POLITICS: As Operation Epic Fury rages, the Iranian regime’s longstanding plot to kill Trump was confirmed

The reality of the Iran war was brought home on Friday in a Brooklyn courtroom when a jury convicted Asif Merchant for plotting with the Iranian government to assassinate President Trump and other American politicians.

After a week-long trial that was barely noticed as “Operation Epic Fury” dominated headlines, the Pakistani garment trader, 47, was found guilty of terrorism and murder for hire.

Prosecutors said Merchant was “a trained operative of the Iranian government’s global terrorist force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” who received training in “tradecraft, including countersurveillance” and repeatedly traveled to Iran to meet with his “IRGC handler.”

He was sent to the US in April 2024 to “sow mayhem and murder,” and tried to recruit “Mafia” members to steal documents, stage a protest and arrange the murder of politicians including Trump, then-President Joe Biden, and presidential candidate Nikki Haley. But “law enforcement foiled the plot,” according to the Justice Department.

“This was not the first attempt by Iran to harm our citizens on US soil,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

“The other efforts also failed.”

Patel likely was referring to Iranian plots to assassinate former Trump officials like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and kidnap or harm Iranian-American dissidents, including journalist Masih Alinejad — the target of multiple foiled assassination and kidnapping attempts in New York City, where she lives under FBI protection.

But Merchant also claimed during his trial that the Iranians were also behind the still-mysterious assassination attempt on Trump by 20-year-old Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pa.

Merchant was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before Crooks opened fire at Trump’s rally, grazing Trump’s ear after he fortuitously turned his head, killing rallygoer Corey Comperatore and injuring two others.

He told jurors the IRGC told him to attend a Republican rally as part of his “mission,” and FBI agent Jacqueline Smith testified that he told her the Butler attack “was the same thing he was sent here to do.”
The FBI refused to comment directly on the Merchant trial  Saturday but pointed to a Justice Department press release and previous statements made by Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino that Crooks acted alone with no foreign connection to the case.

“We would have cracked the biggest investigation in human history — a foreign-directed plot,” Bongino told Fox News Digital last year. “Why would we withhold that? But we can only follow the facts, and they are just not there.”

But how a 20-year-old loner described by neighbors as a “normal dorky kid” who lived with his “normal, nice family” in a quiet Pittsburgh suburb would become so radicalized by the internet that he set out to assassinate Trump is a mystery that needs further exploration.

Trump told The Post in November he still wasn’t satisfied with what he had been told about Crooks’ motivation.

Last month, Vice President JD Vance told reporters that he remains mystified despite ongoing discussions with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

“I have not gotten a satisfactory answer to how Thomas Crooks went from radically pro-Trump to so radically anti-Trump,” he said. “Maybe we will never know the answer to that — sometimes motivations go unsolved.”

Patel and Bongino took umbrage at The Post’s claims last November that they were keeping the public in the dark, and insisted in subsequent interviews that Trump was “satisfied” with their findings.

“We fully briefed the president, as a victim of this case . . . and the president was satisfied with the results,” Patel told Fox Digital in November.

Yet the FBI has been reluctant to reveal all it knows about Crooks.

The fact that the bureau was forced last month to release a new tranche of documents related to Crooks in response to an FOIA lawsuit by the intrepid souls at Judicial Watch raises more questions about the secrecy of the investigation.

The heavily redacted documents further confirm our reporting last year about Crooks’ extensive digital footprint, with a couple of odd exceptions.

New is the fact that Crooks was hospitalized weeks or months before the Butler shooting.

Sometime between May and June 2024, Crooks “was dehydrated and needed to be taken to the hospital,” an unidentified acquaintance of Crooks and his family told the FBI.

“[Redacted] stated that she thought it was strange that [redacted] did not take him to the hospital themselves,” the documents note.

The FBI documents also only reference one of Crooks’ two accounts on the DeviantArt website that hosts fanart and is the largest online hub for “furries” — people who identify as anthropomorphized animal characters, often as a sexual fetish.

The account the FBI did not mention was one in which Crooks used the username “theepicmicrowave,” listed his pronouns as “they/them” and shared a cartoon image of a heavily muscled, Sylvester Stallone-type male body bearing a female face and a small man in his underwear crouching beside it.

The FBI did, however, reference  Crooks’ other account on the site, “epicmicrowave,” which lists “he/him” pronouns and has a violent cartoon image in which a figure is shot in the head against a backdrop of the trans flag colors, blue and pink.

After The Post reported on these accounts last year, the FBI said that DeviantArt’s default settings automatically set profile pronouns as “them/them” unless deliberately changed by the account user.

It may mean nothing; there is no other evidence that Crooks was interested in either trans or furry culture. Nevertheless, it is a curious omission by the FBI, especially in light of a recent prevalence of transgender mass shooters. Even in the Charlie Kirk assassination, alleged shooter Tyler Robinson, 22, was potentially motivated by his romantic relationship with a transgender “furry.”

Regardless, the president clearly is under threat, having survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail in 2024 and, last month, another apparent foiled plot when a young man attempted to sneak into Mar-a-Lago with a gun before being shot dead by the Secret Service.

In January, before Trump started bombing Tehran, Iran issued dire new threats against Trump, broadcasting a picture of the president with his face bloodied during the Butler rally assassination attempt and the words, “This time it will not miss the target.”

Trump brushed off the efforts to kill him by joking at a White House event recently: “I don’t know how long I’ll be around . . . Got a lot of people gunning for me, don’t I?”