Begin with what is not in dispute.
In November 2024, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed charges alleging that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had tasked an operative named Farhad Shakeri with surveilling and assassinating President Donald Trump. The tasking, according to the complaint, came on Oct. 7, 2024 — the first anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Shakeri remains at large in Iran. A separate Revolutionary Guard operative, Asif Merchant, was convicted by a Brooklyn jury of a murder-for-hire plot that ran through recruited American criminals toward the same target. Neither case rests on a leak or an anonymous source. Both rest on indictments, sworn testimony, and a verdict.
This is the part the regime’s apologists would prefer you skip. So, let us not skip it.
None of it began in 2024. It began in Baghdad in January 2020, when a U.S. drone killed Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and the Islamic Republic announced — publicly, repeatedly, on state television — that it would collect the debt in American blood. It kept its word. In 2022, the Justice Department charged a Revolutionary Guard operative, Shahram Poursafi, with attempting to pay $300,000 to have former national security adviser John Bolton murdered on American soil. The reported second target, at a million dollars, was former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The 2011 plot to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington — routed through a man the Quds Force believed to be a Mexican cartel operative — was the template. The plots against Trump were the sequel. The regime does not improvise these things. It institutionalizes them. What Tehran keeps is not a grudge. It is a list.
Which brings us to the present. Khamenei is dead — killed in February in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike — and his funeral was staged, without apparent irony, to open on America’s 250th birthday. Crowds chanted “death to America,” hanged Trump in effigy, and waved banners reading “#KillTrump.” Israeli media, citing Channel 14 and unnamed intelligence sources, report that the Guard has stood up a unit — “Mukhtar” — to hunt American officials. Treat that as an allegation, not a fact: no U.S. agency has confirmed it. But even if that specific unit never checks out, it fits a six-year pattern already documented in federal indictments. The letterhead may be new. The intent is on the record.
None of this requires pretending the strike was clean. It killed Khamenei’s family, too, including a 14-month-old granddaughter — a real cost, worth naming without flinching. But mourning the dead and staging them are different acts. The regime that paraded that child’s coffin before the cameras spent four decades ordering the deaths of others. Grief it can perform. Innocence it cannot claim.
There is a comforting theory that killing a tyrant kills the machine he built. History is unkind to it. Stalin died in 1953. The system he perfected outlived him by four decades. Khamenei is gone, but the Guard that drafts these target lists, the financing that pays for them, the proxies that carry them, and the ideology that sanctifies them are all still standing. A regime is not a man. You cannot decapitate a bureaucracy of vengeance by removing one head from it.
So, the serious question is not whether the threat is real. The indictments settled that. The question is what a constitutional republic does about a foreign terrorist regime that runs assassination operations on its own soil — through recruited criminals, through front organizations, through sympathizers who translate Tehran’s grievances into fluent American English.
Here, the temptation is to reach for the wrong instruments. One camp treats the whole matter as a civil-liberties abstraction, as though naming an agent of a hostile power were an assault on free speech. Another would answer lawlessness with lawlessness. Both are wrong, and the Constitution already tells you why. The answer to a regime that wants to kill your head of state is not less law. It is more — applied without apology and without exception.
The statutes exist. The Foreign Agents Registration Act exists. The prohibition on providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — and the Revolutionary Guard has carried that designation since 2019 — exists. What has gone missing is the will to apply them to everyone they cover, regardless of which constituency it flatters or which donor it offends. Call each by its legal name. Then let the law do what the law is for.
Because a regime that runs guns also runs narratives. As much of the world buried Khamenei for what the record shows him to be, a handful of Americans went to Tehran to perform for him. Jackson Hinkle led “Down with the USA” chants from a rally stage. Calla Walsh — a former Warren campaign volunteer now running Palestine Action US — told Iranian state television he was “the greatest anti-imperialist leader” of her lifetime. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, an outlet whose managing editor received payments from the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV — as the Washington Post reported in 2024 — drummed for the cameras and filed admiring dispatches. The gun and the broadcast have always traveled together. Only the accents change.
The response to this is neither a shrug nor a mob. It is a question, asked in the open and answered by the record: On whose behalf, under which statute, and with what consequence? A democracy confident in itself can ask that out loud. A democracy afraid of the answer has already begun to lose.
WHY IS IRAQ HOSTING THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC’S FAREWELL?
The regime has never hidden its intentions. It printed them on banners and shouted them over a coffin. It has renewed its standing order every year since 2020.
Tehran has already made assassination an instrument of statecraft. Constitutions are not preserved by commemorations. They survive because republics keep the will to enforce them. That will is the one thing Iran cannot decide for America. It is the only question still open.
Emzar Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs (1996–2008), specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations, a former chief of Georgia’s military police, and a former Member of Parliament (2008–2012) representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the United States in 2012.