How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

By Max Blumenthal

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away.

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control.

At that point, Trump was still campaigning to be a “President of Peace. On the campaign stump, he warned that his opponent, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III guaranteed.” Trump vowed to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day, and distanced himself from pro-war Republicans who sought regime change in Iran.

Pro-war elements in Trump’s coterie exercised multiple points of leverage to reverse the president’s anti-interventionist instincts. Ultra-Zionist billionaires supplied vital and well-documented influence over Trump’s policies by keeping his campaign war chest flush. But Trump remained an erratic personality whose petty grievances kept his aides in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

It was only by exploiting Trump’s deepest psychological vulnerability – his fear of an assassin’s bullet – that Israel and its cutouts in his administration were able to secure their influence over the president, keeping him on the warpath against Iran.

The assassination escalation trap

On June 3, 2020, as the commander of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, deboarded an airplane at Baghdad International Airport, on his way to peace talks with Saudi officials, a US drone killed him with a Hellfire missile. The strike had been ordered by Trump following a sustained campaign of military escalation against Iranian allies orchestrated by his National Security Council Director John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As journalist Gareth Porter reported for The Grayzone, by the time Trump authorized Soleimani’s assassination, Netanyahu was planning unilateral strikes on Iran aimed at drawing the US into direct conflict. Trump issued orders to kill the general under sustained pressure by Pompeo and Bolton, two pro-Israel hardliners. Both former Trump officials have lobbied for the Israeli and Saudi-funded Mojahedin El-Khalk (MEK), a cult-like exiled militia that has carried out numerous assassinations of Iranian officials at the behest of Israel’s intelligence services.

By killing Soleimani, Trump set the US on a collision course for all-out war with Iran – just as Netanyahu had hoped. What’s more, the president invited the prospect of violent retaliation against himself and his national security advisors.

So long as Trump feared the specter of IRGC agents lurking behind every corner, it stood to reason that he was more likely to authorize a regime change war on Iran. And so the FBI went to work, concocting a series of plots that helped forge Trump’s belligerent attitude toward Tehran.

Brought to you by the FBI: Iran’s plot to kill John Bolton

The first major Iranian plot arrived in 2022, when the Department of Justice filed charges against an Iranian national, Shahram Poursafi, for supposedly hiring a hitman to kill Bolton. However, the hitman turned out to be an FBI informant, and the plot was largely contrived by the Bureau. Poursafi, for his part, could not be arrested because he lived in Iran.

As journalist Ken Silva reported, the FBI officer who oversaw the manufactured plot to kill Bolton, Steven D’Antuono, was the same official who ran the Detroit field office that relied on paid informants to concoct the 2020 plot by right-wing militia members to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In a 2025 federal appeal court ruling, the judge acknowledged that defendants in that case “are correct that the government encouraged them to settle on a plan” to kidnap Whitmer. The FBI’s D’Antuono also oversaw the probe into the suspicious planting of pipe bombs at Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington on January 6, 2021. In the course of his failed investigation, he misled Congress about having received “corrupted” evidence.

Though Bolton was never in danger from Iran, the FBI-contrived plot began to fuel paranoia among Trump administration veterans. Pompeo now believed that he too was being targeted by Iranian assassination teams. In his 2023 campaign memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” the former CIA director claimed Poursafi had also paid $1 million to a hitman to kill him.

However, Pompeo provided no additional details on the plot, which was never mentioned in DOJ documents charging Poursafi for attempting to kill Bolton. According to those affidavits, Poursafi sent just $100 to the FBI’s confidential human source before the DOJ concluded its investigation.

Asif Merchant, accused ringleader of an FBI-managed Iranian plot to assassinate Trump

Iran’s hapless hitman granted special visa, introduced to FBI informant

In April 2024, as Trump launched his comeback presidential campaign, an itinerant salesman named Asif Merchant arrived from Pakistan to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. He was quickly flagged as a “Qualified Person of Interest” who’d been placed on a Department of Homeland Security watchlist. Agents from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) team then discovered through a search of Merchant’s devices that he had visited Iran, where his wife and adopted son lived. Whether they’d received a tip from Israel, which furnishes reams of intelligence to the FBI on foreign Muslim visitors to the US, remains an open question.

According to JTTF documents obtained by pro-Trump reporter John Solomon, Merchant was “released without incident” and designated as “free to travel to desired destination.” In fact, the FBI had granted him a “Special Public Benefit Parole,” which, as Solomon explained, “would allow agents to try to flip Merchant as a cooperator or try to determine why he was coming to the United States and who he might be working with.”

The FBI whistleblower who provided Solomon with the documents on Merchant’s airport interview compared the “Special Public Benefit Parole” to the scandalous “Fast and Furious” program, in which President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice facilitated the delivery of automatic weapons from US gun dealers to Mexican cartels in order to supposedly surveil the gangs’ criminal activities.

Almost as soon as Merchant entered the US, the FBI introduced him to a confidential informant posing as a potential business partner and operating under the alias, Nadeem Ali. The informant had served as translator for the US military during its occupation of Afghanistan.

Though Merchant did not propose any crimes, the FBI wiretapped a meeting between him and the informant, Ali, in a hotel room on June 3, 2024. There, Merchant was taped making a supposed “finger gun” motion while mentioning an unspecified “opportunity.” This grainy minute-long hidden camera recording is presented as the linchpin of the DOJ’s indictment of Merchant.

According to the FBI, Merchant had outlined a highly complex plot which required the hiring of two hitmen, “twenty five people who could perform a protest after the distraction occurred, and a woman to do ‘reconnaissance.”

For the elaborate flash mob-style assassination extravaganza, Merchant was asked by the informant to fork over a mere $5000. The Pakistani visitor had no means of scrounging up the fee, however, raising further questions about the seriousness of the plot. “I did not think I was going to be successful,” Merchant would later state in court.

Virtually penniless, Merchant was forced to gather the cash from an anonymous “associate,” according to the DOJ indictment. Next, the FBI informant took him on a winding journey from Boston to New York City, where he allegedly handed the money to two other FBI informants posing as hit men. The DOJ claims Merchant made plans to fly to Pakistan on June 12, but was arrested in his residence that day.

Merchant interrogated about Butler, kept incommunicado

The following day, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks arrived at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania where former president Trump was scheduled to speak. He flew a drone in the air for 15 minutes, surveying the area as he finalized plans to assassinate the candidate. In an odd coincidence, the Secret Service’s anti-drone system was offline all morning and into the afternoon — until roughly 15 minutes after Crooks flew his drone. When Trump took the stage, Crooks climbed atop a slanted rooftop 130 yards away and fired eight shots at the president, missing his head by an inch, until a local police officer fired back. He was killed by a Secret Service sniper who had inexplicably hesitated to fire for a full 15 seconds.

Thirty hours later, FBI agents flew to Houston to interrogate Merchant in his jail cell about a possible Iranian connection to the assassination attempt in Butler. An FBI source told the Washington Post the Bureau “took the extraordinary step of interviewing him without his lawyer to determine whether he knew Crooks.”

The grilling continued even after Merchant was transferred to the maximum security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn – the same prison where Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of United Healthcare’s CEO, is currently being held. There, he was held under harsh conditions in solitary confinement, unable to interact with anyone but the guards who brought him food and his lawyers because, as then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco argued, he might use code words to initiate further assassination plots. “It appeared they thought I was some kind of super spy,” Merchant later reflected.

Not only was Merchant prevented from calling his family in Pakistan, he was blocked from reviewing recordings of conversations he held with undercover FBI informants, as the DOJ had marked them “Sensitive.” In March 2025, his lawyer protested that US Marshals repeatedly refused to allow him to meet with this counsel and review discovery at the courthouse. This, too, was justified on the basis of specious national security grounds.

However, as the journalist Ken Silva discovered, an internal memo by the Bureau Of Prisons Director Colette Peters confirmed that Merchant had no contact with any Iranian intelligence assets in the US. “Law enforcement has not identified any IRGC associates of Merchant operating in the United States who could continue to orchestrate violent acts,” Peters wrote.

Indeed, the only Iranian assassins with whom Merchant appeared to have interacted inside the US were undercover informants working for the FBI.

Merchant “had never been close to realizing” Trump assassination

During his trial this March 4, Merchant’s lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz, took the highly unusual step of allowing his client to take the stand. Merchant proceeded to present a version of events that contrasted sharply with the account he provided in his initial FBI proffer. For example, the defendant claimed he had been coerced into the plot by an IRGC agent, and went forward with a plan “to maybe have someone murdered” only because he feared for his wife and adopted son back in Iran.

After his arrest by the FBI, Merchant said he engaged in discussions with federal authorities about becoming an informant himself, but they ultimately broke down for unknown reasons.

“I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” he insisted in Urdu, adding, “I did not think I was going to be successful.”

In its coverage of the trial, the New York Times concluded Merchant “had never been close to realizing the vision of his Iranian handler.”

But back in 2024, as word spread of Merchant’s arrest, Israel-adjacent figures in Trump’s inner circle exploited the case to exacerbate the candidate’s anxiety about the Ayatollah’s wrath.

Israel-aligned forces blur Butler with Iran

Just three days after Trump’s campaign was nearly ended by a lone American assassin’s bullet in Butler, officials burrowed within the architecture of the national security state took measures to shift the focus to Iran.

“The Biden administration obtained intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald Trump, and the information led the Secret Service to ramp up security around the former president, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter,” reported NBC’s Ken Dilanian on July 16, 2024. (Dilanian had been fired from his previous gig at the LA Times after he was exposed for allowing the CIA to review his reports before publication).

The unnamed officials were clearly referring to the plot which the FBI manufactured for Merchant. The revelation not only seemed like a cynical attempt to obscure the reality of the near-assassination in Butler, which was conducted by a friendless American man who had never left the country. It also suggested the FBI had been so focused on concocting Iranian plots on American soil that it ignored the years-long trail of YouTube comments left by the would-be assassin bluntly declaring his intention to kill US politicians and police officers, and his hopes to instigate a civil war.

Though FBI leadership misled the public about the nature of the Butler plot, falsely claiming, for instance, that Crooks was not communicating with others online, they were never able to connect it to Iran. This clearly frustrated Rep. Mike Waltz, a close Trump ally seated on the House committee to investigate the Butler plot.

“These plots from Iran are ongoing. And when Biden says nothing, Harris says nothing, the DOJ tries to bury it, what message does Iran get? They get that we can keep trying to take Trump out and have no consequences,” Waltz fulminated on Fox News in August 2024.

Referencing the FBI-manufactured Merchant operation, Waltz thundered, “You have multiple assassination plots from the Iranians. This Pakistani national was recruiting females as spotters. He had recruited hit men and had made a down payment. He was even recruiting protesters as a distraction.”

By this point, Waltz was on his way to a short stint as Trump’s National Security Council Director, where he would help direct a failed war on Iran’s allies among the Ansurallah movement in Yemen. (Waltz was demoted to US ambassador to the UN after he accidentally included the Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in a private administration Signal chat where classified information about US attack plans on Yemen was shared).

Throughout his career, the Israel lobby and Netanyahu’s allies had quietly propelled his rise. As AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt remarked in private comments exclusively revealed by The Grayzone, Waltz was one of Israel’s “lifelines” inside the Trump administration, as he had been groomed by the Israel lobby since he first ran for Congress.

For Waltz and other Israel-aligned figures close to Trump, connecting the Butler incident to Iran appeared to offer a direct path to conflict with Iran. As an unnamed high-level US official told the Washington Post, if Tehran had been found responsible for Crooks’ attempt to kill Trump, “it would mean war.”

Certain foreign actors were also working to steer the US toward blaming Iran for Butler. In the late summer of 2024, the Justice Department received an urgent alert from abroad which connected Crooks directly to IRGC plots to kill Trump. According to the Washington Post, the tip arrived through a “confidential human source overseas” – almost certainly Israeli intelligence.

After a thorough investigation, DOJ officials decided the tip was not credible. “Nothing credibly connected him to Iranian plots,” one official told the Post.

But in the wake of the shooting in Butler, the constant chatter about looming Iranian threats had indelibly altered Trump’s outlook. Reporters who followed Trump on the campaign trail described a palpable sense of panic from the candidate and his inner circle about IRGC-directed hitmen stalking them at every stop.

“Ghost flights” for Trump triggered by imaginary Iran missile threats

With the Trump campaign already consumed with anxiety, the FBI delivered an alert that sent them spiraling into the depths of paranoia.

According to the Bureau, Iran had placed operatives inside the country with access to surface-to-air missiles. This dubious warning prompted Trump’s already militarized security team to take an extraordinary step. Fearing that Iran would down the famous “Trump Force One” airliner at any moment, Trump was placed on a “ghost flight” owned by his golf buddy, real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, while the rest of his campaign traveled on the main jet.

Joining Trump on the secret decoy plane was his campaign manager, Suzie Wiles, who would go on to become White House chief of staff, controlling access and the flow of information to the president. Unbeknownst to the public, Wiles had served as a paid advisor to Israel’s Netanyahu during his 2020 re-election campaign, consolidating her role as a key point of contact between Tel Aviv and Trump.

Journalist Ken Silva has revealed that the FBI alert which prompted Trump’s use of a “ghost plane” was based on a cynical deception. As Silva explains in his forthcoming book on the assassination plots surrounding Trump, federal investigators had discovered that Routh, the would-be assassin at Mar-a Lago, had attempted to purchase a rocket launcher, and may have been in contact with Iranian nationals during his time in Ukraine. The Bureau likely massaged that information into the bogus report it provided the Trump campaign, conjuring up imaginary Manpad-toting IRGC operatives to exacerbate the candidate’s fears.

Once he entered the Oval Office, Trump was encircled by Israel-aligned advisors and staunchly committed to the belief that Iran had attempted to eliminate him on the campaign trail. As commander-in-chief of the US military, he was hellbent on revenge.

Netanyahu nudges Trump with Butler plot

On June 15, 2025, days after launching an unprovoked war on Iran, Netanyahu took to Fox News to manipulate Trump into joining the assault. The Israeli leader appeared to know exactly which psychological vulnerabilities to exploit.

“These people who chant death to America, tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” Netanyahu declared, asserting without a shred of evidence that Iran was behind both the Butler assassination attempt and the one at Mar a-Lago.

“Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?” a visibly startled Fox News host Bret Baier asked.

“Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him,” stated Netanyahu with a cocksure gaze.

One week later, Trump authorized a series of US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israel’s military assault. Though Trump arranged a ceasefire soon after the attack, Israel’s influence over his administration – and over his psyche – guaranteed that another, much more violent round of conflict was just over the horizon.

In a graphic promoted by the White House’s official Twitter/X account on July 21, 2025, Trump implied that he had begun to turn the tables on his would-be Iranian assassins: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter,” he declared.

Israel claims to eliminate would-be Trump assassin in Iran

By March 2026, Trump was back to war with Iran. Within four days, the US-Israeli joint assault had predictably expanded into an open-ended regional war following the failure of an opening series of decapitation strikes to induce regime change.

On the afternoon of March 4, the glowering US “Secretary of War” and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth appeared before a lectern at the Pentagon and vowed to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long” over the people of Iran.

As his cartoonishly violent screed built to a crescendo, Hegseth issued a dramatic announcement: “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.”

Though Hegseth did not name the figure, an Israeli journalist who functions as one of Netanyahu’s favorite stenographers, Amit Segal, revealed that Israel had assassinated an IRGC official named Rahman Mokadam who was supposedly responsible for directing a plot to kill Trump. But once again, the details of the plot revealed layers of FBI chicanery, confidential informants masked as “co-conspirators,” and a compromised witness.

In fact, the supposed assassination plan which Mokadam was accused of directing did not initially focus on Trump. Instead, the target was said to be Masih Alinejad, an Iranian expat and regime change activist on the US government payroll. The only evidence that Trump was a possible target at all came from the claims of a convicted drug dealer and con man named Farhad Shakeri, who had also been a defendant. Shakeri spoke to the FBI by telephone from Iran, providing dubious information in exchange for a reduced prison sentence for an unnamed associate in the US.

It was during these remote interviews that Shakeri seemingly claimed he had an IRGC handler who had directed him to kill Trump. But according to the FBI’s criminal complaint against him, that handler’s name was “Majid Soleimani,” not Mokadam.

The FBI agent who interviewed Shakeri clearly recognized his penchant for fabulism, writing that “certain of Shakeri’s statements appear to be true and others appear to be false.” Shakeri had indeed lied throughout his interviews, yet the agent still concluded that “it appears” he was planning to kill Trump. He did not explain why he considered the confession credible, and the allegation about a plot to kill Trump was notably absent from the grand jury indictment filed a month later.

After killing Mokadam on March 4, the Israelis went straight to the president to boast of their supposed achievement – and reignite his anxiety about Iranian assassins.

As Amit Segal noted, “Trump was informed of this in the past few hours by Israel.” In doing so, the Israelis reinforced Trump’s sense that he had been hunted by Iran – and that by fighting their war, he was saving his own skin.

As it had in the past, the White House posted a video on its official Twitter/X account proclaiming Trump’s triumph over Iranian assassins: “I WAS THE HUNTED, AND NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”

Thomas Crooks may have narrowly missed Trump’s cranium in Butler, Pennsylvania, but Israel had found a way into the president’s head.