‘Iranian asset’ charged with Trump assassination plot

Republican leader’s comeback to renew national self-confidence: Ramaswamy

• Republican leader Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election will renew national self-confidence, Indian-American politician and Trump’s close confidant Vivek Ramaswamy has said, expressing hope that his comeback will signify America’s comeback.
• “America has this great tradition. We believe in our own manifest destiny... We are born to be the greatest nation that sets an example for everybody else of what’s possible for human capacity,” Vivek Ramaswamy told the Tucker Carlson Show in an interview.
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Biden to host Prez-elect

• A statement from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump would meet in the Oval Office at the outgoing president's invitation.
• Such a post-election meeting is traditional between the outgoing president and the incoming president.
• However, Trump, a Republican, did not host Biden, a Democrat, for such a meeting after he lost the election in 2020.

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The Justice Department on Friday disclosed an Iranian murder-for-hire plot to kill Donald Trump, charging a man who said he had been tasked by a government official before this week’s election with planning the assassination of the Republican president-elect.

Investigators were told of the plan to kill Trump by Farhad Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots.

Shakeri told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him this past September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.

The official was quoted by Shakeri as saying that “We have already spent a lot of money” and that “money’s not an issue.” Shakeri told investigators the official told him that if he could not put together a plan within the seven-day timeframe, then the plot would be paused until after the election because the official assumed Trump would lose and that it would be easier to kill him then, the complaint said.