This harebrained assassination plot went up in smoke.
An alleged Iran-backed terrorist who bizarrely thought he could put a bargain-priced hit out on Donald Trump by paying two men just $5,000 upfront acted out the wacky plot by placing a vape on a napkin to denote his “target,” new video released Thursday reveals.
“This is the target. How will it die?” Asif Merchant said as he gestured to the creamsicle colored smoking device inside a hotel room filled with FBI secret cameras, the footage played for a Brooklyn jury shows.
Merchant, a 47-year-old native of Pakistan, sketched out his plan to whack the then-frontrunner for the GOP nomination during a recorded June 4, 2024 meeting with a recruit who’d been working with the feds.
“Look, to kill this one from here is very easy,” Merchant said in the video, pointing to the left side of the vape, which he placed on an unfolded napkin inside a room at the Floral Park Motor Lodge in Queens.
Iran has repeatedly targeted Trump in retaliation for the US drone strike that killed prominent Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020, during Trump’s first term, US officials say.
Merchant believed he’d get away with the hit and would then target more people who he said “are hurting Pakistan and the world, the Muslim world,” the video shows.
“This is not a one-time job. The work will continue,” he told his recruit-turned-snitch, who testified under the alias “Nadeem Ali.”
But the FBI smoked out the scheme and arrested Merchant as he tried to leave the country that July after paying two purported contract killers — who were actually undercover feds that Ali had connected him with — each a $5,000 “advance” toward the planned hit, court papers say.
Merchant wanted to stage a phony protest at the Trump rally — in a half-baked ruse he claimed would allow the killers to escape, recordings played at the trial show. He also spoke to Ali about separate plans to steal government documents from buildings, the footage reveals.
Merchant never named Trump himself, but court papers show that Trump was his intended target and that he’d searched for locations of Trump rallies online.
Ali, a self-described “deliveryman” who came to the US from Pakistan when he was 18 and was stationed in Afghanistan as a US Army linguist, first took the stand on Wednesday at Merchant’s Brooklyn federal court trial, where the accused plotter faces up to life in prison on murder-for-hire and terror charges.
The FBI snitch said he’d been introduced to Merchant by a friend in the Big Apple’s close-knit Pakistani community, and that Merchant had asked to work with him on a clothing business.
But Ali got spooked and contacted law enforcement after noticing unmarked cars — who he feared might be Taliban terrorists targeting him for his army work in the Middle East — tailing him during several of his meetings with Merchant, he said.
FBI agents revealed they’d been investigating Merchant, and asked if he’d be willing to record their conversations. Ali testified that he agreed to work on the sting and was later paid $20,000 for his efforts.
Merchant arrived in the U.S. from Pakistan in April 2024, court papers show. His defense lawyer said he’d obtained a temporary visa and called him “a visitor…. here by permission of the federal government.”
US officials have called Merchant an agent of the Iranian regime. He did not reveal to Ali who he was working for, but implied that his handler was politically connected in Iran and had helped his Iran-based wife with an immigration issue, according to a recording played at the trial on Thursday.
The accused terrorist has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers have tried to paint him as a family man by bringing up that he has two separate families, with wives and kids, in both Pakistan and Iran, an unusual arrangement they called “perfectly legal.”
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