Testifying in his own defense on Wednesday, Asif Merchant told jurors that in 2024 he tried to enlist two hit men to kill a U.S. political target — possibly Donald Trump — and commit several other crimes on behalf of an Iranian intelligence operative.
It may sound more like an admission than a defense, as Merchant essentially confirmed the claims in the indictment charging him with attempted terrorism and murder for hire. He’s accused, among other things, of giving hit men who turned out to be undercover FBI agents a $5,000 down payment to kill a high-up political figure.
But defense attorneys have a plan: convince the jury he never believed he’d get away with it.
Merchant, a 47-year-old Pakistani national, testified that he’d been recruited about three years ago by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, also known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or, as Merchant calls the paramilitary group, Sepah. He’d meet with his Iran-based handler, Mehrdad Yousef, whenever he was in Tehran visiting his wife and child. Merchant also has a wife and four children with whom he lives in Karachi, Pakistan.
It was Yousef who commanded him to find a killer for hire in spring 2024, Merchant testified. The target remained inexact.
“He did not tell me exactly who it is,” said Merchant, testifying via an Urdu interpreter. “He named three people to me: Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Nikki Haley.”
Yousef instructed Merchant to find someone in the U.S. who could help with four tasks: the murder of the unspecified politician at a rally; hiring protesters to create a diversion and help the killer escape from said rally; stealing documents or a USB drive from a home; and laundering money.
Merchant agreed to take up the mission. His first stop in the U.S. was to visit family in Texas. But when he flew into Houston, he had a problem: Immigration officials questioned him for around two hours, searched his luggage and his phone, and asked him about recent trips to Iran.
“I was a little suspicious,” Merchant testified. “Are they aware of why I had come?”
When he got to New York City around two weeks later, he noticed cars following him. So did the man driving, Naseem Ali, a fellow Pakistan native he’d met through a mutual friend some seven years earlier. Ali, the government’s first witness who testified under a pseudonym, reported Merchant to the FBI after Merchant began asking him to help with the IRGC mission. He began recording their conversations and gave agents access to Merchant’s hotel room in June 2024. There, Merchant, unknowingly on camera, sketched out an assassination plan.
“That’s the target,” Merchant says in a video shown in court as he places an orange vape standing upright on an unfolded napkin. “How does it die?”
As Merchant suggests various angles at which to shoot the target, Ali plays along, according to his testimony, because FBI agents told him to. Merchant says he was only playing along with the IRGC in turn. Yousef had made it clear he knew where Merchant and his family lived, and said he’d be watching, making it impossible for him to go to the police.
“I had no other options,” Merchant testified. “My family was threatened.”
Avraham Moskowitz, Merchant’s attorney, asked him if he believed he’d be able to carry out the plan.
“I had a feeling that there would come a point in time when I would be found out, and I would be arrested,” Merchant said. “At that time, I would tell about this entire plan to the government.”
Merchant even wanted to ask the government for a green card, he said, and discuss moving his family to the U.S. When he was arrested in mid-July 2024, Merchant said he intended to cooperate with the government and sat for three proffer interviews.
An agent who interviewed him, FBI Special Agent Jacqueline Smith, testified during the government’s weeklong case and said Merchant told her he’d gotten the $5,000 down payment from a cousin who, like Merchant himself, was affiliated with the IRGC, which is designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.
To hear Merchant tell it, he first tried to get the money from several other family members and friends, before ultimately getting it from his IRGC-tied cousin.
Merchant’s testimony rounded out trial presentations, paving the way for closing arguments at a trial that has coincided with the U.S. and Israel’s bombing of Iran. Adding to the somewhat surreal timing of events, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday drew a closer link between the war and Iran-led plots targeting Trump. He said the U.S. had killed the leader of an Iranian group that planned to assassinate him in 2024, and even pointed to Iran’s plotting to kill U.S. officials, especially Trump, as part of the reason the U.S. began striking the Middle Eastern country last weekend.
“Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth said.
Scuffle over defense, proffer statement
U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee allowed Merchant to testify as he did over the fervent objection of federal prosecutors, who characterized the defense as a duress defense and said it wasn’t permitted by case law.
During a heated exchange outside the presence of the jury, Moskowitz snapped at the government for trying to keep out what he — and, ultimately, Komitee — considered instead to be a defense as to Merchant’s intent.
“He is under surveillance, and is aware of it, and continues anyway … He intended, or expected, to get arrested,” said Moskowitz, of the firm Moskowitz Colson Ginsberg Schulman. “He had to go through with this charade, so to speak, because he was concerned that if he didn’t his family at home would be harmed.”
Moskowitz also said Merchant had asked law enforcement to help get his family out of Iran after his arrest.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Winik insisted that the defense wasn’t valid. “It’s a made up argument that really is just trying to get sympathy for the defense,” she said.
Weighing the dispute, Komitee said the case had been “interesting for a lot of reasons.” The judge on Monday made a passing reference to the war raging in Iran as trial proceeds by noting we live in “interesting times.” But interesting too, he said Wednesday, was a core fact of the case: “We have a murder-for-hire contract with an unidentified target.”
Despite that prosecutors showed jurors anti-Trump Facebook posts purportedly shared by Merchant, including seemingly AI-generated images of Trump digging his own grave and of Trump’s severed head. They also elicited from witnesses, and said in openings, that Merchant had claimed he was going to help kill someone who was hurting the Muslim world.
By putting Merchant on the stand, defense attorneys opened the door for the government to introduce portions of Merchant’s proffer statements that the government says reveals his true intent. That could happen when trial resumes Thursday, as Merchant is still being cross-examined by the government.