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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The Biden-Harris administration is quietly backing away from a plan to use the ongoing U.N. climate conference to announce an international call for emissions reductions, according to Politico.
It is not clear whether it is because President-elect Donald Trump decisively won last week’s presidential election, but Biden-Harris officials reportedly intended to partner with several other countries in announcing “ambitious” carbon emissions reduction goals for 2035 before the announcement fell through, according to Politico, which cited a draft press release it obtained and several unnamed officials. Had it not fallen through, the announcement could have gone live as early as Monday, the first day of the conference — commonly referred to as COP29 — in Azerbaijan, a Caucasian petrostate with a questionable human rights record.
The aborted call to action would not have been legally binding, though it would have served as a signal to corporations to invest in emissions reduction initiatives and pave the way for other nations to get on board, according to Politico. The countries that would have been named in the announcement would have committed to slashing emissions across nearly every sector of their respective economies, and they would have taken aim at specific chemicals like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
The press release announcing the commitments “clearly won’t be published” at this point, one senior foreign diplomat told Politico, which granted the source anonymity to speak freely on the matter. Beyond Trump’s victory, other potential factors that may have interfered with the plan to roll out the 2035 targets include ambivalence from potential partners or bureaucratic logjam in the European Union, an American ally that typically collaborates on similar climate targets.
The U.S. circulated the idea of putting out a statement ahead of COP29 with “a lot of parties but never pushed for it to become something more,” a European official involved in climate negotiations told Politico.
Trump’s pending return to the White House is looming large at COP29, given the president-elect’s pledges to roll back green spending, regulations and initiatives and jack up fossil fuel production, according to CBS News. Moreover, Trump has also promised to withdraw again from the U.N.’s Paris Climate Accords, which he did in his first term before the Biden-Harris administration rejoined the deal.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
While Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.
President Donald Trump has the opportunity for an easy Day 1 in office victory — remove the COVID jabs from the childhood schedule.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added the shots to the recommended pediatric schedule despite children, especially babies, never being at any real danger of dying from COVID. The shots have been on the recommended schedule for almost two years now – but the widespread push has been a massive failure for the pharmaceutical industry.
Despite the medical establishmentgetting behind the push for pediatric COVID shots, and millions of taxpayer dollars spent on boosting them, a vast majority of parents are rejecting them. In fact, while Americans may be divided on a variety of issues, including abortion, guns, and parts of the LGBT agenda, a topic they seem to unite around is not injecting six-month-olds with the COVID shot.
According to the pro-vaccine Kaiser Family Foundation, only “15% of eligible children in the U.S. got a shot.”
This means that removing the shots from the recommended schedule would generate minimal pushback from parents.
While public health “experts” would likely complain, the parents have already spoken – they don’t want two or three more jabs for their six-month-old. The CDC currently recommends around 28 different jabs in the first two years of life.
Removal of the shots would be a way for Trump to show he is serious about taking on Big Pharma while also acknowledging the problems with the jabs he pushed through with Operation Warp Speed. It would also fit in with his pledge along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “Make America Healthy Again,” since the COVID jabs are linked to numerousproblems, including serious heart problems and death.
“That will be one of my priorities, to make sure that Americans – of course, we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” RFK Jr. told National Public Radio recently. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
Evidence also supports removing the shots from the recommended schedule. Presumably, removal would discourage more parents from injecting their kids, as the shots would no longer have the CDC’s stamp of approval.
Medical experts have warned against the COVID shots for kids, as documented by LifeSiteNews.
“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced in 2022. “We’re kind of scraping at the bottom of the barrel, particularly with healthy kids, in terms of actually being able to quantify with any accuracy and any confidence the even potential of benefit,” Ladapo, a Harvard University-trained doctor, said in 2022.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough also called on Trump last week to pull all COVID shots from the market.
“They have not had the safety track record America wanted to see,” he said recently.
“The viral infection [from COVID itself] is like the common cold now,” he said, as reported by Just the News. “So they’re not clinically indicated. They’re not medically necessary. They should be removed from the market.”
President Trump pledged to take on the Deep State. He also wants to make America healthy again and restore actual science to federal policy and not let big corporations write our regulations. He can do so by ensuring that the CDC does not needlessly push injections for a disease that does not really affect children.
Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, so Trump’s HHS secretary could appoint vaccine science realists to the committee.
He could find ways to withhold funding until the shots are removed, or he could issue executive orders formally opposing the shots. He has some shrewd entrepreneurs like Elon Musk around him. Plus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an experienced litigator – someone can figure it out if they have the will. It is an easy Day 1 victory, and he should take the opportunity.
