Category: Prosecution

20 articles in this category

Coffee with a cabinet member — John Kiriakou's disclosure that he had coffee with a member of the cabinet who told him to be patient about his pardon — and told him to watch what he said. He reports the meeting while stating plainly that there is nothing further he can do to make his case, and that he is not confident the outcome will be decided on justice.
"Do not ever attempt to contact me again" — The reply John Kiriakou says he received from John Kerry, then Secretary of State, after emailing him privately in the days before reporting to prison to beg that his sentence be commuted. Kiriakou had worked closely with Kerry for two and a half years; the one-line answer, sent after two or three days, was the last he ever heard from him.
Ed Martin and the pardon file — The US pardon attorney whose office John Kiriakou directed supporters to write to, and the message a mutual friend brought back from him: that he was the third person that day to call about Kiriakou, that Kiriakou should relax, and that his file was literally on Martin's desk. Kiriakou's advice to letter-writers was to send physical mail rather than email.
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.
"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.
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.
Never meet my grandchildren — The threat John Kiriakou says one of the prosecutors in his case made to him — that he was going to die in prison and would never meet his grandchildren — set against the forty-five years he faced under the original charges.
Pardons nobody asked for — Two cases John Kiriakou cites of people pardoned without applying: the Binance founder, who said publicly that he had never met the president, never asked for a pardon and never applied for one; and Darryl Strawberry, a New York Mets great with tax and drug problems behind him. Kiriakou raises both while waiting, unsuccessfully, for a pardon he has actively sought for years.
Suing the CIA — John Kiriakou's answer to whether anyone has ever successfully sued the CIA in civil court: not that he knows of. He allows only what he calls small, picky victories — chiefly suing for the right to sue — and applies the same pessimism to the burned officer whose case prompted the question.
The Armitage leak — John Kiriakou's account of who actually disclosed Valerie Plame's identity: Richard Armitage — whom Kiriakou identifies as deputy secretary of defense — who everybody assumed would be charged under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and who was never charged with any crime at all. Scooter Libby, he stresses, never leaked the name and was never accused of doing so; Libby fell on a perjury count.
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 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 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 sources and methods red herring — John Kiriakou's argument that the federal government invokes the exposure of sources and methods in every leak prosecution as a matter of routine, has never produced proof in any of them — not against Julian Assange, Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning — and that American claims of damage to national security should therefore not be taken seriously.
The supporters who could not be public — The thanks John Kiriakou offered on the day of his sentencing — to dozens of former and serving CIA officers, FBI agents and assistant United States attorneys who rallied to him, almost all of them privately, with cards, emails and donations to his defence fund.
The thirty-seven analysts — John Kiriakou's account of Tulsi Gabbard firing thirty-seven CIA analysts connected to the national intelligence estimate on Russian election interference, publishing their names, and thereby — because one of them was undercover — violating the same Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981 under which he was himself prosecuted. He says she will not be charged, and argues nobody should be.
The threat to testify — How John Kiriakou says he turned down the government's "best and final" offer of ten years: by warning that he would have to take the stand in his own defence and might let slip the war crimes he had witnessed in fifteen years at the CIA.
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 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.