The IRS audits of Kiriakou
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Among the consequences John Kiriakou attributes to his December 2007 disclosure of the CIA torture program, the earliest was fiscal rather than criminal. The Justice Department had declined the agency''s first criminal referral on the ground that the information was already public, but, he says, "immediately, within weeks, I was audited by the IRS. I''ve been audited by the IRS every single year since giving that interview in 2007."

He made the statement in January 2013, days after being sentenced to thirty months, which places the run of audits at five consecutive years by that point and puts them five years ahead of the Espionage Act charges eventually brought against him. He does not claim direct knowledge of who initiated them; he lists them factually, in sequence with the crimes reports the agency filed after each of his public appearances and the FBI surveillance he and his wife lived under.

The earliest account

The audits appear in the corpus as early as February 2013, given as the second half of a sentence about the criminal investigation rather than as a separate grievance: the Justice Department began investigating him the day after the December 2007 interview and never stopped, and "in addition, I've even been audited by the IRS every single year since I gave that interview." Asked whether that was a chilling effect, he agreed and called it "a program of harassment."

Transcription note: the 2013 auto-caption renders the verb as "honored by the IRS." The reading is unambiguous from the sentence and from the rest of the corpus, and the artifact is flagged rather than silently repaired.

See also

- CIA crimes reports against Kiriakou
- John Kiriakou
- Brian Ross
- The chilling effect of whistleblower prosecutions
