A Pakistani man accused of plotting to murder American politicians, including President Trump, testified on Wednesday that he had worked with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to devise his scheme, which included hiring hit men.
Asif Merchant, who is on trial on terrorism and murder-for-hire charges in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, said that he had been forced to go along with the plot to protect his family in Tehran from the Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Taking the unusual step of testifying in his own defense, Mr. Merchant said he had known the scheme, which involved hiring hit men, stealing documents and staging a protest, had little chance of succeeding. The hit men he ended up meeting were undercover F.B.I. agents.
“I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” Mr. Merchant, wearing a gray sweater over a light-blue shirt, said in clear, enunciated Urdu, with a translator by his side.
Mr. Merchant said he had never been ordered to kill a specific person. But over the course of many conversations in Tehran, Mr. Merchant said, his Iranian handler did name three people: Mr. Trump, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina.
The trial comes during a tense geopolitical moment, as the United States and Israel continue their bombardment of Iran that began early Saturday. The bombing campaign has killed Iran’s top leaders, including those the United States says have orchestrated assassinations and terror attacks.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said an American strike had killed the leader of the Iranian covert unit that schemed to assassinate Mr. Trump in 2024. The Trump administration has said that Iran’s efforts to kill Mr. Trump were one reason behind the bombing campaign.
Prosecutors have said that Mr. Merchant tried to orchestrate the murder plot under the direction of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, who have repeatedly sought to avenge Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the spymaster behind Iran’s security machinery, who was killed by an American drone on Jan. 3, 2020.
On Tuesday, prosecutors showed jurors images they said they had retrieved from Mr. Merchant’s Facebook account showing Mr. Trump’s decapitated head and Mr. Trump next to a pig.
Mr. Merchant’s testimony offered a lens into some of those efforts, though it also suggested that he had never been close to realizing the vision of his Iranian handler.
Mr. Merchant, 47, who fidgeted and clenched his fists as jurors walked in and out of the courtroom during breaks, described himself as a successful businessman. After a career as a banker, he tried his hand at exporting bananas, selling cars and importing glass fiber insulation before working for his uncle’s garment business.
He has five children with two wives, one in Pakistan and one in Iran. He met his second wife, an Iranian woman who was not named in court, while he was on a religious pilgrimage to Karbala, Iraq, one of the holiest cities for Shiite Muslims.
It was through a cousin named Husnain, he said, that he began working with Mehrdad Yousef, a Revolutionary Guards Corps official, toward the end of 2022.
“He asked me if I was interested in doing some work with the Iranian government, and I said yes,” Mr. Merchant said.
Initially, he said, the work centered around the transferring of money to Iran through an informal, illegal system called hawala, commonly used to skirt economic sanctions on the country.
But the subject matter of their meetings would grow more sinister.
After Mr. Merchant said he wanted to start his own garment company in the United States, Mr. Yousef suggested that he go to the United States to recruit people sympathetic to the cause of the Iranian state. He trained Mr. Merchant in counter-surveillance techniques, Mr. Merchant said, including ways to look for cameras in an airport.
In March 2024, Mr. Merchant traveled to Iran to meet Mr. Yousef, who told him to look for criminals, preferably Mafia members, and orchestrate a plot with four elements: arranging a protest, stealing documents, money laundering and “maybe, to have someone murdered,” Mr. Merchant said.
The Mafia, as Mr. Merchant understood it from living in Pakistan, referred to small-time criminals, not Italian organized crime.
Mr. Merchant said he had been worried about what would happen to his wife and adopted daughter in Iran, so he decided to undertake the operation.
In April 2024, he flew to the United States, arriving in Houston, where his uncle lived. He was questioned for several hours by immigration agents, who also searched his baggage and looked through his electronic devices. They asked him about his recent trip to Iran.
After that moment, Mr. Merchant said, he knew his plot had no chance of working. He said he assumed he was being surveilled and followed by the authorities, but he continued with his plan — and did not go to the U.S. authorities — out of fear that the Iranian security forces were watching his every move.
He said he went through the motions of an assassination plot, searching the internet for the locations of Trump rallies and sending Mr. Yousef a report. All along, he expected that he would eventually be arrested, he claimed.
“I did not think I was going to be successful,” he testified.
Mr. Merchant’s efforts were ultimately thwarted largely because of Nadeem Ali, a man who Mr. Merchant thought was a friend and associate but who was in fact an informant with the F.B.I.
Federal prosecutors have rejected Mr. Merchant’s explanation. Anticipating his defense, prosecutors wrote in a filing Wednesday night that there was no evidence that Mr. Merchant had plotted to kill American politicians “out of duress or fear for relatives.”
Nina Gupta, a prosecutor, asked Mr. Merchant on Wednesday whether he had known that he was working with a designated terrorist organization. (He said yes.) She also asked Mr. Merchant whether he had known he was being recorded when he mapped out his plot on a napkin in a hotel room in Queens. (He said he had not.)
He was arrested in Richmond, Texas, on July 12, 2024, and brought to New York.
There, in his telling, he was eager to cooperate. He said he wanted to apply for a green card and even planned to ask if his family in Iran could come to the United States. But their talks broke down, he said.
“It appeared they thought I was some kind of super spy,” he said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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