The US Justice Department says an Afghan national living in Iran has been involved in alleged plots to kill targets in the United States, including President-elect Donald Trump.

The department says that 51-year-old Farhad Shakeri and his two associates in New York were charged on Friday with plotting to kill an American journalist who has been critical of Iran.

The two individuals were arrested in New York on suspicion of surveilling the target and preparing guns. They are believed to have kept contact with Shakeri who was instructed by Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Shakeri told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a telephone interview that he was asked to provide a plan to kill Trump during the presidential election campaign by the Revolutionary Guard.

Shakeri said that he was also told if he could not put together a plan within the timeframe, the plot would be paused until after the election because it was assumed that Trump would lose the election and he would be less guarded then.

In September, Trump's campaign team announced that Trump had been briefed by intelligence authorities on "real and specific" assassination threats from Iran.

The spokesperson for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmail Baqaei, denied the allegation in a statement on Saturday, calling it "completely baseless."

The spokesperson said, "the repetition of this claim at the current time is a disgusting conspiracy by the Zionist and anti-Iranian circles" to complicate the relationship between the US and Iran.