Twenty-four years ago, on September 12, 2002, Benjamin Netanyahu came to Congress to pressure American politicians to authorize the use of military force against Israel’s enemies, namely Iraq and Iran, governments which had been marked for regime change since the neocons’ Clean Break Report authored in the 1990s. Though Israel quickly achieved its first goal of having the U.S military topple Saddam Hussein, it was not until last weekend that an American president made the military commitment toward fulfilling Israel’s long-held war aims against Iran, with President Donald Trump bombing Iran and announcing via a video posted on Truth Social his intent to topple its government.
“The lives of American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” warned Trump as the Iranian military responded to joint U.S.–Israeli bombing with airstrikes of its own against multiple American bases in the region. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has never seen a new war he did not instantly want to send other people’s children to go fight in (he does not have children of his own to send to war), echoed the president’s grim assessment, telling The Wall Street Journal, “If there are deaths or injuries in this operation, I can say without hesitation that they sacrificed for a noble cause…”
The administration has barely attempted to explain to the American people what that cause is, perhaps because they understand how transparent the true motivation for toppling the Iranian government is to most Americans, who can easily spot the Israeli fingerprints smeared all over this operation. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio effectively acknowledged as much on Monday when he said,
The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.
With open admissions from senior government officials that the United States is fighting—and Americans are dying and unprotected in the Gulf States—on behalf of Israel, and with the absence of a rational and clear casus belli to affirm to their audiences and voters, a chorus of Trump loyalists have emerged from Congress and corporate media to spread a series of highly propagandistic lies meant to boost morale and provide retroactive justification for an unpopular war that Congress never authorized.
One of the most influential of those lies is that the government of Iran attempted to assassinate Trump, an allegation that seems to be taken seriously and considered legitimate by senior administration officials including the president himself. On Monday, Trump told ABC “I got [Khameinei] before he got me. They tried twice … I got him first.” Two days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth affirmed that narrative, telling reporters at a press conference that “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.”
Yet reporting by journalist Ken Silva suggests there is scant credible evidence tying Tehran to an actual assassination plot. The case centers on Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national who was arrested in July 2024 and whom prosecutors accuse of attempting to hire hitmen on Iran’s behalf. But as Silva has documented, the operation was a tightly controlled FBI sting, executed in a manner that is highly dubious.
Department of Justice prosecutors allege that Merchant conceived of the plot himself and was acting at the direction of, or in coordination with, Iranian contacts. In the government’s account, Merchant initiated the plan, disclosed it to a friend, and then attempted to hire what he believed were real hitmen, who were in fact undercover FBI agents.
But pretrial proceedings revealed that Merchant had been under FBI surveillance before he even entered the United States, and that the “friend” he allegedly confided in was already a government informant. That would make the federal government not only the architect of the sting operation, but the sole witness to Merchant’s purported expression of criminal intent.
Merchant also allegedly struggled to assemble even a $5,000 down payment for the supposed hit, obtaining funds from an associate via the FBI informant and transferring the money to other undercover agents. The Deputy Attorney General reported that Merchant had no known associates in the United States, including no known Iranian co-conspirators domestically. Disturbingly, prosecutors have signaled their intent to invoke the state secrets privilege to block the public and defense teams from having access to evidence that is potentially exculpatory.
In other words, there is no evidence publicly available that Merchant formed any plot on his own or that the Iranian government ever sponsored it.
Among the few questioning the narrative that Iran tried to kill Trump is the MAGA luminary Tucker Carlson, who said that the intelligence that supposedly proves the Iranian plot existed “came from Israel.” To his point, it was revealed in a letter from a U.S. attorney assigned to the case that the FBI used Israeli spyware Cellebrite to access the alleged assassin’s phone. Certainly Netanyahu has boosted the narrative of an Iranian plot to kill the U.S. president. And as Carlson helpfully reminded his audience, “this country has certainly been manipulated a lot by Israeli intelligence.”
If the attempted assassination allegation truly is a predicate for war, it is one of the thinnest ones in U.S. history, built on a sting operation the government manufactured and on evidence prosecutors are actively shielding from scrutiny.
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