The John Kiriakou Task Force
============================

Asked in 2019 about his personal grievance with Robert Mueller, John Kiriakou answered that it was not abstract. Mueller had been the FBI director when Kiriakou was arrested, and, in Kiriakou's account, had personally created a unit inside the Bureau named after him.

Twelve agents

Mueller, he said, appointed twelve FBI agents to what Kiriakou calls the John Kiriakou task force. They tapped his phones and intercepted his emails. They put agents in cars, two at a time, following him to work, to church and to the grocery store, twenty-four-hour coverage, trying to catch him committing a crime. He was not committing any crimes, he said, and that went on for three years.  

The order to charge anyway

Kiriakou's account of how the case survived that barren investigation turns on a memo. It was John Brennan, he said, who when Barack Obama became president sent a memo to Eric Holder at the Justice Department saying to charge him with espionage. Holder came back and said that his people, meaning the Mueller task force, did not think he had committed espionage. Brennan's response, per Kiriakou, was to charge him anyway and make him defend himself.  On January 12, 2012, an agent by the name of Peter Strzok put him in handcuffs and took him to a holding cell underneath the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Kiriakou draws the obvious line from this to later events, observing that the same people who went after Donald Trump were the ones who came after him, and that whatever one chooses to call it, the deep state, the state, the federal bureaucracy, it exists, and these are the men who run it. 

The three years that preceded it

The task force was the second act. Kiriakou has consistently dated the first FBI investigation to the day after his December 2007 ABC News interview, and says it ran a full year, from December 2007 to December 2008, before the Bureau determined he had not committed a crime, closed the case and sent his attorneys a declination letter.  Three weeks later, he says, Obama was inaugurated, styled himself the most transparent president in history, and secretly ordered the case reopened, something Kiriakou did not know at the time. 

Who set it up

Kiriakou attributes the task force's creation directly to Robert Mueller. Mueller, when he was head of the FBI, set up the John Kiriakou task force, and that task force spearheaded the investigation and then finally the arrest and the prosecution.

He raises it in 2018 as a disclosure rather than as an argument, prefacing it as a matter of transparency before criticising Mueller on other grounds, and declining, as he puts it, to make anything up in order to complain about him.

The invitation

The task force's last approach to Kiriakou before his arrest was made as a request for assistance. In January 2012 he took a call from the FBI's Washington field office asking whether he remembered the case he had helped with about a year earlier, the supposed Japanese diplomat, and saying the Bureau had a similar case and needed his help. He agreed at once: "anything for the FBI."

He met two agents that Thursday in a vaulted conference room and, by his account, was an hour into the meeting before realising the case was against him. At the end of it the agents told him that a search warrant was being executed on his home as they spoke; asked whether he was under arrest, they told him "not yet."

See also

- Robert Mueller
- Peter Strzok
- FBI apologies to Kiriakou
- John Brennan
- Eric Holder
- Espionage Act
- Brian Ross
