The Capitol switchboard
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Before answering questions about his case at a 2021 event, John Kiriakou asked to be reminded to say something else first: "remind me to say something about the effect of calls to members of Congress. I spent years on Capitol Hill and they really do have an effect."

The House

His basis is having worked both chambers. On the House side, he says, "sometimes they jump too with just one phone call or one letter. They're very responsive to constituents."

He gives the mechanism from the inside. "I can't tell you how many times we would get a letter saying, you know, please co-sponsor HR 12345 just because I'm asking you to. And we would read it and say, well, what the heck is HR 12345? Okay, well, if this constituent wants it, sure, we'll co-sponsor that. And we would co-sponsor it."

The reason it works, on his account, is scarcity: "most people don't take the five minutes to write and express an opinion. So when they get an email or ten or a hundred on an issue, they react to it."

The Senate

The Senate is harder and works by volume. There, he says, calls and emails are collated by interns or junior staff members, so that a number of communications on one issue makes its way to the senator.

From his own time working for John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "one call is not going to make a difference, but ten or twenty calls are going to make a difference. At the very least it's going to push the issue onto his agenda. And so imagine what a hundred calls could do, or five hundred. I mean, that's real activism right there."

The number

Kiriakou gives the practical detail that removes the usual obstacle. Callers who do not know who their member is can dial the Capitol Hill operator on 202-224-3121: "the operator is trained to identify who that is and refer your call to the right office."

"So by all means email, call, do whatever is easiest for you, because they'll respond and react to it. ... This is not a waste of time. This actually works. I would encourage everybody to call their members."

The advice sits oddly alongside the rest of his account of Congress, in which the intelligence oversight committees are "little more than cheerleaders" and members were silent about his own case. Kiriakou does not reconcile the two, and the distinction implicit in his advice is between what Congress does about intelligence and what it does about a constituent who writes.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- John Kerry
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Whipping votes
