Leonard Peltier
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Leonard Peltier is one of the prisoners John Kiriakou names when asked whose cases deserve attention alongside Julian Assange's. He calls him "a really great example" of the pattern he is describing, and states the grounds in two parts: "not only is he old and in poor health, but he's factually innocent."

The factual claim rests on the Bureau's own revision. "Finally the FBI, after all these years, all these decades, they finally came out and said, well, okay, our analysis now is that he actually didn't fire the shots that killed these two FBI agents. So why in the world is he in prison serving a life sentence?"

He records the clemency history as a series of non-events. "So many of us believed that Barack Obama was going to finally, if not pardon him, at least commute a sentence and let him live out his days at home. And that never happened. There was never any interest in his case in the Trump administration." On the administration then in office he gives a count: Biden "has issued the fewest number of pardons at this stage of his administration of any president in modern times. He's pardoned three people, two drug dealers and a Secret Service agent who sold a classified file to a journalist." His minimum ask is the lesser instrument: "even if you don't want to pardon people and formally legally forgive the crime, the least you can do is allow a commutation."

Why the cases do not end

Asked whether the persistence is personal, Kiriakou agrees and then reduces it to a career mechanism, which he applies equally to his own case and to Assange's.

> "It is personal, because they don't get promoted by not prosecuting you. They don't get promoted by not asking for the longest sentence. They don't get promoted by advocating for your release from prison. They get promoted by being as tough and mean and strong and ruthless and brutal as they possibly can."

See also

- Julian Assange
- John Kiriakou
- Daniel Hale
