NEW YORK — On July 12, 2024, FBI agents arrested a Pakistani businessman who had been trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to arrange the assassination of an American political leader at a campaign rally. The following day, a gunman opened fire on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his right ear and killing a spectator. When investigators later informed the Iranian operative, Asif Raza Merchant, about the attack, he told them it was “the same thing he was sent here to do,” according to a federal prosecution memorandum.
The Butler gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed by Secret Service counter-snipers. That account appears in a sentencing memorandum filed November 3 in the Eastern District of New York. Prosecutors ask Judge Eric R. Komitee to sentence Merchant on Tuesday to life in prison, followed by a consecutive ten years. The filing describes how the IRGC recruited and trained him, how he scouted Trump rallies and paid men he believed were contract killers, and how he used his own daughter to get messages to his handler in Iran.
“The defendant was instructed that hitmen he hired to commit the killings should be criminals or mafia members and that they should carry out the assassination at a political rally in America,” the sentencing memo says. “The defendant also was told that the hitmen should plan a protest at the political rally as a distraction and then shoot the official at the podium.”
Prosecutors do not allege any link between Merchant and the Butler gunman, and officials said after the shooting that the gunman appeared to have acted alone. Prosecutors cite the remark as proof that Trump, then a candidate and now President, was the target Merchant had in mind.
The sentencing comes eight months into open war between the United States and Iran.