President Trump’s accused would-be death-plot mastermind, Asif Merchant, told jurors Wednesday he expected to be caught by the feds, but claimed if he hadn’t gone along with the chilling scheme, it would have put his family in Iran in danger.
In a surprise move, the accused terrorist took the stand in his own defense at Brooklyn Federal Court, saying he felt federal officials might be onto him the moment he landed in the U.S. to carry out his Iranian intelligence handler’s mission.
Nevertheless, he said, he kept working on the mission to find someone in the mafia who could stage a protest, steal documents and kill a political figure, “because I was supposed to do that work. I had no other option… My family was under threat and I had to do this.”
Merchant, 47, is on trial for murder-for-hire and terrorism offenses, accused of hiring two hit men — actually undercover FBI agents in disguise — to stage an deadly ambush at a political rally in 2024 at the behest of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Merchant’s turn on the witness stand was meant to reframe his actions leading up to his July 2024 arrest. Jurors have heard testimony from a confidential informant who set up Merchant with the undercover agents, as well as the agents themselves, and have seen video of Merchant and the confidential informant, Nadeem Ali, discussing the plot in a Queens hotel room.
Court evidence
Asif Merchant, accused of plotting the assassination of Donald Trump, is pictured in a video taken by a government informant. (Court evidence)
But on the stand, Merchant suggested he was drummed into the plot. Speaking through an Urdu interpreter, he told jurors he grew up and lived in Pakistan, spending much of his adult life in the banking industry before going into the garment business.
Merchant has two wives and families, one in Pakistan and the other in Iran. He met his Iranian wife in 2019 while on a pilgrimage in Iraq, and they wed in 2020, he said.
In 2022, he got recruited by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he referred to as Sepah, through his cousin. “He asked me if I was interested in doing some work for the Iranian government, and I said yes,” Merchant said.
He agreed to start a “hawala” business, serving as an illegal go-between for money transfers from people in Iran to people in other nations looking to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Merchant said It was through that work that he met his handler, Mehrdad Yousef, who encouraged Merchant to expand his business in the U.S. and get a green card, then gave him a mission — to find people in the U.S. willing to work for Iran. Merchant flew out to the U.S. in November 2023, but stated: “I didn’t actually do it.”
Yousef trained him on how to spot surveillance, and other spycraft and murder techniques, and ultimately gave him the assassination plot mission, naming three possible targets: Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, Merchant asserted.
So he returned to the U.S. again in April 2024.
“Why did you agree to go?” his lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz asked.
“Because my family was threatened due to Mehrdad… not directly, but to put pressure on me,” Merchant answered.
Yousef would often tell Merchant that he knew everything about his family, and Yousef unexpectedly showed up close to where his wife and her adult daughter lived in Tehran, Merchant said.
When he landed in Texas, where his family members live, Merchant was immediately flagged for a lengthy immigration interview, he said, adding the interview spooked him, and that he was followed wherever he went — including when he met the confidential informant after flying to LaGuardia Airport.
“I had a feeling that there would come a point in time that I would be found out and I would be arrested,” Merchant said. “At that point in time I would tell this entire plan to the government.”
His said his hope was U.S. officials would help him bring his family to America from Iran as part of a cooperation deal.
When Moskowitz asked Merchant why he didn’t go to law enforcement right away, he replied: “I myself could not have gone to the police, and the reason for that was because Mehrdad had said that he would be watching, not he himself, but his team.”
On cross-examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta got Merchant to admit he was actually trying to recruit the confidential informant into his scheme, and that he didn’t suspect the man was working with the FBI.
“And in the privacy of that (hotel) room, you plotted out what an assassination at a political rally might look like, right?” she asked. He responded: “I gave this presentation to Nadeem Ali.”
When she later asked if he met the two “hit men,” he replied: “Absolutely.”
“And when you met them, you believed they were real hit men?” she asked.
“Yes, I thought that it could be possible that they are,” Merchant replied. “I thought and I felt that it was actually possible that they were assassins.”
