The declination letter
======================

The declination letter was the Justice Department's decision, communicated to John Kiriakou's attorneys in December 2008, not to prosecute him over his December 2007 ABC News interview.

The investigation

Kiriakou has said that the day after the broadcast the CIA filed what is called a crimes report against him with the FBI, alleging that he had revealed classified information to the public. The FBI investigated him from December 2007 to December 2008. 

The grounds

At the end of that year the department sent his attorneys a letter declining to prosecute. Kiriakou has given two reasons as stated in it. The first was that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross had all published papers saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that it was, in his phrase, the worst kept secret in Washington. 

The second was the legal principle he has repeated ever since: that it is illegal to classify a crime. As he puts it, a programme in which CIA officers are violating United States law cannot be classified. 

The celebration

Kiriakou and his wife went out to dinner that night to celebrate.  

What followed

Three weeks later Barack Obama was inaugurated and named John Brennan deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism. Kiriakou has said the two men had always disliked each other, that he never trusted Brennan, and that Brennan was one of the godfathers of the torture programme.  

Kiriakou says he had no idea that within days of the inauguration Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case; that for the next three years his telephones were tapped and his email intercepted; and that teams of FBI agents followed him everywhere, including into church. He was charged in January 2012 with five felonies, including three counts of espionage.  

A year of investigation, then a celebration dinner

The sequence Kiriakou describes begins the day after the December 2007 ABC interview, when the CIA filed a crimes report against him with the FBI alleging he had exposed classified information in violation of the Espionage Act. The Bureau then investigated him for a full year, from December 2007 to December 2008.

In December 2008 his attorneys received the declination letter, stating that prosecutors were declining to charge him because they did not believe he had revealed classified information. Off the record, one of the FBI agents told his attorney "that the torture program was the worst kept secret in Washington." Kiriakou and his wife, herself then a senior serving CIA officer, went out to dinner that night to celebrate the year-long cloud lifting.

It did not last four weeks.

See also

- John Brennan
- Brian Ross
- CIA crimes reports against Kiriakou
- Bankruptcy And The Dropped Charges
- The rogue officer remark
