A federal jury in Brooklyn needed just two hours to reach its verdict. Asif Merchant, also known as "Asif Raza Merchant," was convicted of murder for hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. The man Iran sent to kill a president is now headed toward a life sentence. And the man who sent him is dead.
Merchant was a trained operative of the Iranian government's global terrorist force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He admitted at trial that the IRGC sent him to the United States to arrange for political assassinations and steal documents, but law enforcement foiled the plot before any attack could be carried out.
The conviction landed on the same week the U.S. confirmed that the architect of the plot had been eliminated. The courtroom and the battlefield delivered their answers simultaneously. Iran's campaign to kill Donald Trump is now a case study in catastrophic miscalculation.
Just the News reports, Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the U.S. for his garment business. That was his cover. His actual work began in late 2022.
Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme. By March 2024, Merchant had traveled to Iran to meet his handler directly. By April, he was on American soil with a mission.
Merchant testified that in 2024, he was sent back to the United States with a new mission: to recruit "Mafia" members to steal documents, stage a protest, and arrange the murder of one of three specific U.S. government officials and politicians. He named them himself on the witness stand: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley.
In June 2024, at a motel in Queens, Merchant met with two men he believed were professional assassins, who were actually undercover FBI agents. In a chilling demonstration captured on hidden cameras, Merchant used a napkin and an orange vape to sketch out how the hitmen should shoot the target at a rally.
"Whichever items were popping up, I was sharing them."
That was Merchant's own description of his work for the IRGC. Not coercion. Participation. He was sharing what he had, collecting what he could, and moving toward a killing. Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing "some political person" and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.
At trial, Merchant tried to thread an impossible needle. He claimed reluctance. He said his handler never told him exactly who the targets were. He testified he planned to come clean to authorities before anyone was harmed. The jury wasn't buying it.
Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didn't proactively go to authorities. Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024.
He wasn't waiting to confess. He was heading for the exit.
During a search, investigators said they found a handwritten note that contained the codewords for the various aspects of the plot. That's not the evidence profile of a man preparing to cooperate. That's the evidence profile of an operative covering his tracks.
Merchant told the court he "was not wanting to do this so willingly." He also told the court he said yes when asked to work with the Iranian government, that he "was interested in intelligence work," and that he wanted money. He also wanted a green card. The jury weighed all of it and deliberated for two hours.
The leader of an Iranian unit behind an attempted plot to assassinate President Donald Trump has been killed, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said.
"The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh."
While Hegseth did not name the man, one Israeli reporter identified him as Rahman Mokadam, the head of the special operations division within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The kill was not the stated objective of the broader operation against Iran. The focus was missiles, launchers, nuclear infrastructure. But those who had targeted Americans were on the list.
"It wasn't the beginning of the effort — we were focused on missiles and launchers, and that's the focus — but ultimately, if we had the opportunity to get at those who were trying to get at Americans specifically, we would. And so, we eventually had the opportunity to do that from the air."
The opportunity arose. They took it.
This did not begin with Asif Merchant. U.S. prosecutors claimed that Iran's IRGC was involved with Merchant after the assassination of former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. Merchant was, according to the DOJ, targeting Trump in retaliation for that killing. Tehran decided that Soleimani's death required an answer in American blood.
That decision has now cost Iran its Supreme Leader, its IRGC unit commander, and a recruited operative facing life in federal prison.
Merchant was arrested a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump's life in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 2024, multiple vectors of threat against the same man were moving simultaneously, some stopped by law enforcement, some still under investigation.
Attorney General Pam Bondi kept it direct:
"This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement."
FBI Director Kash Patel was shorter:
"Asif Merchant showed up to the U.S. looking to assassinate President Trump and other government officials. This FBI didn't forget. Today: Justice."
Trump himself, when asked about the killing of the IRGC unit leader, was characteristically blunt. "I got him before he got me," he told ABC News. "They tried twice. Well, I got him first."
That isn't bluster. It's an accurate summary of events. Iran ran two years of active operations against an American president on American soil. They recruited a Pakistani national, wired him into IRGC tradecraft, sent him across the ocean with cash and a list of names, and pointed him at a sitting political figure. Every person in that chain has now faced consequences. The recruiter is convicted. The handler is dead. The regime that bankrolled the effort is in freefall.
Merchant faces up to life in prison. The IRGC unit that sent him no longer has a commander. And Trump, whom they tried twice to kill, is back in the Oval Office setting the terms of what comes next.
"There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!"
Iran placed a bet that America would absorb its provocations and negotiate anyway. It lost that bet completely.