(Ken Silva, Headline USA) When the Justice Department announced that it busted an Iranian assassination plot against President Donald Trump last year, prosecutors said an unnamed person reported the plot to law enforcement and then agreed to become an FBI informant to help arrest an alleged Iran-backed operative, Asif Merchant. The informant did so by introducing Merchant to two undercover FBI agents posing as hitmen.
Merchant was arrested on July 12, 2024—the day before Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.
However, defense lawyers have revealed that the DOJ’s story is bogus. In fact, Merchant was under investigation before he even entered the country in April 2024.
“Discovery has revealed that Asif was under investigation before he arrived in the United States, and he was under surveillance from the moment he arrived in this country. In addition, Asif was the subject of electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),” said Merchant’s lawyers in a letter last Wednesday to U.S. Judge Eric R. Komitee.
Major update in the so-called Iran plot against Trump: New filings show the defendant was under investigation before he even entered the US.
This is significant because the DOJ has been saying that he pitched the plot to someone who reported him to the FBI and became an informant https://t.co/8AwsO190aV pic.twitter.com/eRda9ZnQLE— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) December 8, 2025
Merchant’s lawyers further complained that the DOJ hasn’t provided them with all the surveillance recordings of their client. Moreover, the FBI has heavily redacted interview reports with potentially exculpatory information, they said.
“All of the reports appear to memorialize interviews in connection with the government’s investigation into Asif’s activities prior to his arrest. The basis for the redactions is neither apparent from the context of the document, nor do they appear to apply a consistent standard for withholding information. For example, a report memorializing an FBI interview with Asif’s sister is redacted despite the fact that the interview appears to concern Asif,” the lawyers said.
“Similarly, in some reports the identity of an interviewee will be unredacted, but the name of the person that interviewee learned the information from is redacted.”
Merchant’s lawyers asked Judge Komittee to order the DOJ to provide them with all the discovery for the case. On Friday, the judge ordered the DOJ to respond to the letter by the end of this week.
The letter is the latest indication that the Merchant case was a highly controlled sting operation—or worse, a manufactured plot similar to the 2020 Whitmer kidnap case—and not the organic Iranian assassination attempt that the government has portrayed it to be.
According to whistleblower disclosures reported by investigative journalist John Solomon last year, Merchant was let into the country in April 2024 through a program called “Significant Public Benefit Parole,” which the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ website explains is for “law enforcement and national security reasons or foreign or domestic policy considerations.”
Merchant was admitted into the country despite being flagged at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston after showing up on a DHS terrorist watchlist. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) was called to the scene to fingerprint Merchant and inspect his electronic devices—discovering in the process that he had been to Iran.
Whistleblowers reportedly compared the decision to parole Merchant to the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” scandal, which entailed federal agents purposely allowing illegal gun purchases under the guise of tracking organized crime.
“The parole in Merchant’s case, the officials said, 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,” Solomon wrote when he broke the story.
The U.S. government has imposed such strict lockdown conditions on Merchant despite Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters acknowledging in an internal memo that he had no known Iranian cohorts in the U.S. “Law enforcement has not identified any IRGC associates of Merchant operating in the United States who could continue to orchestrate violent acts,” states the Peters memo, which was submitted to the court by his lawyers.
Merchant faces trial in March.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
