Category: Law

28 articles in this category

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.
Civil confinement — The policy John Kiriakou proposed from inside FCI Loretto — moving sex offenders to a secure location on prison grounds after their sentences end rather than releasing them — an argument that drew public criticism and which he defends with the case of a prisoner named Cook.
Failure to accept responsibility — The federal sentencing enhancement that John Kiriakou says explains why 98 per cent of federal criminal cases end in a plea bargain: a defendant who refuses a deal, goes to trial and loses has time added to the sentence for failing to accept responsibility.
Fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction — John Kiriakou's objection to the designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction — that a WMD is by definition a single weapon that kills large numbers at once, that no drug can be that, and that stretching the term cheapens and disables it. He notes in passing that Venezuela does not make fentanyl and that what it does ship goes to Western Europe.
From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Espionage Act — A lineage John Kiriakou endorsed on the In Limine podcast: that language was lifted from the Alien and Sedition Acts into the Espionage Act of 1917 during the anti-radical hysteria of that period, making a straight line from the earliest American political prosecutions to the statute used against modern whistleblowers.
No declaration of war since 1941 — John Kiriakou's answer to whether Congress will assert its authority over military action against Venezuela — an unqualified no, resting on the fact that the last declaration of war was on 8 December 1941 and that even the Gulf War was fought on an authorisation to use force rather than a declaration.
No prosecution for a dead journalist — A fact John Kiriakou says he read the day he raised it — that the Israeli government has never prosecuted anyone over the death of any journalist, ever — and the conclusion he draws from it: that killing journalists is state policy, and that Israel should stop pretending otherwise and simply say reporters enter at their own risk.
Sealing the courtroom — The physical measures John Kiriakou describes as accompanying a classified-information trial: plastic sheeting and duct tape over the windows so lasers cannot read the vibrations, white noise in the vestibule, and the clearing of everyone but the judge, jury, bailiff, clerk, lawyers and defendant.
The Second Chance Act — The resentencing law John Kiriakou read about in The New York Times inside FCI Loretto and used to win freedom for other prisoners — most notably Mark Lanzalotti, whose petition he wrote and who was released 17 years into a 30-year sentence.
Snowden did not defect — John Kiriakou's two corrections to the treatment of Edward Snowden at Tulsi Gabbard's 2025 confirmation hearing — that "traitor" has a constitutional definition Snowden does not meet, there having been no declaration of war since December 1941, and that Snowden did not defect to Russia but was stranded in a Moscow transit lounge en route to Ecuador when John Kerry revoked his passport.
The ATF funding rider — The provision John Kiriakou describes as the reason no American felon has had firearm rights restored since the 1990s: a Clinton-era law permitting non-violent, non-drug felons to apply to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, paired in the same statute with a bar on any federal money being spent to investigate the applications.
The clear and present danger finding — The presidential determination John Kiriakou says must precede any CIA paramilitary targeted killing — an assertion that the person concerned is a clear and present danger to the United States, to an American installation, or to an American person — and his judgement that in early 2026 that threshold had not been reached in Iran.
The contrition requirement — The rule John Kiriakou says defeats his own pardon applications before they begin — that an applicant must show proof of contrition — and his refusal to meet it. Asked whether he is sorry for the crime he committed, his answer is no, and that he would do it again.
The 11(c)(1)(C) plea — The unusual plea structure John Kiriakou's lawyers negotiated in 2012, in which the sentence is written into the agreement and the judge may accept or reject it but cannot change it. Judge Leonie Brinkema told the court she had never seen one in her career, said she did not like it, and told Kiriakou that if she could she would have given him ten years.
The Espionage Act and the Rosenbergs — John Kiriakou's short legislative history of the Espionage Act: written in 1917 to counter German saboteurs, slightly amended in 1950 after the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and never meaningfully updated since. It does not use the words classified information, because the classification system did not exist when it was drafted.
The EU whistleblower directive — The European Union whistleblower protection directive, which John Kiriakou describes as a watered-down descendant of the Greek law he helped write in 2015. His objection is to its exemption: the directive does not apply to Brussels itself. He treats that as an instance of a general legislative habit rather than a European failing — Congress, he notes, routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
The Guantanamo airfare catch — The pair of legal traps John Kiriakou describes around the detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have been cleared for release: no country will take them and Congress defunded the ability to pay for their flights, while a separate 2009 statute forbids any of them from setting foot on United States soil — so that even a conviction could not be served in an American prison.
The legal definition of whistleblowing — John Kiriakou's insistence that whistleblowing is a legally defined act rather than a figure of speech: bringing to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to public health or public safety — at any level of government.
The Official Secrets Act comparison — John Kiriakou has argued that for whistleblowers the United Kingdom is far worse than the United States, because the Official Secrets Act bars anyone from saying anything touching national security and is used, in his phrase, as an iron fist against whistleblowers and potential whistleblowers alike.
The order of the whistleblower process — John Kiriakou's objection to the 2019 Ukraine complainant — that the Whistleblower Protection Act prescribes a sequence in which the inspector general comes first and the congressional committee last, that this complainant went to the committee first, and that the inversion is a violation of the letter of the law.
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 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 swimming pool substitution — John Kiriakou's illustration of how classified words are handled at trial: prosecutors and judge agree in advance to replace them with harmless unclassified substitutes, so that "Vault 7" becomes "swimming pool" — and the jury, told the real words are too secret for their ears, concludes the defendant must be guilty.
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 unarmed ship — John Kiriakou's enumeration of war crimes committed in the 2026 Iran war — striking civilian targets, rocketing a school and killing 160 children, and sinking a naval vessel and then refusing to aid the survivors — and his insistence that the objection is not confined to Israeli conduct.
The war powers resolution vote — John Kiriakou's assessment of the congressional attempt to take back war powers over the 2026 Iran conflict: a sense-of-the-Congress resolution would have no teeth or authority, and a bill with legal force would simply be vetoed.
The writ of coram nobis — The second route out of his conviction that John Kiriakou describes, besides a pardon: a writ of coram nobis, under which the Justice Department would go to the Eastern District of Virginia and state that it made a mistake in prosecuting him, admits the mistake, and asks that the conviction be overturned. He calls them exceedingly rare, citing one around 2001 and one in 1986.
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.