The U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges Friday against three people involved in Iran’s plot to kill Donald Trump and other American citizens, prompting CNN’s Dana Bash to call the details, “Very scary stuff!”
Senior justice correspondent Evan Perez said two of those suspects appeared in New York federal court and are being detained until trial. The third suspect, 51-year old Farhad Shakeri, remains at-large in Iran.
According to the unsealed indictment, Shakeri tasked a couple of people that he had known in the United States with figuring out a way to kill Trump, but the president-elect wasn’t the only one targeted for assassination.
“According to prosecutors, there are a number of other possible victims that the Iranians were looking for,” Perez said. “One of them is an Iranian citizen who was a critic of the Iranian regime.”
Also on the kill list, according to Perez, “two Jewish-American citizens in New York,” and “Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka.”
Perez continued:
Now this is obviously part of a broader story here, that, according to the FBI, the Iranian regime has been trying to figure out ways to not only target Donald Trump, but also people in this current administration that they believe and perceived to be enemies, as well as carrying out other assassinations in the United States. You remember back, in the summer, there was another plot that was uncovered against a Pakistani citizen who was here to try to find people, again, to carry out assassinations and to do other kinds of surveillance on behalf of the Iranian regime.
In a statement, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the charges stem from Iran’s “brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran.”
Watch the clip above via CNN.
