Leaker versus whistleblower
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Leaker versus whistleblower is the labelling dispute that followed John Kiriakou's arrest, and which he treats as a substantive editorial position rather than a matter of house style.

The year-long campaign

Following his arrest it took his lawyers, "especially Jesselyn Radack, one year, from January of 2012 to January of 2013, to get CNN and MSNBC to stop calling me CIA leaker John Kiriakou and to start calling me CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou."

The outcome was uneven. CNN has used whistleblower ever since. Fox, "for whatever reason, has always referred to me as a whistleblower." MSNBC, in his account, still called him a leaker seven years later, and Rachel Maddow referred on air to "John Kiriakou, who styles himself a whistleblower."

The killed segment

He offers a 2019 episode as the same disposition in live form. Two days before the interview he taped a segment for MSNBC on the Ukraine call whistleblower; the network never ran the clip. He was introduced as "former CIA officer and convicted felon John Kiriakou", "not a word about whistleblowing", a description he calls "utterly irrelevant" to a booking about someone else's complaint.

What the producers wanted, in his reading, was for him to criticise the president, praise the whistleblower and praise the CIA for coming forward. He told them instead that the facts were arriving in pieces from the White House, the Oversight Committee and probably CIA leaks to the press, and that it was not yet clear the whistleblower should be trusted. "That didn't fit into their narrative."

The walkout

A second MSNBC taping from the same autumn ended with him halfway out of the chair. Ari Melber introduced him as a leaker and as a convicted felon; Kiriakou answered "okay, if you're going to play games like that, I'm walking" and took his microphone off. Melber apologised and asked what he objected to. The objection was the pairing: "You brought me on here with Daniel Ellsberg of all people, the godfather of all whistleblowers, to talk about whistleblowing. And then you introduced me as a leaker and convicted felon." That taping, too, was recorded in advance rather than live. It is treated separately at the Melber walkout.

The two MSNBC accounts sit twelve days apart and share a network, a pre-recorded format and the convicted felon introduction, but he describes them differently, one as a segment about the Ukraine call whistleblower that was never aired, the other as a panel on whistleblowing with Daniel Ellsberg that he nearly left. He does not say whether they were the same booking, and the accounts are recorded here as he gave them.

In the same conversation he sets the networks against each other by name: it took his attorneys a full year to move CNN off CIA leaker, Fox used whistleblower from the very beginning, and MSNBC "still refuses", with Maddow, whom he says he boycotts, still saying "John Kiriakou, who styles himself a whistleblower."

Why the word matters

The distinction is not cosmetic in his usage. A leak is the unauthorised release of information; whistleblowing is the reporting of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or a threat to public health or safety, which the law explicitly protects. Being described as the former strips the legal defence out of the description while leaving the conviction in, which is what he objects to in the convicted felon framing.

See also

- The Melber walkout
- Jesselyn Radack
- John Kiriakou
- The Ukraine call whistleblower
- CIA media revolving door
