A Pakistani man charged with plotting to kill US politicians claimed that Iranian spies recruited him to target Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden in bombshell testimony Wednesday.
Accused terrorist Asif Merchant, 47, coolly claimed on the stand that he was forced into the half-baked plot to save his family.
“I had no other options. My family was threatened,” Merchant told jurors in Brooklyn federal court, where he’s charged with bizarrely paying two undercover FBI agents posing as hitmen just $5,000 to carry out the murder scheme.
Merchant, a Pakistan native who said he was a former banker with a failed banana export business, testified that his Iranian spy handler ordered him in April 2024 to go to the US and “maybe to have somebody murdered” — before giving him three potential targets.
“He did not tell me exactly who it is, but he named three people to me: Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Nikki Haley,” the accused plotter, sporting a salt-and-pepper combover and wearing a gray sweater over a blue button-down shirt, matter-of-factly explained.
Trump and Biden were the leading candidates in the 2024 presidential election at the time, and Haley, the former South Carolina governor, had dropped out of the race a month earlier.
Merchant, who pleaded not guilty to terrorism and murder-for-hire charges after his August 2024 arrest, claimed that he’d volunteered to work with Iranian spies in late 2022 or early 2023, helping the regime launder money to evade US sanctions.
His handler, who he named as Mehrdad Yousef, ordered him to carry out the assassination plot as well as steal unidentified documents, he testified.
Merchant claimed that he only agreed to do so because Yousef, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had put “pressure” on his Iranian relatives.
Merchant, who has a separate wife and three kids in Pakistan, did not describe any specific threats to his Iran-based wife and daughter.
But he claimed Yousef had made an unannounced visit outside his home and had displayed a weapon during their meetings.
“My family was under threat, and I had to do this,” he told the jury.
FBI secret security cameras caught Merchant at a June 2024 meeting inside a cheap Queens motel describing plans to kill a GOP politician — who court papers said appeared to be Trump — later that year.
“This is the target. How will it die?” he said in the video played for the jury earlier in the trial.
Merchant claimed Wednesday that he knew he would be arrested ahead of the meeting, and before the murder plot could actually unfold.
“I didn’t think I would be able to be successful,” he told the jury. “I was not wanting to do this so willingly.”
He added that he was “aware,” when he handed the $5,000 to the purported hitman, that “nobody does anybody’s murder” for that measly sum.
“I had a feeling that there would come a point in time when I would be found out and arrested,” he testified, speaking through an Urdu translator.
Merchant claimed he was “mentally ready” to be nabbed and stressed that he wanted to tell US authorities about the plot.
“I was going to tell the government,” he told the court. “I wanted to apply for a green card.”
Merchant was set to be questioned by prosecutors on cross-examination Thursday. He faces life in prison, if convicted.
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