The State Department has offered up to $20 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the Iranian operative who has been accused of plotting to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton.
Shahram Poursafi is a uniformed member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps whom the U.S. Justice Department has accused of plotting to hire assassins to carry out the murder of Bolton. The DOJ unsealed a criminal complaint against him on August 5, 2022.
The IRGC has repeatedly pursued to avenge the U.S. assassination of IRGC leader Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. Donald Trump was in the White House at the time, and Bolton was the president’s national security adviser. Several other members of the administration are believed to be potential targets of the IRGC as well.
Iran is still seeking to exact its revenge, including by targeting the former president himself. U.S. intelligence officials briefed Trump this week on the plots against him.
“Big threats on my life by Iran,” Trump said on Truth Social earlier this week. “The entire U.S. Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before. Nice to see Republicans and Democrats get together on something. An attack on a former President is a Death Wish for the attacker!”
During a campaign rally, the former president seeking a second term warned any adversary threatening presidential candidates that carrying out such an attack would lead the United States to “blow it to smithereens.”
“If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case, Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens,” Trump said at a campaign event in North Carolina. “We are going to blow it to smithereens.”
The comments from Trump and the announcement of the reward for information leading to Poursafi’s arrest come the same week that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly.
The threats against Trump have come to the forefront as he has survived two assassination attempts in recent months, though neither of the attackers is believed to have foreign ties. In the first instance, Trump was shot at, a bullet grazed his ear, and the attacker, who was killed moments after opening fire, killed a bystander. More recently, a would-be assassin was discovered before being able to fire at the former president.
“Look, this is something we’ve been tracking very intensely for a long time — an ongoing threat by Iran against a number of senior officials, including former government officials like President Trump, and some people who are currently serving the administration,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday on NBC’s Today. “So it’s something we take very, very seriously. We’re looking at it very carefully. I don’t have any further information to share, but know that we’re watching this very carefully.”
Additionally, the DOJ arrested Asif Raza Merchant, a Pakistani man with ties to Iran, on July 12. He is accused of trying to arrange a murder-for-hire scheme targeting the former president.
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“For years, the Justice Department has been working aggressively to counter Iran’s brazen and unrelenting efforts to retaliate against American public officials for the killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time that the DOJ publicly revealed the Merchant arrest. “The Justice Department will spare no resource to disrupt and hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran’s lethal plotting against American citizens and will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to target American public officials and endanger America’s national security.”
Merchant is in federal custody.