New York
Trial seeks to tie Revolutionary Guard to assassination plot
NEW YORK (AP) — While the U.S. fights a widening war in Iran, American prosecutors are airing claims that Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was entangled in a foiled 2024 assassination plot that eyed then-candidate Donald Trump as a possible target.
The alleged scheme is at the center of a criminal trial that started in a federal court in New York last week, days before the Mideast combat that now looms in the background.
“This trial is happening in interesting times,” Judge Eric Komitee told lawyers this week in the case of Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national accused of trying to hire hit men to kill a U.S. politician. Merchant didn’t name a target but searched online for Trump rally locations, according to prosecutors, who introduced evidence Tuesday that Merchant’s laptop contained photos of both Trump and then-President Joe Biden at a time when they were rivals for the presidency.
An FBI agent testified Tuesday that Merchant told her he had a Revolutionary Guard “handler” and believed the handler would help bankroll the plan. Merchant’s lawyer suggested the purported statements might not be accurate.
Merchant, 47, has pleaded not guilty to attempted terrorism and other charges. His attorneys say prosecutors are trying to wedge evidence into a narrative that doesn’t fit.
Merchant has children in Iran and has traveled there. His lawyers have portrayed his trips as religious pilgrimages and family time. But federal authorities have long suggested that he had ties to Iran’s theocratic government.
When Merchant was indicted in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case was “straight out of the Iranian regime’s playbook.” Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland portrayed it as an example of “Iran’s lethal plotting against Americans.”
In court Tuesday, an FBI agent opened a window — though a narrow, constrained one — on the government’s basis for pointing a finger at Tehran.
It stems from what Merchant allegedly told agents in a July 2024 interview. The session wasn’t recorded, and the agents’ report on it is sealed. Only a few questions about it were allowed in court.
According to agent Jacqueline Smith, Merchant said one of his cousins introduced him to a Revolutionary Guard handler at some point in Iran. Formally called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force has been prominent in Iran under the country’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S.-Israeli attack this weekend. The U.S. deems the Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Merchant said he expected his handler would reimburse $5,000 that Merchant had gotten from his cousin and had given to the supposed hit men, who actually were undercover FBI agents, Smith told jurors. She said Merchant also relayed some advice from the handler: “If he noticed he was being surveilled, he should act normal.”
Defense lawyer Avraham Moskowitz underscored that the interview wasn’t recorded, and he described the agents’ report as “someone’s impression of what was said.”
“I disagree with that characterization,” Smith said, but acknowledged the sealed document wasn’t a verbatim account.
The interview was what’s known as a proffer session, generally a time when defendants or suspects and their lawyers explore the possibility of cooperating with authorities. Moskowitz noted, while jurors weren’t in the room, that proffers can produce a mix of things “that may be true and other things that are said that may not be true.”
While getting only a glimpse of that interview, jurors have seen and heard recordings of Merchant interacting with undercover FBI agents and with an acquaintance who flagged him to the agency in the first place.
In one June 2024 recording that was played in court this week, Merchant told the undercover agents that he and associates in Pakistan were looking for people to steal documents, create protests at political events, “and the last thing is: Maybe you can, say, kill someone.”
“The third thing you wanted, like, that could be a big deal,” one of the agents observed. He dangled the possibility that “you want somebody’s wife killed?”
“No, no.... maybe it’s some political person, maybe some other person,” said Merchant, who later explained that he didn’t yet know exactly whom.
“Wow,” the agent said, adding: “That’s gonna cost.”
About a week later, Merchant was recorded meeting the agents at a Manhattan rooftop restaurant and then, in a nearby car, handing them $5,000 in rolled-up, rubber-banded $100 bills.
Merchant was arrested in Texas on July 12, 2024, as he was packing to fly back to Pakistan, authorities said in court documents.
A day after Merchant’s arrest, a Pennsylvania man made an attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
Arkansas
Man accused of killing daughter’s alleged abuser wins GOP sheriff’s nomination
An Arkansas man accused of killing his teenage daughter’s alleged abuser won the Republican nomination for local sheriff while waiting to stand trial for murder in his rural county, where he ran on a message of seeing the failures of law enforcement.
Aaron Spencer defeated Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley in Tuesday’s primary elections, according to unofficial results posted by the Arkansas secretary of state. He would not be able to serve if he is convicted of killing Michael Fosler, 67, who at the time was out on bond after being charged with numerous sexual offenses against Spencer’s then-13-year-old daughter.
Spencer’s attorneys do not deny that he shot and killed Fosler but maintain he acted within the law to protect his child from a predator.
Spencer won more than 53% of the vote with all precincts reporting, according to unofficial results. Staley, whose department arrested Spencer in 2024, conceded the loss.
“Congratulations to Mr. Spencer. Tonight the voters made their decision in the Republican Primary, and I respect the decision,” Staley said in a statement posted on Facebook.
Spencer’s campaign and attorneys did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages seeking comment.
He is now set to face Democrat Brian Mitchell Sr. in the heavily Republican county in November.
Spencer has pleaded not guilty and is out on bond while awaiting trial, which was originally scheduled to start in January. The trial was delayed after the presiding judge was removed from the case. A new date has not been set.
Court documents show that on the night of the October 2024 shooting, Spencer woke up to find his daughter missing from her bedroom and went searching for her in his truck. He found the girl in the passenger seat of a vehicle Fosler was driving. Spencer forced Fosler’s truck off the highway and, after an altercation, called 911 to report he had shot the man, records show.
Spencer pledged in a Facebook post last month that if elected he would establish a dedicated team to combat sex crimes against children.
California
Elon Musk takes stand in Twitter shareholder trial accusing him of deflating stock before purchase
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk took the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he’s accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter’s stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.
The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO reached a deal to buy Twitter and take it private in April 2022. On May 13, however, he declared his plan “temporarily on hold” and said he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.
Twitter’s stock tumbled as a result. A few days later, he tweeted that the deal “cannot go forward” and claimed that almost 20% of Twitter accounts were “fake,” according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Aaron P. Arnzen, began with questioning Musk about his tweets — or lack of tweets — about his decision to buy Twitter and his purchases of Twitter stock prior to deciding to take the company private.
Wearing a black suit and tie, Musk said he didn’t think it was “material” when, in early 2022, he began amassing Twitter stock and did not tweet about it or disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said he’s bought stock in “many companies” and did not post about it.
Once he did, Twitter’s stock jumped 27% in one day.
“That sounds high,” Musk said.
Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.
In the following weeks, Musk continued to try to delay or get out of the deal, which the lawsuit claims he did in the form of false, disparaging statements about Twitter’s business that drove the San Francisco company’s stock down sharply.
In July 2022, Musk doubled down on the bots issue and said he would abandon his offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. That’s even though the lawsuit notes that Musk waived due diligence for his “take it or leave it” offer to buy Twitter. That means he waived his right to look at the company’s nonpublic finances.
Musk was repeatedly asked Thursday if, before waiving due diligence, he asked about Twitter’s methodology for determining the number of fake or spam accounts, which the company disclosed to be about 5%. Musk said he did not, but that he assumed if Twitter put something in an SEC filing, “it would be accurate.”
“It subsequently turned out they misrepresented the number of bots,” he said. “They lied.”
The stock closed at $36.81 on July 8, when Musk tweeted he was abandoning the deal over the fake accounts issue. That’s 32% below Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share.
“To try to renegotiate the price or delay the merger, Musk made materially false and misleading statements and omissions, and engaged in a scheme to deceive the market, all in violation of the law,” the lawsuit says.
The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.
Twitter sued Musk to force him to complete the deal, and Musk countersued. On Oct. 4, Musk offered to go through with his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which Twitter accepted. The deal closed later that month. In the ensuing months, Musk slashed the company’s workforce, gutted its trust and safety team and rolled back content moderation policies. In July 2023, he renamed Twitter as X.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has been dragged into court to defend himself against allegations of duping investors with his social media posts. Three years ago, Musk spent about eight hours testifying in a San Francisco federal trial about his plans to buy Tesla — the electric automaker that he still runs as publicly traded company — for $420 per share in a proposed 2018 deal that never materialized. A nine-member jury absolved Musk of wrongdoing in that case.
Trial seeks to tie Revolutionary Guard to assassination plot
NEW YORK (AP) — While the U.S. fights a widening war in Iran, American prosecutors are airing claims that Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was entangled in a foiled 2024 assassination plot that eyed then-candidate Donald Trump as a possible target.
The alleged scheme is at the center of a criminal trial that started in a federal court in New York last week, days before the Mideast combat that now looms in the background.
“This trial is happening in interesting times,” Judge Eric Komitee told lawyers this week in the case of Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national accused of trying to hire hit men to kill a U.S. politician. Merchant didn’t name a target but searched online for Trump rally locations, according to prosecutors, who introduced evidence Tuesday that Merchant’s laptop contained photos of both Trump and then-President Joe Biden at a time when they were rivals for the presidency.
An FBI agent testified Tuesday that Merchant told her he had a Revolutionary Guard “handler” and believed the handler would help bankroll the plan. Merchant’s lawyer suggested the purported statements might not be accurate.
Merchant, 47, has pleaded not guilty to attempted terrorism and other charges. His attorneys say prosecutors are trying to wedge evidence into a narrative that doesn’t fit.
Merchant has children in Iran and has traveled there. His lawyers have portrayed his trips as religious pilgrimages and family time. But federal authorities have long suggested that he had ties to Iran’s theocratic government.
When Merchant was indicted in 2024, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the case was “straight out of the Iranian regime’s playbook.” Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland portrayed it as an example of “Iran’s lethal plotting against Americans.”
In court Tuesday, an FBI agent opened a window — though a narrow, constrained one — on the government’s basis for pointing a finger at Tehran.
It stems from what Merchant allegedly told agents in a July 2024 interview. The session wasn’t recorded, and the agents’ report on it is sealed. Only a few questions about it were allowed in court.
According to agent Jacqueline Smith, Merchant said one of his cousins introduced him to a Revolutionary Guard handler at some point in Iran. Formally called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the force has been prominent in Iran under the country’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the U.S.-Israeli attack this weekend. The U.S. deems the Revolutionary Guard a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Merchant said he expected his handler would reimburse $5,000 that Merchant had gotten from his cousin and had given to the supposed hit men, who actually were undercover FBI agents, Smith told jurors. She said Merchant also relayed some advice from the handler: “If he noticed he was being surveilled, he should act normal.”
Defense lawyer Avraham Moskowitz underscored that the interview wasn’t recorded, and he described the agents’ report as “someone’s impression of what was said.”
“I disagree with that characterization,” Smith said, but acknowledged the sealed document wasn’t a verbatim account.
The interview was what’s known as a proffer session, generally a time when defendants or suspects and their lawyers explore the possibility of cooperating with authorities. Moskowitz noted, while jurors weren’t in the room, that proffers can produce a mix of things “that may be true and other things that are said that may not be true.”
While getting only a glimpse of that interview, jurors have seen and heard recordings of Merchant interacting with undercover FBI agents and with an acquaintance who flagged him to the agency in the first place.
In one June 2024 recording that was played in court this week, Merchant told the undercover agents that he and associates in Pakistan were looking for people to steal documents, create protests at political events, “and the last thing is: Maybe you can, say, kill someone.”
“The third thing you wanted, like, that could be a big deal,” one of the agents observed. He dangled the possibility that “you want somebody’s wife killed?”
“No, no.... maybe it’s some political person, maybe some other person,” said Merchant, who later explained that he didn’t yet know exactly whom.
“Wow,” the agent said, adding: “That’s gonna cost.”
About a week later, Merchant was recorded meeting the agents at a Manhattan rooftop restaurant and then, in a nearby car, handing them $5,000 in rolled-up, rubber-banded $100 bills.
Merchant was arrested in Texas on July 12, 2024, as he was packing to fly back to Pakistan, authorities said in court documents.
A day after Merchant’s arrest, a Pennsylvania man made an attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
Arkansas
Man accused of killing daughter’s alleged abuser wins GOP sheriff’s nomination
An Arkansas man accused of killing his teenage daughter’s alleged abuser won the Republican nomination for local sheriff while waiting to stand trial for murder in his rural county, where he ran on a message of seeing the failures of law enforcement.
Aaron Spencer defeated Lonoke County Sheriff John Staley in Tuesday’s primary elections, according to unofficial results posted by the Arkansas secretary of state. He would not be able to serve if he is convicted of killing Michael Fosler, 67, who at the time was out on bond after being charged with numerous sexual offenses against Spencer’s then-13-year-old daughter.
Spencer’s attorneys do not deny that he shot and killed Fosler but maintain he acted within the law to protect his child from a predator.
Spencer won more than 53% of the vote with all precincts reporting, according to unofficial results. Staley, whose department arrested Spencer in 2024, conceded the loss.
“Congratulations to Mr. Spencer. Tonight the voters made their decision in the Republican Primary, and I respect the decision,” Staley said in a statement posted on Facebook.
Spencer’s campaign and attorneys did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages seeking comment.
He is now set to face Democrat Brian Mitchell Sr. in the heavily Republican county in November.
Spencer has pleaded not guilty and is out on bond while awaiting trial, which was originally scheduled to start in January. The trial was delayed after the presiding judge was removed from the case. A new date has not been set.
Court documents show that on the night of the October 2024 shooting, Spencer woke up to find his daughter missing from her bedroom and went searching for her in his truck. He found the girl in the passenger seat of a vehicle Fosler was driving. Spencer forced Fosler’s truck off the highway and, after an altercation, called 911 to report he had shot the man, records show.
Spencer pledged in a Facebook post last month that if elected he would establish a dedicated team to combat sex crimes against children.
California
Elon Musk takes stand in Twitter shareholder trial accusing him of deflating stock before purchase
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk took the stand in a shareholder trial on Wednesday in San Francisco, where he’s accused of making false and misleading statements that drove down Twitter’s stock price before he bought the social media platform for $44 billion in 2022.
The lawsuit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of Twitter shareholders who sold the stock between May 13 and Oct. 4, 2022, a few weeks before Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized. It claims Musk violated federal securities laws by making false, public statements that “were carefully calculated to drive down the price of Twitter stock.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO reached a deal to buy Twitter and take it private in April 2022. On May 13, however, he declared his plan “temporarily on hold” and said he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.
Twitter’s stock tumbled as a result. A few days later, he tweeted that the deal “cannot go forward” and claimed that almost 20% of Twitter accounts were “fake,” according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiff’s lawyer, Aaron P. Arnzen, began with questioning Musk about his tweets — or lack of tweets — about his decision to buy Twitter and his purchases of Twitter stock prior to deciding to take the company private.
Wearing a black suit and tie, Musk said he didn’t think it was “material” when, in early 2022, he began amassing Twitter stock and did not tweet about it or disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said he’s bought stock in “many companies” and did not post about it.
Once he did, Twitter’s stock jumped 27% in one day.
“That sounds high,” Musk said.
Musk’s May 13 tweet — “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” — was “false because the buyout was not, in fact, ‘temporarily on hold,’” the lawsuit says. That’s because Twitter did not agree to put the deal on hold, and there was nothing in the merger agreement the two parties signed that allowed Musk to put it on hold, according to the lawsuit.
In the following weeks, Musk continued to try to delay or get out of the deal, which the lawsuit claims he did in the form of false, disparaging statements about Twitter’s business that drove the San Francisco company’s stock down sharply.
In July 2022, Musk doubled down on the bots issue and said he would abandon his offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. That’s even though the lawsuit notes that Musk waived due diligence for his “take it or leave it” offer to buy Twitter. That means he waived his right to look at the company’s nonpublic finances.
Musk was repeatedly asked Thursday if, before waiving due diligence, he asked about Twitter’s methodology for determining the number of fake or spam accounts, which the company disclosed to be about 5%. Musk said he did not, but that he assumed if Twitter put something in an SEC filing, “it would be accurate.”
“It subsequently turned out they misrepresented the number of bots,” he said. “They lied.”
The stock closed at $36.81 on July 8, when Musk tweeted he was abandoning the deal over the fake accounts issue. That’s 32% below Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share.
“To try to renegotiate the price or delay the merger, Musk made materially false and misleading statements and omissions, and engaged in a scheme to deceive the market, all in violation of the law,” the lawsuit says.
The problem of bots and fake accounts on Twitter wasn’t new. The company had paid $809.5 million in 2021 to settle claims it was overstating its growth rate and monthly user figures. Twitter also disclosed its bot estimates to the Securities and Exchange Commission for years, while also cautioning that its estimate might be too low.
Twitter sued Musk to force him to complete the deal, and Musk countersued. On Oct. 4, Musk offered to go through with his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which Twitter accepted. The deal closed later that month. In the ensuing months, Musk slashed the company’s workforce, gutted its trust and safety team and rolled back content moderation policies. In July 2023, he renamed Twitter as X.
This isn’t the first time that Musk has been dragged into court to defend himself against allegations of duping investors with his social media posts. Three years ago, Musk spent about eight hours testifying in a San Francisco federal trial about his plans to buy Tesla — the electric automaker that he still runs as publicly traded company — for $420 per share in a proposed 2018 deal that never materialized. A nine-member jury absolved Musk of wrongdoing in that case.
