A member of the Iranian government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was charged with a murder-for-hire plot to assassinate former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
The Justice Department unsealed charges on Wednesday accusing Shahram Poursafi of attempting to murder Bolton, likely in retaliation for the United States’s successful strike killing Quds Force leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.
Poursafi was charged for the “use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire and with providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot.” The Justice Department said that he attempted to pay U.S.-based individuals $300,000 to carry out the murder in either Washington, D.C., or Maryland.
“The Justice Department has the solemn duty to defend our citizens from hostile governments who seek to hurt or kill them,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, the head of DOJ’s National Security Division, said Wednesday. “This is not the first time we have uncovered Iranian plots to exact revenge against individuals on U.S. soil and we will work tirelessly to expose and disrupt every one of these efforts.”
IRAN WANTS REVENGE OVER U.S. STRIKE AGAINST SOLEIMANI
Prosecutors said that Poursafi “remains at large abroad” but that, if convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison. Court records indicate the plot against Bolton was foiled with the help of a confidential human source.
The Washington Examiner first reported in March about an IRGC plot to assassinate Bolton.
Bolton, who worked as national security adviser for President Donald Trump in 2018 and 2019 and as United Nations ambassador under President George W. Bush, went on to write The Room Where It Happened, a book harshly critical of Trump.
Soleimani was the head of the IRGC and its specialized Quds Force, which the U.S. considers responsible for the deaths of over 600 U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War. The Pentagon said in early 2020, “General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”
The violent storming of the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in early January 2020 followed the Iraqi government’s condemnation of U.S. airstrikes targeting Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia in the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces guided by Soleimani and his adviser Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, who were subsequently both killed in a U.S. airstrike. The United States had blamed Kata’ib Hezbollah for attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq in December 2019 that resulted in the death of a U.S. contractor.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced in 2019 that the State Department was designating the IRGC a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Pompeo has also been a target of Iran, his successor Antony Blinken told Congress in April.
