WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with conspiring to assassinate John R. Bolton, who served as President Donald J. Trump’s national security adviser.
Prosecutors said the Iranian had offered $300,000 to hire someone to kill Mr. Bolton, a conservative foreign policy expert and Iran advocate, in Washington or Maryland.
Officials in the department’s homeland security division said the planned assassination of Mr. Bolton was likely in retaliation for the killing by the US military in January 2020 of Qassim Suleimani, a top commander in the Revolutionary Guards, a branch of Iran’s military that is a power base for elites military and political rulers of the country.
Shahram Poursafi, 45, is not in custody and remains abroad, department officials said. If caught and convicted, he would face up to 10 years in prison for using interstate commercial facilities in the plot and an additional 15 years for attempting to provide material support for a transnational murder plot.
Matthew G. Olsen, deputy attorney general for homeland security at the Department of Justice, said the case “was not the first time we have uncovered Iranian plots to retaliate against people on American soil, and we will work tirelessly to expose and interrupt”. each of these efforts.”
Mr. Bolton, who bitterly opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Tehran, clashed repeatedly with Trump during a stormy 17-month tenure as national security adviser. He later wrote a book detailing the former president’s impulsive and often haphazard foreign policy requests.
“While not much can 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 about the indictment. “Their radical and anti-American goals have not changed; their commitments have no value; and its global threat is growing.”