(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Court records show that 1.6 million items of classified evidence were kept secret from the man accused of working for Iran in a plot to assassinate Donald Trump in 2024.
The classified info was collected in the case of Asif Merchant, who was found guilty last month of attempting to hire undercover FBI agents to kill U.S. officials, including possibly Trump. Merchant was arrested on July 12, 2024—the day before Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The presiding judge made the order to keep the classified evidence in January, but it wasn’t filed on the docket until Wednesday. The order was made pursuant to the Classified Information Procedures Act, which allows the U.S. government to keep state secrets just that: secret—even if it negatively impacts the rights of a defendant.
Evidence that the judge allowed to keep secret included activities of an FBI informant who drove Merchant around, spied on him, and connected him to the two undercover agents. The evidence also included “sensitive” investigative techniques, as well as info received from a foreign government—likely Israel, according to reporting from the New York Times and independent journalist Max Blumenthal.
The judge didn’t review all 1.6 million pieces of evidence. Instead, he reviewed “random samples” and a few “specific documents” before concluding that the entire trove should be kept secret on national security grounds.
In his conclusion, the judge said “there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged.”
🚨NEW: The judge's decision that allowed the FBI to withhold classified info in this case was recently docketed, showing there were 1.6 MILLION items of evidence kept secret.
The judge only reviewed 'random samples' of the evidence, which included the FBI informant's activities. https://t.co/3vxnVRGo4h pic.twitter.com/ZcoIwTULWz— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) April 5, 2026
“Thus, even if any of these materials were discoverable, because the government has properly invoked the state-secrets privilege and the materials are not helpful or material to the defense, they may be deleted from discovery,” the judge said.
The Merchant case isn’t the only Trump assassination case where classified evidence was sequestered.
Last August, Judge Aileen Cannon allowed the FBI to keep an untold amount of classified evidence secret from Ryan Routh, the man who was found guilty of attempting to kill Trump at his Palm Beach golf course in September 2024. Judge Cannon didn’t elaborate in her ruling, saying simply that disclosing classified information in Routh’s case “could cause serious damage or exceptionally grave damages to the national security of the United States.”
The DOJ has exercised CIPA in the past to keep damning government scandals from the public.
For instance, former Venezuelan Gen. Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones was charged in March 2020 with participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy with the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. According to the DOJ, Cordones conspired with Maduro, other top Venezuelan regime officials, and members of Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia to ship cocaine to the United States.
However, Cordones outed himself as a CIA asset who participated in the failed CIA-sponsored coup against Maduro in March 2018. Cordones attempted to prove this in court in 2022.
“Cordones’ activities were communicated at the highest levels of a number of U.S. government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Treasury Department, the National Security Council, DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], and DOJ,” the Venezuelan’s lawyers argued in a February 2022 motion.
“Such evidence casts doubt on the government’s theory of prosecution and, to the extent the government is able to prove such a conspiracy, would support a defense of withdrawal from any such conspiracy.”
However, the DOJ successfully invoked Section 4 of CIPA in response to Cordones’s motion. A judge ruled that the “disclosure of the classified materials … to the defense or the public could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security. Accordingly, it is ordered that the government motion is granted, and the classified materials … need not be disclosed to the defense.”
Cordones pled guilty in 2023 and was sentenced to 260 months in prison.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
