The 1996 campaign contribution disclosure
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The 1996 campaign contribution disclosure is an internal whistleblower report John Kiriakou made while serving overseas as a CIA officer, and the case he uses as the benchmark for what a proper disclosure looks like.

What he reported

"In 1996 I was serving overseas and I became aware of a very large but illegal campaign contribution to the Dole presidential campaign, and so I reported it." He took it to the CIA Inspector General. The IG took the information, opened an investigation, deemed it credible, and sent it to the Federal Election Commission. "End of story. That's a normal whistleblower disclosure."

He recounts the episode to define the term: whistleblowing is bringing to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety, and taking it to the chain of command, the Inspector General, or the congressional oversight committees.

Relation to the Bahrain cable

The corpus holds a second account of a 1996 illegal contribution to the Dole campaign from the same overseas tour. In that telling, a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain working as a Dole fundraiser solicited and received fifty thousand dollars from the Bahraini foreign minister and another fifty thousand from the Amir personally, and Kiriakou omitted the second contribution from his reporting cable on the instruction of Ambassador David Ransom. The two accounts describe different stages, what went into the cable, and what he separately put in front of the Inspector General, and Kiriakou does not link them explicitly in either telling.

Why it matters to him

The 1996 case is the control against which he judges later complaints. It is the reason his objection to the Ukraine call whistleblower is procedural rather than partisan: he has been through the process as it is written, and it functioned. It also sits oddly beside his own later career, since the same institution that processed his 1996 report correctly prosecuted him in 2012 for going to the press about torture after concluding that no internal route was open to him.

See also

- The Ukraine call whistleblower
- David Ransom
- CIA Torture Program Whistleblowing
- Whistleblower Protection Act
