Blackmail of closeted politicians
=================================

Prompted by the Bernie Moreno affair, Kiriakou puts a general question: "it makes one wonder too how many politicians, senior politicians, national politicians, do you think are closeted in some way and are being blackmailed for it?" The interest is professional as much as political, the leverage a concealed private life gives is the same mechanism the CIA relies on in recruitment.

The roll-call

His examples come from his own college years in the 1980s, when two Democratic congressmen from Massachusetts were outed at the same time. Barney Frank, who Kiriakou notes had recently died, was having an affair with a man who turned out to be a prostitute; Frank apparently did not know, and let him move into his house on Capitol Hill, where the man "was turning tricks in the congressman's house" while Frank was at work. Frank was forced to acknowledge that he was gay, and, in Kiriakou's summary, "nobody cared."

The comparison he draws is with Gerry Studds, who "was having sex with underage male pages, 16 year olds" and who, "believe it or not", was re-elected and never charged with a crime. A Mississippi Republican, whom he names as "John Henson", was caught in a House bathroom with his male chief of staff and did not survive the scandal. His last case is the Idaho senator arrested in a Minneapolis airport men's room for a foot-tapping signal, whose defence was that he had "a wide stance" and was tapping his toes at random rather than soliciting the man in the next stall; the senator's wife stayed with him. The auto-captions render the Mississippi congressman as "John Henson" and the Idaho senator as "Mccclure"; both are recorded here as spoken.

Kiriakou's summary of the pattern is that it is not exceptional: "this kind of thing happens all the time."

See also

- Bernie Moreno
- Max Miller
- Blackmail in agent recruitment
