The U.S. Justice Department on Friday filed criminal charges against an Iranian citizen allegedly assigned to build a team to attempt to assassinate then presidential candidate and now President-elect Donald Trump, as well as others.
Farhad Shakeri, 51, of Iran, remains at large and is believed to be in Tehran.
“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement. “The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump.”
Also charged were Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, New York; and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, New York. Rivera and Loadholt, who are in custody, are charged in connection to an attempt to murder a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin in New York, the Justice Department says.
“We have also charged and arrested two individuals who we allege were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime,” Garland said. “We will not stand for the Iranian regime’s attempts to endanger the American people and America’s national security.”
According to the criminal complaint, Shakeri was ordered by an unnamed member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to build a team to plot to kill Trump.
“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – a designated foreign terrorist organization – has been conspiring with criminals and hitmen to target and gun down Americans on U.S. soil and that simply won’t be tolerated.”
Dan McCaleb is the executive editor of The Center Square. He welcomes your comments. Contact Dan at [email protected].
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Andrew Bridgen says UK security agencies ignored detailed information about child trafficking, including names of people involved and where the children were being taken.
A former UK Member of Parliament says the top security agencies of Britain, including the police and MI5, are refusing to act on detailed information they’ve been given about child trafficking into the country.
Andrew Bridgen, who served as a popular Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire from 2010 until 2024, told Infowars founder Alex Jones in a Friday interview how he had raised concerns while in Parliament about “a number of individuals” who were evidently pedophiles.
“It was always passed to the police, to the National Crime Agency, and it involves senior politicians, very senior police officers, and nothing was ever done about it,” Bridgen told Jones.
He had explained that early in his career he had seen London police quash an investigation into child prostitution — and so this appeared to be a repeating pattern of cover-up of child sex crimes.
A former policeman named Jon Wedger had discovered that “children were being taken from children’s homes in the UK and prostituted on the weekend,” and were returning “under the influence of drugs and often with terrible venereal diseases, and the people at the homes were doing nothing about it.”
Upon further investigation, Wedger “wrote a report he sent to his superiors pointing out that child prostitution in London had not been investigated for decades.” However, instead of attempting to protect the children and stop the abuse, the police “threatened” Wedger, told him to retract the report, and fired him from the police force “on false pretenses,” according to Bridgen.
Later, Bridgen met a man who conducted a two-year investigation into sex abuse by pedophile and deceased Prime Minister Edward Heath. The police concluded that, were Heath alive, “he would have been arrested and charged with pedophilia.”
“If a former MP could have been a pedophile and it was covered up, then anything is possible,” Bridgen remarked.
He then told how last year a source approached him with “information about child trafficking into the UK,” including “detailed names of people involved on the ground; where the children were being brought in; where they were being taken; where their photographs were being taken; and the name of the company that was instrumental in laundering the money” used to buy these children.
The source had brought this information to the police, to the counter-intelligence agency MI5, and to the National Crime Agency, and “nothing was done” by any of these groups. Not only did they fail to act on the information, but “mysteriously, within two days of dropping the file with the National Crime Agency,” the source’s LinkedIn profile was “visited and investigated by someone who worked at the company who was named in the file.”
“Meaning they were tipped off,” Jones noted.
Bridgen told how the source had recorded all of his phone calls with MI5, the police force, and the National Crime Agency, and when they failed to act, Bridgen “sent a file with all the information to senior politicians.”
“Eventually, all I got back was, ‘Take it to the police.’ I pointed out this had already been to the police, and it had been to MI5. There actually was an MI5 officer who had been very sympathetic and realized how important this evidence was. And he tried to push it. He was removed from the service. That’s how deep the corruption runs.”
In a June 2024 interview on the Resistance Podcast, Bridgen elaborated, “And then when you see the names, you see why. They are known names.”
He shared further horrifying details about the final end of the children who are trafficked and abused.
“They use them in the sex trade for about three years and then when they’re worn out they organ harvest them,” Bridgen shared.
“No one’s interested. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to talk about a lot of things.”
Bridgen believes this demand for child trafficking is an explanation for the drive to continue wars around the world, including the war in Ukraine, because the conflicts present “a huge opportunity for child trafficking.”
Jones pointed out it was publicly admitted that decades ago, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein entered war zones in Kosovo and Serbia and bought “nine- and 10-year-old girls” in order to sell them into sex slavery in the U.S. The father of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the main directors of the “blackmail pedophile operations” of “MI6 and Mossad,” according to Jones.
“Ultimately, I think it’s the glue that holds the self-proclaimed elites around the world together, because once they’re involved in pedophilia or profiting from child trafficking, it’s the ultimate blackmail,” Bridgen said. “There’s no way out of the club for them. They all have to go down together.”
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance visibly rolled their eyes as the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, lectured them on being kind to transgender people and immigrants at Tuesday’s National Prayer Service.
Budde requested that the newly sworn-in president and vice president “have mercy” on gay, lesbian and transgender people as well as illegal immigrants who are allegedly “scared” by the new administration. The new leaders did not appear amused by her lecture, with Vance repeatedly shooting looks to his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy on the people in our country who are scared now,” Budde said. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants, who work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors, they are faithful members of churches and our mosques, synagogues and temples.”
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Trump and Vance attended the National Prayer Service along with Usha, First Lady Melania Trump and their families at the Washington National Cathedral. The interfaith service was held to “offer prayers of thanksgiving for our democracy” at the beginning of the new administration, according to a statement from the National Cathedral.
Budde, a staunch critic of Trump since his first term, said during a phone call in 2020 that she was “outraged” by the president’s speech about the importance of law and order at St. John’s Episcopal Church after it was set ablaze by Black Lives Matter protesters. She further seethed at Trump for allegedly being given no notice that the area surrounding the church would be cleared with tear gas.
Trump signed a slew of executive orders Monday evening to terminate birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and to direct the federal government to only recognize two sexes, male and female.
An Axios/Ipsos poll from Sunday found that 66% of Americans support deporting immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally, an action that Trump had promised to enact throughout his campaign. The poll surveyed 1,025 adults between January 10 to 12 with a 3.2% margin of error.
A national poll by PPRI in June 2023 found that 65% of Americans believe there are only two genders. The poll surveyed 5,000 adults between March 9-23 with a 1.5% margin of error.
