JUSTICE DEPT. CHARGES IRANIAN IN PLOT TO KILL BOLTON
Plan was response to assassination of senior commander
The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Wednesday with planning to assassinate John Bolton, who served as the national security adviser to President Donald Trump, as payback for the killing of a senior Iranian official.
The charging document, filed in federal court, read like the synopsis of an international espionage novel — but the scheme, had it been carried out, would have resulted in the murder of a prominent American critic of the government in Tehran, and the plot’s disclosure has further jolted an already shaky relationship between the United States and Iran at a critical moment in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program.
The plan was foiled by a confidential federal informant who posed as a would-be assassin. But the court documents suggested a chilling level of sophistication in the planning, if not execution. At one point, an operative in Tehran provided details of Bolton’s movements that could not have been known through public sources.
The accused plotter, Shahram Poursafi, 45, is not in custody and remains at large, presumably in Iran. Pictures purporting to be Poursafi show a man with fashionable glasses, wearing Revolutionary Guard fatigues or clad in stylish
Western-style clothes.
“While much cannot be said publicly right now, one point is indisputable: Iran’s rulers are liars, terrorists and enemies of the United States,” Bolton said in a statement released by his office. “Their radical, antiAmerican objectives are unchanged; their commitments are worthless; and their global threat is growing.”
Justice Department officials have informed Mike Pompeo, who also took a hard line on Iran as Trump’s secretary of state, that he was the second target for assassination, according to a person close to Pompeo.
Nasser Kanaani, the spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, accused U.S. officials of making “baseless accusations” without “credible proof or documents” in comments posted to the foreign ministry’s website. He said Tehran was prepared to defend itself in international courts.
U.S. officials told a much different story. In October 2021, prosecutors said, Poursafi, a revolutionary guardsman who lives in Tehran, reached out to an unnamed resident of the United States online with a seemingly innocent request: Would the person be willing to track down Bolton and take a few pictures of him for a book he was writing?
It was a ruse, prosecutors said. Poursafi was working on behalf of his government to recruit a network to murder Bolton, likely in retaliation for the U.S. military’s killing in January 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, the top commander of the Revolutionary Guard, a branch of Iran’s military that is a power base for the country’s ruling military and political elites, officials said in the court filing.