Federal plea coercion
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Federal plea coercion is John Kiriakou's term for how the federal system extracts guilty pleas. Prosecutors "stack" charges, 20 felonies threatening centuries in prison, then offer to drop 19 for a plea to one; with the government winning 98.2% of its cases (per ProPublica), even the innocent fold. Kiriakou says he stood in court and told the judge he was not actually guilty, only to have his attorney insist he say he was to get the deal, after another lawyer, Mark McDougall, told him the system is "not about justice; it's about mitigating damage."

Kiriakou describes two paired tactics prosecutors use to break defendants and win cases: "venue shopping," charging a defendant in the federal district most likely to produce a conviction and a severe sentence, and "charge stacking," piling five, ten, or twenty felonies onto a defendant, rather than the one crime actually alleged, and forcing them to defend against all of them until they go broke, at which point prosecutors offer to drop most of the charges in exchange for a plea to one. Kiriakou says the actual purpose of a case like his is not to maximize a sentence but to bankrupt and personally and professionally ruin the defendant, while frightening any other would-be whistleblower into silence.

In his own case, Kiriakou says he initially faced 45 years in prison and, according to ProPublica, the Justice Department wins 98.2% of its cases nationally. His attorneys told him that realistically, if he went to trial and lost, he was looking at 12 to 18 years, a risk his 11 defense attorneys were themselves divided on whether to take. The government's plea offer dropped from 45 years to 10, then to 8, then held at 5 years for an entire year, which Kiriakou refused, saying he would go to trial, before eventually settling around 30 months, of which he would serve a maximum of 23; he ultimately accepted, after also initially turning down that offer. Daniel Ellsberg, with whom Kiriakou consulted, advised him not to fight the Espionage Act charges and to take the deal, noting Kiriakou had five children to consider. Kiriakou says he spent $1.15 million on attorneys and still owes $880,000 of it that will never be repaid.

Incentive structures behind overzealous prosecution

Kiriakou argues the underlying driver of cases like his own is not any individual prosecutor's malice but simple career incentive: "Individuals don't get promoted by not arresting you. They don't get promoted for not pursuing charges against you. This is how they get ahead in life." He illustrates the point with an unrelated example, a whale-tour boat operator who was raided by the FBI and charged with a felony under the Endangered Species Act over an allegation that a passenger, not she, had whistled at a whale; she lost her job, pension, business, boat, and condo fighting the case for five years before the charge was finally reduced to a misdemeanor.

- Mark Mcdougall
- Espionage Act
- Daniel Ellsberg
- Leonie Brinkema

The arithmetic he was given

Kiriakou describes the method plainly: prosecutors "heap multiple major felony charges on you, knowing that you're going to run out of money, that your friends and family will eventually turn against you, you're going to exhaust yourself, and eventually you're going to take a plea just to make the rest of it go away."

In his own case the numbers did the deciding. He had run up legal bills of well over a million dollars and still owed his attorneys $880,000, without going to trial. Going to trial was estimated at a $3 million bill, and his lawyers put the realistic exposure on conviction at 12 to 18 years against a government offer of two and a half. With five children at home, "the decision's an easy one when you put it like that."

Forty-five years, and how it came down to thirty months

The opening position was the maximum. Kiriakou was facing 45 years, "and in fact, that was the Justice Department's first offer." The line he remembers came from one of the department's own attorneys: "take a plea to an espionage charge, Mr. Kiriakou, and you might live to meet your grandchildren."

What moved it was his willingness to stop calculating. The government's "best and final offer" was three and a half years, and by then he was, in his own words, "so depressed to the point of being suicidal, I just didn't care anymore." He told them he would roll the dice, go to trial, testify on his own behalf, and "might accidentally mention some of the horrible crimes against humanity and war crimes that I witnessed in 15 years at the CIA. And then we'll just see how the cards fall." The reply came back at 30 months, of which he served 23.

The financial outcome he states in two figures: a confiscated pension worth $700,000, and $1.1 million in attorney's fees "most of which I didn't have." "They literally quite literally bankrupted me."

Charges as attrition

Kiriakou describes the stacking of charges as deliberate method rather than prosecutorial excess. What the Justice Department does, he says, is heap charges on a defendant knowing that all but one will be dropped if he takes a plea, because the defendant will eventually be so beaten down that he gives up.

The attrition he describes is financial before it is psychological: the defendant spends every cent he has, then every cent he has been able to borrow from friends or family, then his pension, "unless they take it away from you like they did in my case", and still has the charges.

On his own pension he is brief and unhedged: he lost his federal pension. "I've got nothing. I'm going to have to work till the day I die. There's nothing I can do about it."

The arithmetic of his own plea

Kiriakou presents the decision as a calculation about his family rather than a judgement on the charges, which he maintained were false. The government had sought forty-five years. The question he put to himself was whether his family could live without him for two years, essentially on the kindness of strangers and family members, and the answer was yes, against whether they could live without him for the twenty years he realistically expected on conviction, and the answer was no.

"So I cut my losses and I took a plea."

What it failed to accomplish

Asked whether the prosecution had silenced him, Kiriakou returned to a line he says he used in a speech before going to prison: if they thought this would shut him up, they did not know him at all, because he had now devoted his life to fighting them.

Who drafts the agreement

Kiriakou describes the document at the end of a federal prosecution as the prosecutors' own. They write the final agreement; a defendant can object to its contents, and they can tell him to go fly a kite.

In his own case the agreement had him confessing to grave crimes he says he did not commit, and his objection to it in open court was met with the observation that the passage was just window dressing.
