The Chilean newspaper prediction
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John Kiriakou has recorded one prediction he made publicly and got wrong, and returns to it as a caution rather than a defence.

The question

In the week Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he says, he gave an interview to a Chilean newspaper. The paper put the same question to three people: to him, to Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency, and to Edward Snowden. All were asked whether they thought things would be better or worse under Trump for national security whistleblowers.

His answer

"I foolishly said that I was cautiously optimistic," he recalls, "because they couldn't possibly get any worse than they were under Barack Obama." His own verdict on the reasoning, delivered four years later: "Never say that. It was a stupid mistake, because of course things got worse almost instantaneously."

What he counted afterwards

He supports the correction with cases. Reality Winner, the National Security Agency whistleblower, was serving five and a half years. Terry Albury, the FBI whistleblower, was due out within a week of the conversation. And, he says, the country knew from Jeff Sessions, "the former attorney general and his big mouth", that a large number of national security leak investigations were then open.

His summary was blunt: "it's far worse than Barack Obama," and "the sentences are longer than they were under Barack Obama."

Why he keeps the error on the record

Kiriakou's public position is that the prosecution of whistleblowers is a bipartisan practice, and he has argued the point with statistics on both sides, noting in the same conversation that George W. Bush killed a handful of people by drone in his final month in office while Obama killed several hundred in his. The Chilean prediction is the counter-example he supplies against himself: an occasion when the bipartisan analysis he now applies would have saved him from an optimistic forecast, and did not.

See also

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Edward Snowden
- Thomas Drake
- Barack Obama
- Donald Trump
