A Brooklyn jury convicted Pakistani business owner Asif Merchant on Friday on terrorism and murder-for-hire charges, following a weeklong trial in which Merchant himself testified that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard directed him to arrange the killings of American political figures during the 2024 presidential campaign. Merchant, 47, faces up to life in prison.
The conviction, reached after roughly two hours of deliberations, provides the most detailed courtroom account yet of alleged Iranian-orchestrated assassination plotting on U.S. soil, as the United States remains engaged in a broader conflict with Iran in the Middle East.
The plot and its disruption
Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative roughly three years ago. He said the contact gave him countersurveillance training and later assigned him the assassination scheme. According to Merchant, his handler never specified a target but raised names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador who was also running for the Republican presidential nomination at the time.
The nascent plot collapsed after Merchant used objects on a napkin to show an acquaintance what he intended — depicting a shooting at a rally — and asked the man to help him find hired killers. The acquaintance instead introduced him to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording the conversations, as the acquaintance had been doing as well.
Merchant paid the supposed hit men $5,000 in cash during a meeting in a parked car in Manhattan, telling them he needed services that could include killing “some political person,” according to prosecutors.
He was arrested on July 12, 2024, while packing for a flight to Pakistan — one day before an unrelated assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said at the time that the Butler gunman appeared to have acted alone but that they had been tracking what they described as a separate Iranian threat on Trump’s life; Iran called that claim “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
Merchant’s defense
Merchant took the stand during the trial, testifying in Urdu through a court interpreter. He said he went along with the scheme to protect family members living in Iran and believed he would be arrested and able to explain himself before anyone was harmed.
“I was going along with it,” he said.
Prosecutors countered that Merchant had taken concrete steps to advance the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the United States designates as a foreign terrorist organization, and that he had not gone to authorities on his own. They also noted that when Merchant later spoke with FBI agents to explore a cooperation agreement, he did not tell them he had acted out of fear for his family.
Merchant sought to explain the gap by telling jurors he thought the agents already believed he was “some type of super-spy,” which he said he was “absolutely not.”
The jury rejected his duress defense after deliberating for approximately two hours.
Government response
Attorney General Pam Bondi released a statement after the verdict. “This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,” she said.
Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, did not immediately reply to a request for comment, according to the Associated Press.
The Iranian government has denied trying to kill U.S. officials.
Background
Merchant, who is 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before moving into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, one in Pakistan and one in Iran, and traveled periodically to the United States for his garment business.
Sentencing has not yet been scheduled.