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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 wavered.
Federal prosecutors have flatly rejected Merchant’s account, telling the judge in a filing on Wednesday there was no evidence supporting a genuine duress defense. They noted Merchant acknowledged knowing he was working with a designated terrorist organization and was recorded mapping out the plot on a napkin in a Queens hotel room, apparently unaware cameras were rolling. The prosecution’s case was built substantially on intelligence from Nadeem Ali, an acquaintance Merchant trusted who had been secretly working as an FBI informant all along.
Merchant was arrested on 12 July 2024 in Texas as he prepared to fly back to Pakistan.
The trial opened last week, just before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran that killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and reportedly more than 1,000 others, according to human rights monitors. On Wednesday, the Pentagon secretary, Pete Hegseth, said a US strike had also killed the Iranian official the Trump administration says ran the 2024 assassination plot against the president. It remains unclear whether that person was connected to the alleged handlers Merchant had allegedly been speaking to.
Trump alluded to an alleged plot against him when commenting on Khamenei’s death, telling ABC News: “I got him before he got me.”
Iran has denied targeting Trump or other American officials.
