WASHINGTON • An Iranian operative has been charged in a plot to murder former U.S. national security adviser John Bolton in presumed retaliation for a U.S. airstrike that killed the country’s most powerful general, offering $300,000 to “eliminate” the Trump administration official, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Shahram Poursafi, identified by U.S. officials as a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, is wanted by the FBI on charges related to the murder-for-hire plot.

Prosecutors say the scheme unfolded more than a year after Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force and an architect of Tehran’s proxy wars in the Middle East, was killed in a targeted airstrike at Baghdad’s international airport in January 2020. After the strike, Bolton, who by then had left his White House post, tweeted, “Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.”

In the fall of 2021, Poursafi, an Iranian citizen who officials say has never visited the United States, offered $300,000 to someone he was corresponding with in the U.S. if the person would hire someone to “eliminate” Bolton, according to an FBI affidavit unsealed Wednesday. Poursafi told the person, who was actually an FBI informant, that he wanted “the guy” to be purged or eliminated.

Poursafi provided the person with Bolton’s office address, including the name and contact information for someone who worked in the office, and took screenshots of surveillance photographs of Bolton’s office, the affidavit says.

“This was not an idle threat,” Assistant AG Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in a statement released by the department.