Report Confirms That Netanyahu Convinced Trump To Start Iran War Based On Fabricated Claims Iran Tried To Assassinate Him.

More Detail Emerges On False Claims Benjamin Netanyahu Used To Convince Trump To Go To War With Iran.

How Netanyahu Convinced Trump Of War With Iran.

A new report in Reuters confirms that Trump’s final decision to bomb Iran came after a call with Benjamin Netanyahu, where the Israeli Prime Minister used fabricated claims that Iran wanted to assassinate Donald Trump to convince Trump to pull the trigger on the war for greater Israel.

Reuters reported that , “Less than 48 hours before the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone to President Donald Trump about the reasons for launching the kind of complex, far-off war the American leader once had campaigned against” adding that, “new intelligence suggested that the meeting had been moved forward to Saturday morning from Saturday night” and “The call has not been previously reported.”

According to the report, “Netanyahu, ‌determined to move forward with an operation he had urged for decades, argued that there might never be a better chance to kill Khamenei and to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump”.

According to the sources speaking to Reuters, “By the time the call took place, Trump already had approved the idea of the United States carrying out a military operation against Iran but had not yet decided when or under what circumstances the United States would get involved” and “ The three sources briefed on ​the call said they believed it - along with the intelligence showing a closing window to kill Iran’s leader - was a catalyst for Trump’s final decision to order the military on February 27 to move ahead with Operation Epic Fury.”

To back up the claim which apparently led Trump to authorize Operation Epic (better knows as Epstein) Fury, Netanyahu apparently cited, “a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Iran in 2024, when Trump was a candidate” where “The Justice Department has accused a Pakistani man of trying to recruit people in the United States in the plan, meant as retaliation for Washington’s killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ top commander, Qassem Soleimani.”

An FBI Manufactured Plot.

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal recently released a piece in the Grayzone showing that the Justice Department’s claim that Iran tried to assassinate Trump in 2024 using a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant, who allegedly had ties to the Iranian IRCG, was an FBI-manufactured entrapment operation.

As Blumenthal noted, journalist Ken Silva, writing about Asif Merchant, the man accused of attempting to assassinate Trump at the behest of Iran, wrote, “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents”.

Blumenthal noted that, “as Merchant entered the US, the FBI introduced him to a confidential informant posing as a potential business partner and operating under the alias, Nadeem Ali. The informant had served as translator for the US military during its occupation of Afghanistan.”

Blumenthal added that:

Though Merchant did not propose any crimes, the FBI wiretapped a meeting between him and the informant, Ali, in a hotel room on June 3, 2024. There, Merchant was taped making a supposed “finger gun” motion while mentioning an unspecified “opportunity.” This grainy minute-long hidden camera recording is presented as the linchpin of the DOJ’s indictment of Merchant.

According to the FBI, Merchant had outlined a highly complex plot which required the hiring of two hitmen, “twenty-five people who could perform a protest after the distraction occurred, and a woman to do ‘reconnaissance.”

For the elaborate flash mob-style assassination extravaganza, Merchant was asked by the informant to fork over a mere $5000. The Pakistani visitor had no means of scrounging up the fee, however, raising further questions about the seriousness of the plot. “I did not think I was going to be successful,” Merchant would later state in court.

Virtually penniless, Merchant was forced to gather the cash from an anonymous “associate,” according to the DOJ indictment. Next, the FBI informant took him on a winding journey from Boston to New York City, where he allegedly handed the money to two other FBI informants posing as hit men. The DOJ claims Merchant made plans to fly to Pakistan on June 12, but was arrested in his residence that day.

As Ken Silva put it , “In the Merchant case, the two hitmen he attempted to hire were undercover FBI agents introduced to him by one of their informants. Merchant appears to have been an unwitting dupe in an FBI sting operation.”

Furthermore, the U.S. government admitted that Asif Merchant has no contact with Iranian assets while in the U.S., with documents showing the Bureau Of Prisons Director, Colette Peters, saying that , “law enforcement has not identified any IRGC associates of Merchant operating in the United States who could continue to orchestrate violent acts” after his arrest, showing that, “the only Iranian assassins with whom Merchant appeared to have interacted inside the US were undercover informants working for the FBI.”

Furthermore, as the New York Times noted, Asif Merchant “had never been close to realizing the vision” of assassinating Trump.

Leaked documents reported on by Just the News show that “The FBI allowed Asif Raza Merchant, … to enter the U.S. in April with special permission known as ‘significant public benefit parole’ even though he was flagged on a terrorism watchlist and recently traveled to Iran”.

According to the report, “The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed Merchant, fingerprinted him and inspected the contents of his electronic devices when he arrived at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, in Houston, but then let him leave with the special parole that expired on May 11”

This was done according to U.S. officials in order to “allow agents to try to flip Merchant as a cooperator or try to determine why he was coming to the United States and who he might be working with”.

Even if Asif Merchant wasn’t entrapped by the FBI to manufacture a plot to assassinate Trump, he was flagged by the FBI once entering the country and only let go in order to get caught in a sting operation where all others involved in the plot, including his associate Nadeem Ali and the two hitmen he hired to carry out the plot, were FBI agents.

Israel Weaponizes Assassination Claims For War With Iran.

Despite the questionable nature of the allegations around Asif Merchant, “Israel-adjacent figures in Trump’s inner circle exploited the case to exacerbate the candidate’s anxiety about the Ayatollah’s wrath,” as Max Blumenthal noted.

This was done by attempting to tie the Asif Merchant arrest to the two more advanced assassination attempts against Trump, by Thomas Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania, and by Ryan Routh at Mar-a-Lago.

Max Blumenthal noted that Israeli intelligence tried to connect Thomas Crooks to Iran, a claim that was soon proven false. As Blumenthal wrote:

Certain foreign actors were also working to steer the US toward blaming Iran for Butler. In the late summer of 2024, the Justice Department received an urgent alert from abroad which connected Crooks directly to IRGC plots to kill Trump. According to the Washington Post, the tip arrived through a “confidential human source overseas” – almost certainly Israeli intelligence.

After a thorough investigation, DOJ officials decided the tip was not credible. “Nothing credibly connected him to Iranian plots,” one official told the Post.

In the case of Ryan Routh, who attempted to kill Trump at Mar-a-Lago in September of 2024, his motive was clearly an obsession with the proxy war in Ukraine.

Before the assignation attempt, Routh self published a disturbing screed where he detailed his time in Ukraine during the proxy war writing, “We all ponder as to why our great minds did not simply kill Hitler early on, and now why have we not taken steps to kill Putin at all costs to end this war” and called to “discard and silence those that stand in the way of progress and question and complain” the proxy war in Ukraine adding that, “Every country around the globe should have every single military personnel and asset on the front line of Ukraine proudly and announcing and advertising the fact.”

Despite this, Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to connect the two assassination attempts to Iran, with no evidence.

In an interview with Fox News in June of 2025 , Netanyahu said, “These people who chant death to America, tried to assassinate President Trump twice” in reference to Iran.

When asked, “Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?”, Netanyahu replied, “Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him.”

As Max Blumenthal noted:

One week later, Trump authorized a series of US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israel’s military assault. Though Trump arranged a ceasefire soon after the attack, Israel’s influence over his administration – and over his psyche – guaranteed that another, much more violent round of conflict was just over the horizon.

In a graphic promoted by the White House’s official Twitter/X account on July 21, 2025, Trump implied that he had begun to turn the tables on his would-be Iranian assassins: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter,” he declared.

Lindsay Graham’s Hidden Hand?

Understanding that the claim of Iran trying to assassinate Trump was the best way to convince Trump to go to war with Iran, Netanyahu repeated the claims to finally get Trump to pull the trigger.

But did he have help from hawkish U.S. senator Lindsay Graham in what line would best move Trump towards war?

The Wall Street Journal reported that in the lead-up to the war, “Few people lobbied Trump to undertake the riskiest gambit of his presidency as effectively as the hawkish and persistent Graham, who over a decade has held a sometimes close, sometimes tumultuous relationship with Trump.”

One argument that apparently helped Graham in convincing Trump to go to war was the Assassination claim. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Graham came back to Trump, in part because he wanted to shape his foreign-policy thinking against isolationist figures in MAGA. Going back to Trump before others did after Jan. 6, he said, gave him more leverage on foreign policy.

“Lindsey has an interventionist mentality that is idealistic about America’s role in the world,” said Marc Short, a longtime chief of staff to Mike Pence. “The president doesn’t share that, but the president doesn’t always share the view that America is going to stay out of all foreign engagements.”

Graham is realistic about Trump. He has joked with others that the Ukrainians should build a Trump Tower in Kyiv if they wanted Trump to give more support to the country.

On Iran, Graham likened Iran’s leader to Adolf Hitler and told Trump that Iran was in a historically weak position. They talked about the regime’s efforts to assassinate Trump in 2024. “If you think Trump forgets stuff, you’d be mistaken,” Graham said.

(Emphasis: Mine)

The Wall Street Journal also reported that, “To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country’s intelligence agency. ‘They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,’ he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.”

Part of Graham’s “coaching” of Netanyahu no doubt included telling him to emphasize the claims of Iran trying to kill Trump.

It has now been revealed that Netanyahu urging Trump “to avenge previous Iranian efforts to assassinate Trump,” the final straw that made Trump make the decision to go to war.

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