Details of an unsealed Iranian assassination plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump raise questions about how the current administration will act, as President Joe Biden previously warned Iran that the United States would consider targeting the Republican nominee as a ” act of war”.

According to a Friday statement from the US Department of Justice, Farhad Shakeri, 51, was charged with planning an Iranian assassination plot against Trump ahead of the US presidential election. Shakeri, who is still at large and reportedly lives in Iran, was ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to carry out the task.

Two other men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, New York, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, were also charged. The men were recruited to kill an Iranian-American journalist who criticized the Iranian regime, prosecutors say.

Get the latest news for FREE

Subscribe to receive daily/weekly emails of the best articles (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

As the department noted, the Iranian government is targeting US citizens and allies to suppress criticism of the Iranian regime and seek revenge for the 2020 killing of the former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ quadruple force, Qasem Soleimani. The former IRGC-QF chief was killed in a US military strike in Baghdad.

“The indictments announced today reveal Iran’s ongoing and untoward attempts to target American citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents critical of the Tehran regime,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a designated foreign terrorist organization — conspired with criminals and assassins to target and take down Americans on U.S. soil, and it simply will not be tolerated.”

“Thanks to the hard work of the FBI, their deadly plans were foiled,” he continued. “We are committed to using all of the FBI’s resources to protect our citizens from Iran or any other adversary that targets Americans.”

That criminal complaint points out, the IRGC ordered Shakeri in September “to set aside his other efforts on behalf of the IRGC and focus on the surveillance and ultimately the assassination of former United States President Donald J. Trump.”

An IRGC member instructed the asset to formulate a plan to kill “Victim-4”, which refers to Trump. The IRGC member said that if Shakeri can’t come up with a plan by the deadline, then the IRGC will wait to kill him after the election, believing Trump will lose and be easier to kill.

In October, the Biden administration warned the Iranian government against further plans to target Trump, saying Washington would consider assassination attempts against the Republican nominee an “act of war.” A US official said Reuters at the time Biden had been briefed on Iran’s plots against Americans and directed his team to address the issue.

As for the recent report about Iran’s plot to kill Trump, it’s unclear how the Biden administration plans to respond. The White House did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.

Shakeri is an Afghan national who came to the U.S. as a child and was deported around 2008 after serving time in a New York state prison for a 1994 armed robbery conviction, according to the criminal complaint. The IRGC operative provides the Iranian military agency with contacts from a network of criminal associates Shakeri met during his time in prison, providing them with agents for surveillance or assassination of targets.

Rivera and Loadholt were part of Shakeri’s network of criminal associates, the complaint states. The journalist the two intended to kill, Masih Alinejad, has written extensively about the Iranian government’s human rights abuses.

“I came to America to exercise my first amendment freedom of speech – I don’t want to die,” Alinejad wrote on Friday. X post. “I want to fight against tyranny and I deserve to be safe. I thank law enforcement for protecting me, but I urge the US government to protect America’s national security.”

Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, claimed that the DOJ statement was part of a pro-Israeli plot to complicate US-Iranian relations, The Associated Press reported.

“Repeating the accusation in the current time frame is a disgusting plot by Zionist and anti-Iranian circles, which was aimed at complicating the US-Iran issues,” Baghaei said.

Last Monday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, a Republican, wrote a letter urging Biden to end “red tape” and support Israel amid growing threats from Iran.

“It is clear that Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah, are seeking to exploit the perceived divisions between the United States and Israel, exacerbated by recent actions by senior Biden-Harris administration officials,” McCaul said.

“It is imperative that you act now to deter our adversaries by showing that there is no light between the United States and Israel.”