The Lafayette Square tents
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The Lafayette Square tents are the long-standing protest encampment opposite the White House, discussed by John Kiriakou on the DeProgram programme in August 2025 during the federal takeover of the District of Columbia police.

The complaint

The immediate occasion was political. Kiriakou says the pretext for part of the crackdown was "a complaint from a Republican congressman from New Jersey about this tent that is set up directly across the street from the White House at the edge of Lafayette Square." He describes it as "a pro-Palestine, pro-nuclear disarmament kind of ongoing long-term protest."

The congressman "wants the Secretary of the Interior to take it down by force."

What Kiriakou says about its age

His objection is that there is nothing new to respond to. "Tell you the truth, there have been tents there since I arrived in DC in 1982. It's just a thing. It's always been."

The remark also fixes a date in Kiriakou's own chronology, his arrival in Washington in 1982, before his intelligence career began.

The Union Station tent

He describes a second site: "another sort of sister tent in front of Union Station, the train station up on Capitol Hill." Kiriakou says he had spoken to the man there the previous week and asked whether he was getting pushback "from the cops or from the Trump people."

The answer was no. "Every once in a while somebody will walk past and give him the finger, but most people, he said, are very supportive and pleasant and say encouraging things."

He had walked past the White House site himself a few nights earlier without stopping: "he was just sitting in a lawn chair holding a Palestinian flag, and people were taking pictures in front of the tent, and then taking pictures in front of the White House."

The other alteration to the lawn

In the same passage Kiriakou noted a change made at the other end of the argument, on the White House grounds themselves: "I did notice that Donald Trump ordered that a giant hole be dug in the front lawn of the White House, the north lawn." A flagpole followed, which both hosts compared to the oversized flags flown at motorway car dealerships.

See also

- The National Guard In Washington
- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
