Plato Cacheris
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Plato Cacheris was a legendary Washington, D.C. defense attorney who served as John Kiriakou's lead counsel in his 2012,2013 prosecution. Kiriakou describes him as "this legendary guy", at the time of the case approximately eighty years old, six-foot-two, 280 pounds, mean-faced, with fifty-two years at the D.C. criminal bar. The Washington Post called Kiriakou's legal team, Cacheris among them, "legal titans", the same lawyers who had represented Monica Lewinsky, convicted CIA mole Aldrich Ames, and Attorney General John Mitchell during Watergate. When prosecutors' first offer was 45 years, Kiriakou's response was blunt: "I'm not doing 45 minutes."

The 2007,2008 declination

Cacheris represented Kiriakou years earlier, during a separate FBI investigation running from December 2007 to December 2008, predating the 2012,2013 Espionage Act prosecution. Cacheris told him at the outset, "you didn't commit a crime... nobody in America knows more about the espionage act than I do." The investigation ended unusually: the FBI sent Cacheris a declination letter stating it had concluded Kiriakou committed no crime and closing the case, a rare step Kiriakou says the Bureau does not normally take. Kiriakou believes then-FBI Director Robert Mueller, who felt strongly the CIA's torture program was itself a crime, personally instructed the counterintelligence division to send the letter.

The Kiriakou case

Among the 15,000 pages of classified discovery in Kiriakou's case was a memo to Peter Strzok from an FBI agent recommending the agency end an operation in which an undercover agent posing as a Japanese diplomat had repeatedly tried to induce Kiriakou to sell classified information, "recommend that we end this operation. He's clearly not going to take the bait." When Kiriakou asked Cacheris why the government would press on anyway, Cacheris told him: "Because they have a shit case and they know it's shit, and that's why we're going to trial." Elsewhere Kiriakou recalls the fuller version of that answer, that the government was, in Cacheris's words, "trying to frame you."

The plea-deal pivot

For most of the prosecution, Cacheris advised Kiriakou to reject every Justice Department plea offer, including a final offer of three and a half years, on the ground that the case could be beaten at trial. The Department's pattern of coming down in offered sentence struck him as proof of weakness:

> I've been a criminal defense attorney in this city for 52 years, and this is the first time I've ever seen them come down in time. Usually they offer you 10, you say no, the next offer is 15, then 20.

In Kiriakou's own case, prosecutors' offers fell within a single week: 10 years on a Monday, eight years on Wednesday, five years on Friday, a pace Cacheris, who by then had spent 48 years practicing law in Washington, said he had never seen in a career that included representing Lewinsky, Mitchell and Ames. The offer continued down to three and a half years, which Kiriakou also rejected, before the Justice Department returned with a "best and final" offer of 30 months, of which he would serve 23, the deal he ultimately accepted in place of the original 45-year threat.

On the morning of the decision, after Kiriakou had emailed his eleven-attorney team at 6 a.m. announcing he would refuse the deal, Cacheris drove to Kiriakou's house with three partners. His first words: "You stupid son of a bitch, take the deal." When Kiriakou protested that Cacheris had spent the whole case telling him not to, Cacheris replied: "I only told you that to keep your spirits up." Another attorney put it in starker terms: the case was "not about justice... it's about mitigating damage," and a trial loss meant realistically 12 to 18 years. With five children at home, Kiriakou took the deal.

The defense team

Kiriakou's team ran to eleven attorneys, including the D.C. firm Trout Cacheris and Mark McDougall, a Georgetown law professor and chairman of the white-collar defense practice at Akin Gump Strauss. Not everyone on the roster was a friend of the case: one attorney at his old firm, referred to by Kiriakou only as Lanny, called him personally to say he had recused himself the moment he heard the government was going after Kiriakou, this despite Kiriakou having seen him standing next to the attorney general at a press conference. At least one of the Washington Post's "legal titans" represented him for free after he called her office and she agreed to take the case; regardless, Kiriakou says he ultimately spent $1.1 million on attorneys.

The jury consultant

Kiriakou's defense also hired O.J. Simpson's former jury consultant, the uncle of his best friend's wife, who flew in from Dallas, obtained a security clearance, and waived his usual $10,000-a-day fee out of what Kiriakou describes as pity for his situation. After reviewing the 15,000 pages of classified discovery, the consultant told Kiriakou's attorneys that the Eastern District of Virginia is known as the "espionage court" because no national-security defendant has ever won a case there, its jury pool is drawn from employees and relatives of the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and intelligence-community contractors.

Robert Hanssen

Cacheris also represented FBI counterintelligence officer Robert Hanssen, the Soviet/Russian mole. Per Kiriakou, the government had Hanssen "dead to rights," and the only concession Cacheris obtained in the plea was that Hanssen's wife could continue to receive his pension.

'You may live to meet your grandchildren' (Judging Freedom)

John Kiriakou says the government's first offer was 45 years, with an Obama prosecutor telling him, "Take the deal, Mr. Kiriakou, and you may live to meet your grandchildren." He hired Plato Cacheris, whom his godfather had introduced him to over lunch in Alexandria 30 years earlier, telling the teenage Kiriakou, "if you're ever in trouble, hire this man."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Robert Hanssen
- Peter Strzok
- Espionage Act
