reported Merchant to the FBI and became a confidential informant. The “hitmen” Merchant subsequently met were undercover FBI agents. That meeting took place at a strip club in Manhattan, where agents bought “exotic dances” for the visibly nervous Merchant as he cryptically outlined his three-part plan.
For this supposed assassination attempt of a sitting president, Merchant offered a down payment of $5,000 in cash, paid in a parked car in Manhattan. At trial, Merchant himself told jurors he was “absolutely not” a super-spy and that he had planned to get caught by law enforcement from the start—but prosecutors showed he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, the day before the unrelated assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa.
After a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, 2026, Trump told ABC News: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” thus directly linking Khamenei’s killing to the alleged Iranian assassination plots against him.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on March 4 that “the leader of the unit that attempted to assassinate Trump has been hunted down and killed” in U.S. airstrikes, declaring, “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.”
However, Hegseth did not name the individual, and Israeli journalist Amit Segal identified the man killed as Rahman Mokadam, head of the IRGC’s special operations division. As the New York Times reported and “Headline USA” website relayed, U.S. officials were split on whether Mokadam had even been killed. Officials said Hegseth had likely overstated his role, noting that “there was no intelligence placing him in a direct role of plotting to kill Mr. Trump,” and that the actual leader of Iran’s external assassinations unit, who was believed to have directed the Trump plots, was still alive.
The timing of Merchant’s trial drew notice among critics. It opened in late February 2026, days before Operation Epic Fury began. The conviction came on March 6, during the first week of active combat operations against Iran.
The case fits a pattern that civil liberties organizations have documented for decades. As Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded in its landmark 2014 report “Illusion of Justice,” all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots in the post-9/11 era, with four exceptions, “were actually FBI sting operations—plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants.”
According to multiple studies cited in that report, nearly 50% of federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases, and almost 30% were sting operations where the informant played an active role.
The report quotes former FBI agent Michael German—who left the bureau in 2004 as a whistleblower and later served as policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union:
When the FBI undercover agent or informant is the only purported link to a real terrorist group, supplies the motive, designs the plot and provides all the weapons, one has to question whether they are combatting terrorism or creating it.
The same HRW report found that many sting defendants were “severely mentally ill or were so inept or dysfunctional” that independent terrorism was essentially inconceivable. In some cases the FBI “may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action.”
In Merchant’s case, his first contact immediately became an FBI informant, the “hitmen” were undercover agents, and the FBI monitored the entire operation from nearly its inception. Military Times noted:
Federal prosecutors have charged multiple people in two separate cases of Iranian murder-for-hire plots during the 2024 presidential campaign, though officials have not presented evidence directly tying Tehran to those schemes.
Significant evidentiary questions also arose at trial. The $5,000 payment came from Merchant transferring money from a relative abroad—not through any demonstrable Iranian government channel. Iran has categorically denied orchestrating assassination plots against Trump, calling such accusations unsubstantiated.
Merchant’s defense was that he acted under duress, fearing for his Iranian family’s safety, and that he intended for the plot to fail. “I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” he testified through an Urdu interpreter — adding that he believed law enforcement would never take him seriously because “they think that I am some type of super-spy,” which he insisted he was “absolutely not.”
A Muslim businessman with a $5,000 budget and no actual hitmen, whose entire plot the FBI monitored from the start, became the justification for a war contradicting every principle President Trump once claimed to champion. Americans deserve better than fabricated pretexts for endless Middle East conflicts.
