New in SpyWeek: Plot to Murder Trump

Iran plot unmasked as president-elect eyes candidates for top security jobs. Also: China in our phones, espionage arrests and worries, domestic extremist terrorism

The Iran Plot on Trump: Lots of things caught our eye in the Justice Department’s just unsealed complaint on the Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trump.  First off was how the FBI managed to elicit a confession from Farhad Shakeri, the organizer of the action, while he was—and evidently remains—in Tehran. In a  revelation with faint echoes of Dog Day Afternoon,  Shakeri told FBI agents by phone that his “participating in the interviews was to attempt to obtain a sentence reduction for another individual…who is serving a sentence in U.S. prison,” according to the FBI’s affidavit, unsealed Friday. The individual was not identified, nor the resolution of that issue.

You know who. (CNN screen grab)

Another interesting thing alleged Friday was that “IRGC Official-1,”  the Tehran official accused of overseeing the plot,  told Shakeri to shelve another murder project in order to murder Trump before Nov. 5. “If SHAKERI was unable to put forth a plan within that time frame, IRGC Official-1 continued, the IRGC would pause its plan to kill [him] until after the U.S. Presidential elections, because IRGC Official-I assessed that [Trump] would lose the election and, afterward, it would be easier to assassinate [him].” Money “was not an issue,” the official told Shakeri. The Iranians have a special hate-on for Trump because he ordered the drone-assasination of IRGC Quds Force legend Gen. Qasem Soleimani, on Jan. 3, 2020. 

But Iran seems to have an equal passion to murder Masih Alinejad, a prominent Iranian-American journalist living in Brooklyn, according to the feds.