Laura Loomer
============

Laura Loomer is the American activist whose attack on John Kiriakou he recounts alongside an earlier one by Louise Mensch, as the case where he chose not to act. He learned of it the way he learned of the first: "I woke up one Sunday a few months ago to half a dozen emails from friends saying, buddy, Laura Loomer is just tearing you up on Twitter."

The charges were specific. She "called me a Russian spy, a Russian asset, and a common criminal." He went back to the lawyer who had handled the Mensch letter, and got the opposite advice: "nobody takes Laura Loomer seriously. She's a nobody." The reasoning offered was that she is "literally the only person in Donald Trump's circle that even Trump thought was so crazy that she didn't deserve a government job." Kiriakou let it go, and "the very next day, she just moved on to somebody else."

The turn on Russia and Ukraine

Kiriakou reads her switch of position as a career calculation rather than a change of mind. She "has been all about Russia, Russia, Russia since the very beginning until now. And now it's all about Ukraine." His explanation is that she has finally understood the appointment is not coming, "she's not going to get a job at the White House. She's not going to be named the head of some obscure federal agency somewhere", and so has fallen back on what serves her own following: "switching sides on Russia Ukraine was the way to go."

The defence he did not ask for

He tells one coda with evident pleasure. While the attacks were running, a stranger opened a new account solely to post a single comparison, then deleted it: the account had asked an AI chatbot which country benefited most from what Kiriakou says, the answer given was the United States, on the basis of his torture-programme whistleblowing, and then put the same question about Loomer's statements, where the answer given was Israel. Kiriakou's response was to thank whoever it was: "thank you for defending me like that."

See also

- Louise Mensch
- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
- Podcasters On Foreign Payrolls
