A tyrannical foreign regime is doing everything in its power to place its favored candidate in the White House. But in 2024, this is no fantasy scenario about Russia making Donald Trump president. Instead, it’s a deadly serious effort by Iran to help Kamala Harris—and kill Trump.

On July 12, the day before the first attempt on Trump’s life, a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant was arrested in a murder-for-hire investigation as he prepared to flee the United States. Merchant, with family in Tehran as well as Karachi, is charged with attempting to solicit the assassination of multiple U.S. officials past and present.

Although prosecutors haven’t disclosed the names of his targets, a senior law-enforcement source confirmed to NBC News that Trump was on the hit list. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the plot was “orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian regime’s playbook.”

Also in the Iranian playbook is incitement to kill the former president while he golfs: Two years ago, Iran put out an animated video showing a remote-controlled weapon shooting Trump on a green in West Palm Beach. The video isn’t entirely realistic—it’s set at Mar-a-Lago, which doesn’t have a golf course, rather than the nearby Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach, which is where the second would-be Trump assassin, Ryan Routh, planned to kill the Republican last month.

Merchant came to the U.S. in April from Pakistan, after spending time in Iran—and landed on the FBI’s radar. He presented himself as an agent of foreign interests to the gunmen he hoped to hire.

But the associates he paid $5,000, as an advance on the contract, were undercover FBI. Merchant has no plausible connection to Thomas Crooks, the sniper who fired on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The blogger Marcy Wheeler, however, who is no fan of Trump, wonders if Merchant or middlemen like him were involved in Routh’s homicidal preparations. When he was arrested, Wheeler notes, “Routh had six cellphones in his truck, at least two of which used different carriers, and four more cell phones in the box he left at a neighbor’s.”

Merchant was savvy about cellphone security too, according to Justice Department filings, though he didn’t go to the lengths that Routh did. Routh’s attempts to involve himself in Ukraine’s defense against Russia might have informed his sense of operational security.

But in his self-published book Ukraine’s Unwinnable War, Routh also railed about Trump’s termination of Barack Obama’s Iran deal and openly invited Tehran to murder the former president: “You are free to assassinate Trump.”

The Trump campaign says U.S. intelligence had briefed the candidate on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” “Big threats on my life by Iran,” Trump himself posted on the social media site X. “Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again.”

Tehran wants more than just revenge on Trump for the drone strike that took out Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander who was Iran’s top exporter of state-sponsored terrorism. It wants a return to the complacent days of the last Democratic administration, when Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the “Iran deal”—eased sanctions and released billions of dollars in assets to the Islamic Republic.

Liberals accuse Trump of being cozy with dictators, but the dictators of Iran’s cruel and corrupt regime find comfort only with Trump’s Democratic opponents. The bounty they’ve put on Trump’s head is only the boldest of the Iranians’ attempts to dictate the outcome of our election.

They’ve also supplied Democrats, progressive activists and media with data stolen from the Republican campaign. Why doesn’t this threat to the integrity of our elections—and the lives of Americans—receive a fraction of the attention Russian propaganda gets?

Media prejudice against Trump isn’t the whole story: Iran’s murderous reach into America grasps at many other victims, including Salman Rushdie, who lost an eye and the use of one hand after a Hezbollah fan tried to slay him on stage at an event two years ago. Iran’s influence in the Middle East is wilting as Israel takes out its Hezbollah and other proxies.

Yet here in America, Tehran finds hope—if the right candidate wins in November. The terror state’s hope is that a Harris administration will be as pliable as Obama’s was and could pressure Israel to call off its war on Iran’s surrogates.

When Americans go to the polls, they must take this foreign meddling seriously—and give Iran no satisfaction.

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