Category: Cases

98 articles in this category

Abu Omar rendition — The CIA's kidnapping of a Milan cleric, Abu Omar, who was sent to Egypt to be tortured; John Kiriakou calls it a case that ought to be taught at the CIA as how not to run a rendition, and it is what ultimately sent him to prison, after he confirmed a former colleague's surname to a journalist claiming to be writing a book about it.
The cremation footnote — A footnote John Kiriakou cites from the declassified executive summary of the Senate torture report, stating that Abu Zubaydah will never be permitted to leave Guantanamo — despite never having joined al-Qaeda, never having pledged fealty to Osama bin Laden and never having been charged — and that on his death the CIA will cremate his body and scatter the ashes at sea.
Assange and the European Court of Human Rights — The last legal avenue John Kiriakou identified for Julian Assange in 2022 — three precedents in which the Strasbourg court refused to let Britain extradite mentally ill defendants to American solitary confinement — and the procedural trap that made it useless: Britain said the appeal need not halt the extradition.
Assange plea deal — The 2024 agreement under which Julian Assange pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, was processed in Saipan, and returned to Australia; John Kiriakou details its odd terms — a Chelsea Manning purge affidavit and a 25-year green-card ban — and the debate over whether it sets a precedent.
Athens bank fraud report — John Kiriakou's account of taking a dream job as COO of an Athens investment firm in 2020, discovering it was an elaborate bank fraud, and being unable to get the FBI to act — an agent telling him that without 'terrorism, China, or January 6th,' they were not interested.
Bahrain fishing officer demarche — Kiriakou's account of serving, while stationed in Bahrain, as the embassy's econ officer and by extension its fishing, banking, aviation, and environment officer — including delivering a formal U.S. demarche to Bahrain's deputy foreign minister over a U.S.-Canada dispute about whether clams legally count as fish.
Bankruptcy and the dropped charges — The sequence John Kiriakou places at the centre of his case: that the espionage counts against him were dropped only after his legal fees had bankrupted him, which he presents as evidence that the government's aim was attrition rather than conviction.
The Charles Littlejohn prosecution — The five-year sentence handed to an IRS contractor who disclosed Donald Trump's tax returns to the New York Times, which John Kiriakou calls stunning and unjustified — the material was protected but not classified, the Biden campaign made use of it, and the sentencing judge compared the disclosure to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Citizens United — The Supreme Court decision John Kiriakou blames for legalizing unlimited corporate political money and for corporations having "taken over" two of the three branches of government — and which he says lets AIPAC pour tens of millions into single congressional races to defeat candidates who cross Israel.
Dark Alliance — Gary Webb's seven-part San Jose Mercury News investigation reporting that cocaine reaching Los Angeles and fuelling the crack epidemic had travelled through Nicaragua with the CIA's knowledge. John Kiriakou's account stresses what Webb did and did not claim — that the agency turned a blind eye rather than ran the operation — and that three separate federal investigations later found his reporting correct.
The Department of Education SWAT raid — John Kiriakou's account of a pre-dawn armed raid on the home of a Washington Times journalist and her husband, an official at the Department of Education — carried out, he says, by the Department of Education's own armed SWAT team, which seized the reporter's notes and refused to return them. He uses the episode to point out that several civilian federal departments maintain armed tactical units, and that no other journalist covered it.
Epstein and more than one service — John Kiriakou's revision of his own position after the release of a further tranche of Epstein documents — that while he continues to believe Jeffrey Epstein was working for the Israelis, the papers indicate he was probably also working for the British, probably for the Americans, and possibly for the Germans.
Epstein Files Transparency Act — The law compelling the Justice Department to release the Epstein files by a fixed deadline, passed 419 to 1 in the House and 99 to nothing in the Senate and then, in John Kiriakou's account, simply not complied with.
Evidence of previous heroism — A phrase John Kiriakou attributes to Judge Leonie Brinkema at his 2013 sentencing. When his service in Pakistan and his role in the capture of Abu Zubaydah were raised in mitigation, the judge ruled — in what Kiriakou gives as her exact words — that any evidence of previous heroism is irrelevant.
Five and a half years on the table — John Kiriakou's stated regret about his own whistleblowing — not that he did it, but that he waited: he learned of the torture programme in May 2002, it began on 2 August 2002, and he said nothing until 11 December 2007.
Hague Invasion Act — The American statute, described by John Kiriakou as having been passed during the Obama administration, that authorises the president to use the United States military to invade the Netherlands and free an American or allied national held by the International Criminal Court — the standing legal answer to the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu might be arrested abroad.
"I had no intent" — The formula John Kiriakou used in the days around his January 2013 sentencing to describe his own guilty plea — that he had committed the act charged but had neither the intent to commit a crime nor the intent to harm the officer he named, having believed the man was retired and available to be interviewed.
"I only wanted to kill Jews" — In the hospital room at a Pakistani military base, after telling the wounded Abu Zubaydah that fifty thousand people had been in the towers and that he was not the victim, John Kiriakou says the prisoner answered that he had only wanted to kill Jews and had been overruled.
Iraq WMD intelligence — John Kiriakou's account of how the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was fabricated: the intelligence community's consensus was that Iraq had no WMD, but the White House had already decided to invade and sought analysis to fit the policy.
Israel's cell-phone assassinations in Iran — John Kiriakou's account of how Israel wiped out Iran's military leadership by tracking cell phones — recruiting destitute Afghan refugees as $100-a-month spotters, and, when the generals stopped carrying phones, targeting their bodyguards' phones instead.
Israeli art student spy ring — A spring 2001 U.S. counterintelligence report on so-called "Israeli art students" who used counterfeit visas to try to access federal buildings and military sites, some living on the same Hollywood, Florida block as 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta; per John Kiriakou, the "dancing Israelis" stopped by NYPD in a white panel van on 9/11 were part of the same espionage effort and were released back to Israel rather than prosecuted.
Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners — John Kiriakou's account of systematic abuse in Israeli detention after October 7 — thousands held, whistleblower reports of forced amputations, and a prison-wide rule that Palestinian inmates must crawl rather than walk, on pain of being beaten with rebar.
Japanese diplomat FBI sting — John Kiriakou's account of an FBI entrapment operation in which an agent posing as a Japanese diplomat cold-pitched him for classified information over five lunches, hoping he would commit actual espionage they could charge — a scheme he discovered only in his own case discovery.
Kiriakou's gun rights appeal — John Kiriakou's effort to have the firearms disability attached to his felony conviction lifted, by suing the Justice Department over a restoration process announced in 2025 and never built, and separately by applying for a presidential pardon he says he cannot count on.
Make it the blip — Having stayed up all night reading law review journals and concluded that he had broken no law, John Kiriakou telephoned his attorneys at six in the morning to say he wanted to go to trial. They drove to his house, told him he was facing twelve to eighteen years, and the lawyer he respected most gave him the sentence that changed his mind.
Maxwell at a work camp — John Kiriakou's objection to Ghislaine Maxwell's placement in a minimum security work camp — that convicted sex offenders are, in his experience, never eligible for minimums — and his refusal, when pressed, to offer any explanation for the exception.
"It's about mitigating damage" — The sentence John Kiriakou credits with changing his mind about going to trial — one of his own attorneys telling him that his problem was that he thought the case was about justice, when it was about mitigating damage — and the two lawyers who drove to his house after he emailed at six in the morning to refuse the plea.
Office of Special Plans Israeli leak — A major Israeli spy operation John Kiriakou says was uncovered in the 2000s involving a leak from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, headed by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith — both authors, with Richard Perle, of the "Clean Break" report advocating a dual-containment strategy against Iraq and Iran on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu. Per Kiriakou, Wolfowitz and Feith did not merely fail to take Israeli counterintelligence seriously; he believes they actively helped abet it.
Operation Mega — A 1997 FBI investigation into a senior U.S. government official believed to be passing highly sensitive information to Israel, opened after the NSA intercepted an Israeli intelligence communication referring to a source code-named "Mega." Per John Kiriakou, unlike similar investigations into other countries, the case never resulted in an indictment or public disclosure, and the identity of the American official was never revealed.
The pillow-talk disclosure case — A case John Kiriakou witnessed from the next desk: a CIA officer told a classified fact to a former senior officer turned CNN commentator during an affair, he repeated it on air, and the agency identified her within days. Her punishment was four weeks' suspension without pay and a memo in her file. Kiriakou uses it as the benchmark for how far the handling of disclosures has moved — today, he says, it would be an Espionage Act prosecution and about five years in prison.
The Salim lawsuit — The civil action brought against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen by two survivors of the torture programme and the family of a prisoner who froze to death at a CIA site in Afghanistan — and the defence John Kiriakou found sickening, that the inventors of Zyklon B had not been prosecuted at Nuremberg.
Saudi princes and 9/11 — John Kiriakou's account of finding three Saudi princes' personal cell numbers in Abu Zubaydah's seized diary — and how, after the CIA warned the Saudis, all three princes soon died in improbable ways, convincing him the Saudi government was involved in 9/11.
Seventy-two denied motions — The count John Kiriakou gives of the pretrial motions filed in his case and denied by Judge Leonie Brinkema — seventy-two denied and none granted — which he offers as the mechanism by which a national security defendant in the Eastern District of Virginia is prevented from mounting a defence at all.
SPLC 2025 indictment — Federal criminal case unveiled by FBI director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche against the Southern Poverty Law Center on multiple felony counts, described by John Kiriakou as concerning alleged payments to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi groups and alleged money laundering; Kiriakou judges the charges are of the documentary kind that either happened or did not and that they could bring an end to an organisation whose 2024 balance sheet showed assets of roughly $786 to $822 million.
The 1968 waterboarding conviction — The precedent John Kiriakou uses to dispose of the argument that waterboarding was legally uncertain after 2002: a January 1968 Washington Post front page showing an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner, an investigation ordered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the soldier's arrest, conviction for torture and imprisonment. The law, Kiriakou points out, never changed in between.
The 1994 women's class action — A class action brought by female CIA employees who had been passed over for promotion produced, in John Kiriakou's account, a judicial finding that the Agency had documented its own crime and a remedy of an across-the-board two-level promotion for every woman at the CIA.
The 1996 campaign contribution disclosure — The whistleblower disclosure John Kiriakou made inside the CIA in 1996, sixteen years before the one that ruined him. Serving overseas, he learned of a very large illegal contribution to the Dole presidential campaign, reported it to the CIA Inspector General, and watched the system work exactly as written: the IG investigated, found the information credible, and referred it to the Federal Election Commission. He offers it as the control case against which he judges every later complaint.
The 2020 extradition hearing — The London hearing on the United States' request to extradite Julian Assange, described by John Kiriakou two days into it — a proceeding scheduled to run to July with a month-long recess inserted at the American prosecutors' request, held in a courtroom whose microphones did not work, with Assange behind a plastic screen and unable to hear his own case. Kiriakou called it more of a circus sideshow than a legal hearing, and warned that even a defence victory would leave Assange expelled to Australia and open to a fresh American request.
The approvals required to kill Assange — John Kiriakou's reading of the 2021 Yahoo News report on CIA plans to abduct or assassinate Julian Assange — that an operation of that kind requires three separate approvals, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, from the government of the target's own Five Eyes country, and from the congressional oversight committees — and his conclusion that if the planning went as far as reported, all three were given.
The Bolivian visa line — The CIA's interrogation of John Kiriakou's wife, then a serving senior officer, over a single sentence in a Los Angeles Times op-ed her husband had written and had already cleared through the agency's own publications review board. Told the piece was cleared, the security officer replied that one line in it was top secret — the statement that Iranians no longer needed visas to travel to Bolivia. Kiriakou had taken it off the Bolivian foreign ministry's website.
The Bolton raid — John Kiriakou's reading of the August 2025 FBI search of John Bolton's home and office — that emailing national defense information to family members is the Espionage Act's definition of espionage, on a precedent set in Kiriakou's own case — together with the FBI evidence sticker he says is still on the back of his own computer.
The Brennan felony referral — John Kiriakou's July 2025 report, sourced to Matt Taibbe, that the Justice Department was moving beyond referred misdemeanour charges against John Brennan and James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and was actively pursuing felony conspiracy charges against at least Brennan — a prospect Kiriakou said he would attend the trial of every single day.
The buried Senate documents — John Kiriakou's account of a sitting senator who could not obtain a set of documents classified in the 1970s. Long past the point where mandatory declassification should have applied, the CIA disclaimed them as not its own; they turned out to be Senate documents, which no disclosure law reaches, and no authority existed to compel their release.
The business-card espionage charges — Two of the three Espionage Act counts brought against John Kiriakou rested on his having passed a former CIA colleague's business card to two reporters — a man who had left the agency and had never been undercover — and were dropped after an exchange in open court in which the prosecutor's only answer to the judge was that Kiriakou should have been more careful.
The clemency campaign of January 2013 — The three parallel appeals for a pardon or commutation made on John Kiriakou's behalf in the days before his 25 January 2013 sentencing — a letter to the president from Ralph Nader, Bruce Fein and Joan Claybrook, a change.org petition with nearly two thousand signatures, a Greek-American community petition, and a letter signed by more than eighteen CIA officers and FBI agents alongside Pete Seeger, Oliver Stone and Daniel Ellsberg.
The declination letter — The letter the Justice Department sent John Kiriakou's attorneys in December 2008 declining to prosecute him, on the grounds that the torture allegations were already public through human rights organizations and that it is illegal to classify a crime — and the celebration dinner that was followed three weeks later by Barack Obama's inauguration.
The Epstein files and the Starmer government — John Kiriakou's prediction that the Epstein disclosures could bring down Keir Starmer's government, on the strength of evidence that Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson gave Epstein classified British Ministry of Defence documents — an Official Secrets Act matter that in America would fall under the Espionage Act.
The Eric Adams ambassadorship — The September 2025 proposal, floated by Steve Witkoff, to remove Eric Adams from the New York mayoral race by offering him the embassy in Riyadh — which John Kiriakou thought likely to be attempted, on the reasoning that Donald Trump is not stupid, knows Adams cannot win, and would gain by forcing Zohran Mamdani to spend money.
The Flynn charges — John Kiriakou supported the appointment of a special counsel in 2017 while rejecting the Russia allegations outright — arguing that the case for an investigation rested not on election interference but on a list of ordinary, provable crimes he believed senior Trump campaign figures, and Michael Flynn in particular, had already committed.
The Fox News military analyst — The cable-news commentator John Kiriakou says he identified as a fraud within a single green-room conversation, because the man used movie vocabulary — black ops, wet work — where a real officer would have named a directorate. The man had obtained a Defense Department clearance on the strength of his claimed CIA service, advised generals in Afghanistan, and was later arrested and imprisoned for fraud.
The Gabbard confirmation fight — John Kiriakou's February 2025 assessment that Tulsi Gabbard was in real danger of not being confirmed as Director of National Intelligence — not because the Democrats opposed her, which they did, but because she was losing Republicans over Section 702, and had been telling them privately that she supported a renewal he knows she opposes.
The Giuliani–Epstein emails — A cache of correspondence that a former chief of business development for Giuliani Partners told John Kiriakou she holds — thousands of pages of emails between Rudy Giuliani and Jeffrey Epstein, which she says she has offered to news organisations and to congressional committees and which nobody wanted, together with her claim that a second British prince and other former heads of state are implicated.
The golf course deed forgery — The property fraud John Kiriakou encountered at FCI Loretto — a prisoner who forged papers transferring ownership of a golf course to himself and then began charging people rent — and the place such crimes occupy in the prison's own hierarchy of offences.
The Greek colonel and China — The arrest of a Greek colonel assigned to NATO on charges of spying for China — a case John Kiriakou calls highly unusual not because espionage arrests are rare in Greece, but because they are almost always for Russia, and which he says shows the Chinese have begun caring about NATO communications.
The Imran Khan apology demand — The demand issued by Imran Khan's party in late October 2025 that John Kiriakou apologise in writing to Khan, to the party and to the Pakistani people over a single sentence he had given an Indian outlet — that India would win a conventional war because it has five times the population — together with his refusal, the death threats, his lawyer's advice, and the blanket policy on South Asian media he adopted afterwards.
The Intercept's exposed sources — John Kiriakou's charge that national security whistleblowers who take material to The Intercept end up in prison. He names Reality Winner and Terry Albury as sources whose identities the outlet exposed, says the same thing happened to Daniel Hale, and identifies the outlet's two national security reporters, Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole, as the journalists responsible for sending him to prison. His question is whether the pattern is incompetence or something worse.
The Jay Jones texts — The leaked 2022 text messages in which Virginia's Democratic candidate for attorney general joked about shooting Republicans — which John Kiriakou called shameful on reflex, before landing on the position he now holds: that everyone talks that way privately, that Republicans do it constantly, and that he no longer cares.
The jury consultant's advice — What John Kiriakou's jury consultant told him about a national security trial in the Eastern District of Virginia: that in any other district in America he would say fight and win, but in that one, "buddy, you don't have a prayer. Take the deal."
The killing of Alex Pretty — John Kiriakou's verdict on the shooting of a man by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January 2026: a Kent State moment for the administration, a cover-up in progress, and — because there is no statute of limitations on murder — a case that will outlive the presidency and put people in prison.
The Las Vegas case — John Kiriakou's scepticism about the Justice Department's claim that it played no role in a Las Vegas child-exploitation case involving an Israeli suspect who left the country — on the ground that electronic images and electronic communications would have made the matter federal.
The legal bills — The cost of John Kiriakou's defence, which he has given variously as more than half a million dollars, approaching a million, and more than a million — a figure he treats not as a hardship but as the mechanism of the prosecution itself, since bankruptcy is what makes a defendant accept a plea.
The Macron defamation suit — The Macrons' libel action against Candace Owens over her claim that Brigitte Macron was born male, which John Kiriakou discussed as a question of venue — and which prompted him to say he wished he had sued the Los Angeles Times in England when he had the chance.
The Maxwell Justice Department interview — Ghislaine Maxwell's July 2025 interview with the Justice Department, in which her counsel said she took the fifth on nothing and answered every question — a risk John Kiriakou reads as evidence she was probably telling the truth, and as an approach for a commutation or a pardon.
The Mayflower Madam analogy — John Kiriakou's argument, borrowed from the 1980s Mayflower Madam case, that the Epstein 'list' will disappoint anyone expecting a schedule of clients — because address books contain the dry cleaner and the Chinese takeaway alongside everyone else, and nobody keeps a spreadsheet of their crimes.
The nine months on food stamps — The nine months John Kiriakou's family spent on public assistance after his arrest in January 2012 — his wife working out at the dining room table that they could not afford to buy food the following week, because everything they had had gone to the lawyers, and the Arlington County welfare office for which they qualified for everything.
The open letter to Edward Snowden — The letter John Kiriakou wrote from prison in 2013 to Edward Snowden, sent privately through a shared attorney and carrying three pieces of advice — hire the best national-security lawyers available, cultivate a base of support on Capitol Hill, and never under any circumstances talk to the FBI — which went viral and reached its addressee only because Arianna Huffington published it.
The pardoned January 6th defendants — John Kiriakou's observation that a striking number of the January 6th defendants pardoned by Donald Trump have got into trouble since their release — one arrested for threatening to kill the House minority leader, another shot dead in a gunfight with a police officer in Indiana — and his agreement that the base rate may explain all of it.
The Paris rifle serial number — The case John Kiriakou uses to argue that American weapons sent to Ukraine are leaking onto the black market: a rifle used to shoot and severely wound a policeman in Paris whose serial number, he says, matched a shipment of assault rifles the United States had sent to Ukraine some six months earlier.
The pillow talk leak case — A 1990s CIA disclosure John Kiriakou witnessed from the next desk: a colleague passed classified information to a retired senior officer she was involved with, who repeated it on CNN as a terrorism consultant. The agency traced it to her within days and punished her administratively — a letter in her file, two weeks without pay, a year without promotion. Kiriakou holds it up as the correct way to handle mishandled classified information.
The play the CIA killed — A stage play about John Kiriakou's case, written in 2015 by the screenwriter Scott Burns for a New York theatre, which Kiriakou says was never performed because the CIA applied enough pressure on the theatre owner to stop it — an account he offered as a counterpoint to the Reality Winner play that was running unmolested at the same moment.
The professor and the Ellsberg profile — The story John Kiriakou says his CIA recruiter told him — that in 1971, as founder of the unit producing long-distance psychological profiles of foreign leaders, he was handed a file on Daniel Ellsberg, refused to profile an American citizen, and later discovered his boss had done it anyway under his name, which he testified to before the Watergate Committee.
The science fiction writer FOIA request — The Freedom of Information Act request John Kiriakou filed with the CIA about a 1950s science fiction writer long rumoured to have been an undercover officer — answered only with a letter saying the agency lacked the manpower to meet its statutory ninety-day deadline. Fifteen years later, he says, he is still waiting.
The Scooter Libby deposition — The 2006 or 2007 session at which John Kiriakou, appearing as a witness in the Scooter Libby case, mentioned that the only conversation he had witnessed between two senior CIA officers concerned a covert action programme — and the agency's general counsel jumped up and stopped him mid-sentence, because an officer may not say the words at all.
The second officer in the same case — A document John Kiriakou says his attorneys discovered shortly before his January 2013 sentencing, showing that a second CIA officer had given the same reporter the names of ten undercover officers along with information on counterterrorist operations and the flight plans of the aircraft serving a secret prison — and was never investigated or prosecuted, which Kiriakou takes as proof that his own case was about whistleblowing rather than disclosure.
The sentencing remark — The comment John Kiriakou says the judge made at his sentencing — that she wished she could give him the maximum, because that is what she would give him — and his reading of it as a performance for the national security reporters filling the gallery.
The seventh Espionage Act defendant — The case John Kiriakou cited two days before his own sentencing to correct the count of Espionage Act prosecutions brought under Barack Obama — a translator at the American naval base in Bahrain who had just been charged, making seven, against three in the whole history of the United States before 2009.
The SHU loophole — John Kiriakou's warning about the American assurances given to British courts in the Julian Assange extradition case: prosecutors promised not to place him in a communications management unit but said nothing about the Special Housing Unit, and in Kiriakou's account a prison need only cite an overheard threat to hold a man in solitary indefinitely.
The solitary confinement precedents — The legal argument John Kiriakou made repeatedly between 2020 and 2022 in defence of Julian Assange, and revived in 2025 for the Australian pilot Daniel Duggan — that no extradition to the United States can succeed once a court is asked to find that American solitary confinement is not torture, a proposition already contradicted by the United Nations, by the United States' own federal torture statute, and by a line of British and European rulings blocking extraditions on exactly that ground.
The State Department cover investigation — One of the inquiries John Kiriakou opened as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on a reporter's tip that the CIA was placing some of its torturers under State Department cover in violation of the cover agreement between the two departments. He wrote to the State Department asking for clarification. Five or six weeks later a colleague told him a reply had come and had been classified above his clearance; asked what it said, the colleague summarised it as an obscenity. That was the end of the investigation.
The Stratfor cables on Venezuela — Material John Kiriakou says WikiLeaks exposed on American operations against Venezuela — the training of opposition figures including Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López, and plotting to sabotage dams inside the country to help bring down Hugo Chávez. He offers it as an example of detail so obscure that few journalists know it, and as the real reason for the pursuit of Julian Assange.
The Sue Mi Terry case — John Kiriakou's reading of the prosecution of analyst Sue Mi Terry — charged not under the Espionage Act but under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, an offence he reduces to failing to fill out a form on the internet, and one whose nominal sentencing range he says means nothing in practice.
The Syria chemical attack correction — John Kiriakou's public retraction of what he wrote about the August 2013 chemical attack near Damascus. Asked about the passage in his book on Iran, he said he had written it before United Nations whistleblowers came forward to say they did not believe it was a Syrian government attack, and thanked the questioner for the chance to correct it.
The thrown sandwich — The arrest of a man who threw a sandwich at a National Guardsman at 14th and U Street in Washington in August 2025, charged with felony assault on a police officer with a stated demand for ten years — an overcharge John Kiriakou said no Washington jury would ever convict on.
The Toronto transit detention — John Kiriakou's account of being seized at the aircraft door in Toronto by two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers, told 'you are not welcome in Canada,' and walked by both arms through the airport onto his connecting flight — while transiting home from a trip on which the Greek government had hired him to help write a whistleblower protection law.
The $230 million claim — John Kiriakou's reaction to a sitting president demanding a quarter of a billion dollars in compensation from his own Justice Department — he telephoned his friend and former attorney Bruce Fein, expecting to be told it was impossible, and was told instead that an obscure nineteenth-century law makes it perfectly legal.
The unexplained false statement charge — One of the five counts against John Kiriakou was making a false statement, and neither he nor his eleven lawyers could establish what the statement was supposed to have been; the government withdrew the count after his defence had spent six figures on it.
The voice vote on the Epstein files — John Kiriakou's account of how the Senate passed the Epstein files release without a roll call — a voice vote he says Chuck Schumer requested to save the majority leader, leaving no written record of how anyone voted and allowing every senator but one House holdout to claim they had stood up to the pedophiles.
The weight of the government — John Kiriakou's comparison, made on the eve of his imprisonment, between the danger of his overseas career — including two attempts on his life by different terrorist groups — and being prosecuted at home, which he says none of it prepared him for.
The witness letter — A letter John Kiriakou received in August 2025 informing him that he would be called as a witness in Noelle Dunphy's defamation case against Rudy Giuliani — a consequence, he says, of having told the New York Times that Giuliani's people tried to squeeze $2 million out of him for a pardon.
Tom Alexandrovich — Senior Israeli cyber security official arrested in Las Vegas in August 2025 on multiple counts of child pornography after being caught in an undercover police sting targeting child sex predators, and immediately permitted to board a plane back to Israel — a case John Kiriakou uses as a live illustration of the rule that Israel does not extradite Jews.
UC Global and the state secrets privilege — The Spanish private security company that John Kiriakou says copied the electronic devices of everyone visiting Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and passed the contents to the CIA. When two journalists and two attorneys sued and the case survived dismissal, the agency moved to invoke the state secrets privilege — which Kiriakou treats as proof that a plain constitutional violation can be left without any remedy at all.
The Ukraine call whistleblower — The intelligence officer whose complaint triggered Donald Trump's first impeachment, and whom John Kiriakou declines to accept as a whistleblower at all — not on partisan grounds but on procedural ones. The complaint went to the Justice Department rather than the oversight committees, and its prose, he says, is lawyers' prose rather than the uniform CIA analytic style every analyst is trained into. He is nonetheless emphatic that naming the man was indefensible.
United Fruit and the Arbenz coup — John Kiriakou's account of the 1954 CIA overthrow of Guatemala's President Arbenz after he nationalized the banana crop — engineered by the Dulles brothers, who sat on the board of the United Fruit Company, and followed by half a century of dictatorship.
The UPMC whistleblower case — A False Claims Act suit against neurosurgeons at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, alleging inflated operation counts and needlessly complex procedures. John Kiriakou — a Pittsburgh native — argues the charge is not merely fraud but deliberate endangerment of patients for profit, calls the False Claims Act 'the RICO statute of health care', and says the story deserved national coverage it never got.
Why he believes Epstein killed himself — John Kiriakou's stated conclusion that Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide, reasoned from his own experience of how federal prison guards actually work rather than from any view of the wider Epstein case.
Why Maxwell took the Fifth — John Kiriakou's explanation of Ghislaine Maxwell's silence before Congress — not that she was protecting anyone, but that nobody had offered her anything. His precedent is Oliver North, whose congressional immunity made his testimony unusable and kept him out of prison altogether.
The arrest of Yves Engler — John Kiriakou's account of the arrest of the Canadian activist Yves Engler in Montreal on a hate-speech charge after he criticised a prominent Canadian Zionist — five days in jail, additional harassment charges filed after he telephoned the arresting officer to request his own police reports, and suspension from Twitter and Facebook.
Zawahiri assassination — John Kiriakou's account of the drone strike that killed al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri — using a bladed, warhead-less missile fired as he stepped onto a balcony to smoke, deliberately chosen to avoid killing the women and children inside.