Title: Every Official Everywhere With Classified Documents
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2023-01-28
URL: https://youtu.be/zWTHWRbcuyI
Duration: 36:00

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[00:00] hello everyone and welcome to the shadow proof YouTube Welcome um here for another conversation but before we get going I just want to take a moment to encourage you to subscribe to the channel you'll get alerts when we post new content you'll know when we're having conversations like this one and then also become a subscriber go to the center.org get a regular updates on whistleblower stories as well as the latest developments on WikiLeaks founder Julian assange's case uh without with

[00:33] that out of the way let's get to today's conversation I'm joined by my friend and colleague John kiriaku who is a CIA whistleblower uh he has his own newsletter which I think is just John kiriaku.substack.com that you can go subscribe you call it loud and clear loud and clear with John kiriaku yes yep and uh that goes back to what you did with Paul Wright and uh I used to be a regular on uh your show and also right

[01:06] and also uh your contributor to Consortium news and so welcome back thank you we've been doing these conversations on uh developments with Donald Trump unfortunately I didn't get one in with the with Joe Biden but frankly I found it to be kind of lame like the news was trying to squeeze something out of nothing although there is a little detail that I will ask you about that I find somewhat fascinating but now we're talking about well well

[01:37] we're talking about this so I'll just go ahead and let this uh local news broadcast do the work of setting it up classified documents are making headlines from former president Donald Trump and former vice president Mike Pence to sitting President Joe Biden but it's not a unique problem for high-ranking government leaders in fact it goes all the way back to Jimmy Carter's president see in a new report an anonymous source tells the Associated Press that former officials turn over classified information they found

[02:08] several times a year in fact One Source says Carter once found classified materials at his home in Plains and turned them over to the National Archives President Carter himself actually created the Presidential records Act of 1978 just three years before he left office that act namely changed legal ownership of the official records of the president from private to public and it set up a new structure for how presidents must manage records from their administrations it didn't go into effect for Carter's own presidency but

[02:40] former President Carter still invited Federal archivists to help him organize his records before they went before they were sent to his presidential library right here in Atlanta right and then now we're hearing that the National Archives has sent a letter to just about every representative of former presidential administrations has said no know if you got any records just let us know we'd really like to have them back yes yes we've we've really entered the

[03:12] Absurd uh you know the the big issue here and I know that you agree with me on this the big issue here is the overuse the misuse of the unconstitutionally vague Espionage Act um in my own case I I was charged with Espionage back in 2012. in my own case my judge said um that Espionage that she she would not respect precedent a precedent that was set in the Tom Drake case and she said that that in my

[03:45] case she was defining Espionage as providing National Defense information to any person not entitled to receive it and my attorneys jumped up and one of them said your honor wait are you saying that a person can accidentally commit Espionage and she said that's exactly what I'm saying and she looked at me and she said Mr kiriaku you either did it or you didn't do it and I think you did it well guess what that

[04:16] unconstitutionally broad uh uh definition of an unconstitutionally broad law means that Donald Trump Joe Biden um uh Mike Pence and who knows who else are technically guilty of having committed Espionage the way that the Espionage Act has been using is being used today makes them guilty now are they guilty of Espionage of course not should they be prosecuted for Espionage of course not but this gives us an

[04:50] opportunity to scrap this terrible law and to rewrite it so that people who are guilty of Espionage people working for our enemies people working on behalf of foreign governments or foreign powers can be prosecuted rightfully prosecuted and whistleblowers and people who accidentally take home a classified document are not subject to this Draconian law right what we are seeing is that the

[05:21] justice department has actually created this dilemma and where in which they find themselves where they actually should be following their own practice and indict all of these people everybody being found with documents yes and what we're learning is in fact they were wrong to charge all of you you reality winner anybody else Stephen Kim whomever who had documents that they should have

[05:54] charged them with a misdemeanor of mishandling classified information because then in this situation it would be fine to look the other way it would be fine to treat it as just like nothing that anybody should really worry about but now just just to do a quick accounting of it we we hear that Mike Pence first he says he doesn't have any documents very confidently and then documents are found in his possession and we we learned that

[06:26] they actually were briefings from foreign trips that he took as vice president which by the way that's that's not something to just shrug off because to me that's about 50 of the state Embassy cables that were published by Wikileaks which they still refused to declassify still treat as like highly sensitive material right most of those half of those are background briefings that's exactly what Mike Pence had I

[06:56] would go supposed to say I would go so far as to say that what Mike Pence has is is more serious than what Julian Assange released because those briefing papers those those briefing um uh well they call them briefing books that Mike Pence has include finished CIA intelligence for example psychological profiles of the foreign leaders that he's going to meet with that's very highly classified Julian Assange never released anything as highly classified as that so this is

[07:27] this is worse than than what Julian Assange is being accused of having done and then one thing we're we're uh in relation to Biden this is the part of what he did that I think deserves the most attention is that they found documents they believe he took when he was a Senator yeah when he was a Senator and you've got Senators like Mark Warner and Marco Rubio and others who have to go through all of these procedures to see documents

[07:57] scratching their heads trying to figure out what what is this what why did he think he was exempt from the rules Kevin this one worries me you know I spent I spent two years plus as the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and if you're on any committee other than the intelligence committee and and Joe Biden when he was a Senator he was the chairman of this of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if you're on the Foreign Relations Committee and you want to see classified

[08:29] documents you have to go down to the vaulted area uh the vaulted conference room that's managed by the Senate security officer right you can't just have classified documents in your office because your office is not a vaulted area it's not a secure area so you cannot have classified documents there if you wanted to read a briefing or to read international cable traffic you go down to the office of the Senate security officer which is underneath the capital Rotunda

[08:59] you make an appointment there you go down there they take you into the classified uh uh Vault the conference room and you can read those documents there you can't walk out with classified documents like you have to make an effort to walk out with classified documents and if Joe Biden had classified documents from his time as a senator he tried to take out those documents this is one of those issues that I think he's going to have to answer for to the American people and to

[09:31] explain you know classified docs from your Senate days those don't accidentally get into your stuff he's going to have to explain it and what we're hearing also is that emphasis on inadvertently I'd like to play this clip I don't have a lot of respect for the person asking this question but frankly it doesn't matter but I want to play to you what John Kirby who uh was was asked about

[10:05] um he's some official in the uh Biden Administration and I just want to play what he was saying in response to a question about you know particularly how does this happen how do documents leave a skiff and what should happen to somebody if they take documents that's it to walk out of a skiff with classified material everybody who goes in to a skiff uh knows what the requirements are to go in

[10:37] um and knows uh what the requirements are to go out um you know there's you can't bring personal devices in and uh you certainly can't leave uh with material unless that material is appropriately secured and usually what happens to someone in the chain of command if they do leave with a piece of classified material that they're not supposed to have or that is not secured I think uh if

[11:07] if you do it inadvertently or you do it and you really you realize you know you don't have it secured in a locked bag or you know you you self-report which is exactly what the president did self-reported um but you self-report and you uh you make sure that uh that you get the material back secured where it belongs um and that you're transparent about it okay yes and no I mean is it that easy I mean I'm thinking of people who are low

[11:39] level who I really care about who might find they have a document how do they convince their superiors that they weren't doing it deliberately well I I think I can shed some light on this if you if you walk out of a skiff and you want to take classified documents with you there are two ways to do it you have to put it in an envelope seal it Mark the classification on the front and back of the envelope put it in another envelope seal it again

[12:12] and then put the address of your home Agency on it and then you carry it with you and God help you you better not drop it or lose it or you know leave it somewhere right or your agency puts it in a uh it it's a leather bag with a double lock on it and you you put it in an envelope and then put the envelope in the leather bag and lock it and take it back to your agency I've honestly never heard of somebody

[12:44] just walking out of a skiff with classified documents and just kind of forgetting about it for you know 12 years and just finding it in his garage in a box that that's just not that doesn't happen in real life now with that said I want to give you an indication of how things have changed over the years when I was when I was at the CIA uh I sat next to a woman who had an affair with a former senior Cia officer who had become a commentator on CNN

[13:15] and in the course of you know their relationship pillow talk she she said something to him that was classified he went on to CNN and he repeated what she had told him the CIA immediately began an investigation and they very quickly zeroed right in on her they called her into security and they asked did you give this information to this guy who then broadcasted on CNN she said yes I did right now today

[13:46] she would be charged with Espionage and she would do if we look at the reality winner case which is one of the most recent she would do about five years in prison but what they did with her is they suspended her for four weeks without pay and they put a very strongly worded memo in her file saying that she did this and that was it now that's how they should have dealt with it she didn't commit Espionage she did something stupid was there any harm

[14:16] to the National Security no there wasn't but by God she'll never do it again because of that punishment so how did we get in 20 short years how did we get from from that this this sane approach to to the disclosure of classified information to just wantingly charging everybody with Espionage it doesn't make sense to me I'm I'm cautiously hopeful that this situation between Biden and

[14:47] Trump and Pence and whoever else happens to come forward and I think there probably will be others makes makes the situation so ridiculous that Congress is forced to take a closer look at reforming the Espionage Act otherwise it's just going to get worse and we're going to have to charge everybody with Espionage I mean in your pool who who who has documents next I mean I should we take Barack Obama we haven't heard without a doubt from Barack Obama yeah but I imagine he might

[15:18] have a document perhaps on the the targeted killing program he protect perfected just yeah just to keep for his own legacy and and it turns out it actually uh shouldn't be released because they were fighting the ACLU or the center for constitutional rights in court and or so I'm thinking I'm imagining of something that absurd you know I I saw I think it was in the New York Times yesterday that Bill Clinton and and both bushes have been cleared

[15:50] that there's no classified documents uh in their personal possession there are no classified documents that are inappropriately housed or stored at their presidential libraries nobody said anything about Barack Obama and so I I think I think you're on to something here I think probably the next announcement that we hear is oh my gosh how did this happen but Barack Obama has classified documents whether they're in that storage facility and outside of Chicago where they're awaiting the building of his Presidential Library or

[16:22] at his 14 million dollar Oceanfront mansion on Cape Cod my guess is that's what we hear next yeah and and just a quick aside from me personally as a Chicago resident the construction of his library is a scandal it's it's in a it it's it was uh a slap in the face for the whole community on the south side that had to give up all this property for this monstrous this gaudy monstrosity that he's going to construct on the lakefront uh anyways uh

[16:54] and I it's not even going to have documents it's not even going to be a library so there's not even any academic contribution that he's watching you the whole point that should be the whole point is for Scholars to be able to go to these presidential libraries and read these documents and use them you know in scholarly Publications or their PHD dissertations or whatever they shouldn't be they shouldn't be Alters to uh to you know self-promoting greatness

[17:27] so before we uh wrap this up I have a few quick clips I want to run by you because I think it touches on some aspects of this that I'm really glad someone with a wide platform was able to bring up so uh Jon Stewart has this podcast called the problem that is done by Apple TV plus you just did a conversation that went for about 45 minutes I found a lot of it pretty fascinating with someone from Columbia University named Matthew Connelly who

[17:58] has a book that was just released called the declassification engine and he spent like the last 10 years examining wide overclassification is such a problem and I think this is really what more of our conversations should be focused upon so I just want to get your reaction to a few of these points that that came up rather organically um and also I'll just say that I was kind of impressed I'm I mean I'm I'm I was gratified to learn that somebody who does this is spending so much time

[18:28] talking about politics and these issues actually seems very sympathetic and empathetic to what has unfairly happened to Chelsea Manning reality winner and Julian Assange and and did get it right so here I'm gonna play this first clip yeah so for an example when I first started out I mentioned how it was about 10 years ago I got together with some colleagues in the statistics department and computer science and we had this idea hey you know there's all the secrecy and there are millions now millions of Declassified documents and

[18:59] who knows how many still classified billions uh probably and we thought you know why don't we begin using like these data science tools to get to the bottom of this like let's start figuring out like what is like an actual top secret and and what is really something that's already in the public domains people you know things that people should already know and what we found is that there are lawyers out there you know former government lawyers uh you know one of them was the general counsel of the NSA another one was they had a major crimes at the southern district these lawyers uh told us that we could get prosecuted

[19:32] under the Espionage Act just for analyzing Declassified documents you know so it's not just like yes now in God's name you can be prosecuted for Espionage by analyzing Declassified information that's the theory that doesn't make any sense if you go to a very fancy law school it's got to be a fancy one it has to be fancy and you get paid a thousand dollars an hour you can come up with all kinds of theories he's right it's called the Mosaic

[20:03] concept yep it's something that the that the Soviets came up with in the 1960s where they believed that if you if you look at enough unclassified or Declassified information you can put pieces of this Mosaic together or puzzle together to come up with a classified program and so it's something that the United States has long struggled with but he's absolutely right if if there was some uh

[20:33] some prosecutor in the southern district of New York or more more likely in the eastern district of Virginia who wanted to make a name for himself um sure I could see I could see a professor uh being charged with Espionage for looking at unclassified or Declassified information absolutely yeah so I was looking at something from the information security overs it's the iso um that is in charge of doing these

[21:04] reports annually and examining the classification system uh they're supposed to do some oversight and it's really hard job that they have because they just don't really have much power over what the executive branch does and the choices that these agencies make but I noticed that even they were and this is this is wild to me they were suggesting that uh controlled unclassified information or they say cui which isn't secret it's not top secret

[21:35] but controlled unclassified information is not covered by The Insider threat program yes and that they should expand it so that they have uh are trying to track and monitor any threats of people like taking controlled um classified information which is just like just this metastasization of this getting worse and worse yeah that's the word for it in the intelligence community that information is is called

[22:07] sbu sensitive but unclassified yeah yeah it's not a classification it's a control so so things that have sbu on them are like um a training manual for how to clean a gun right or um the department of commerce's trade numbers that are going to come out in three days those are sensitive but unclassified

[22:39] they have nothing to do with sources and methods they may potentially possibly cause a little bit of embarrassment if they were to leak but they are not classified and to to include information like that under the the Espionage Act would be to add an entire layer of federal employees underneath the Espionage acts auspices

[23:11] people who for example people at the office of personnel management okay nobody at the office of personnel management has access to classified information they don't need access to classified information so everything that they do because it's Personnel based it's sensitive but unclassified well let's say uh you know you're a really hard worker you're a branch chief at the office of personnel management and you need to really finish these Personnel uh updates so you take some of

[23:43] the some of the files home with you and you accidentally leave them on the subway what you're going to be charged with Espionage come on this is really entering the realm of the of the Absurd yeah but it's also like a window into this National secrecy complex and and how much of a like psychosis these people have of this need to protect and I just wanna I know you know this but I want people who hear us having this

[24:14] conversation or watch us have this conversation recognize what like so you can't really tell what this document is but what I'm going to tell you by pointing out these black bars is that this is the redaction of how much money they're spending to declassify information you're not even allowed to know how much money the CIA spends on deep classification systems or what NSA spends on B classification systems or

[24:45] what the National geospatial Intelligence Agency or the odni the office of the director for you're not allowed to know what they're spending that is outrageous and it's typical and very common you know we only know we only have a general idea of what the CIA spends because the former deputy National deputy director of National Intelligence Mary Margaret Graham

[25:15] accidentally let it slip while giving a speech during the Obama Administration otherwise we wouldn't have any idea what the budget is the budget has always been classified yeah all right so I got one more clip I split it into two just for the sake of talking points but it's about a minute and a half and then we'll wrap this up uh so here so in 2012 they said it was over 90 million times so that's three times every second three times every second somebody is saying yeah this is

[25:46] classified right and just the other day I was looking at a document from The Carter Administration back in 1977 they were trying to do something about this you know impossible problem and the NSA the National Security Agency the people like who spy on everyone um and surveillance they try to get Exempted entirely you know from the whole system for trying to review and release information and one argument they made was that request was that a top secret request it was in the Carter library for decades before we

[26:18] we had found this document with a bunch of other documents so the figure they gave is they said how are we supposed to declassify stuff we produced 10 000 secret reports a day so this is back in 1977. can you imagine what the volume is now it's estimated the state department even I think it was like eight or ten years ago the state Department's producing two billion email a day right so how are you going to control and protect all those secrets yeah that's right that's right I remember I was overseas I

[26:49] was on an overseas uh temporary Duty with the CIA on the day that classified email was implemented and I remember the station chief that I was working for saying we thought things were out of hand already there's no way to control classified email and you know I've mentioned to you in the past Kevin that at the CIA and at NSA and DOD and NSC and so many of these other organizations literally everything that is produced gets a classification on it

[27:19] even when it is legitimately unclassified for example I would write an email to my wife who was also a senior Cia officer and I'd say do you want to meet for lunch and I would classify it secret because every CI employee has classification Authority secret hum 4-82 which is the the actual Authority human intelligence and she would respond sure let's meet in front of the deli at 12 and she would classify her response Secret

[27:51] hum 4-82 well it's not secret that I want to meet my wife for lunch it's not secret that we're going to meet at noon in front of the deli but that's just how you're taught how you're trained to do it where everything is classified because they say look if if you make it unclassified some Malignant Force out there the Russians the Chinese whomever they might be able to put it together and come up with some classified information as a result you have billions and

[28:21] billions of classified documents being created every single year with no mechanism to police them or to eventually declassify them and uh and just very quickly and then I'll play the the rest of the clip that I have uh are in your mind our officials stamping these documents secret because they want their boss or Superior to give them attention that's something that this uh that that Connolly says in this

[28:52] conversation with Jon Stewart that he believes that uh there's there's so many documents that get classified just because that makes them important to the person at the agency oh without a doubt not so much at the CIA because everything's classified anyway but at some of these lesser agencies absolutely absolutely it makes you feel like you know you're one of the In Crowd you're one of the you know the special people that has access maybe the guy you sit next to he doesn't have access so you're more you're more important than he is

[29:24] you see that every day yeah so I found that in fiscal year 2015 this was flagged by the project on government oversight that uh they do these this thing called classification challenges um which is a natural uh procedure that is uh apparently built into some of these agencies if you're confident that certain information has been classified inappropriately you you you and you have a challenge and then what they found was

[29:54] nearly half of the classification challenges ended up overturning the initial classification decision of that year now it's much lower maybe they're doing a better job I don't know what but that to me is like quite a statement of how far afield this whole system has gone and so um let's close I've got uh Jon Stewart making what I think is the essential point and then I'll get your response to it and then we'll get out of here and

[30:25] the crazy part is it doesn't feel as though journalists have any sense of how to put any of this into context they own right now they are chasing something that they believe is spy versus spy Trump V Biden when they're not looking at the broader absurdity of the entire National Security State so true so completely true there are very very

[30:55] few journalists certainly none in the mainstream that that I've encountered who really have a full appreciation for what this uh this issue is yeah I'm glad that you're that you're doing this because you understand the problem the problem isn't who found how many documents in whose garage the the problem is why are these documents classified in the first place yep and the problem isn't who is this going to be worse for in the 2024 election exactly and and uh oh if uh if if Biden apologizes does that mean that

[31:28] we can still prosecute Trump or does it mean that Trump doesn't get to use Biden to his benefit to get people to vote for him and it's it's like it's the most mind-numbing stupidity for them to go back and forth and I don't see how you can even try and pull this and make it seem like it's a relevant issue I just don't think I have to say this for people who got through this video and and go well why do I care about classified documents

[32:00] it's not that's not anything in my daily life that I have to deal with that's not anything that I have to worry about when I'm working my job trying to put food on the table uh trying to figure out how to pay my bills and take care of my debts I understand that completely and I think that's what's insane but um there was there was this one comment I read from this uh low ranking officer I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna

[32:30] I'm gonna read this to you and and conclude with this because I found it this is just it's just a YouTube comment uh and normally I would think it's completely insignificant but I find this to be just like why I believe what we're observing in this country has struck such a nerve and um here this comes from his name's Tony and he says I spent many years in the military and as a civilian handling classified documents and materials as a classified document

[33:02] custodian it was my responsibility to ensure that any document that was under my control was signed for and when returned signed back into the filing system these signatures were required for anyone that removed a document from my control if that document was not returned within a specified time frame it was reported and an immediate investigation was conducted how the hell does this crap happen with the people that we have entrusted with our safety and our protection are these people so

[33:35] far above the law that they just don't give a damn I really empathize with that I do too I do too yeah we should put we should put him on the Blue Ribbon panel to uh to declassify these billions of documents yeah I mean all of these people I mean at this point I think you know nearly half of it has to be Declassified but you know the problem is

[34:05] two that uh the agencies can't keep up with the amount of information that needs to be Declassified now they just bureaucratically don't have the staff and resources for it it's not going to be funded by Congress and then two they don't want to declassify these materials and so anyways if you have uh like 25 years is up and let's say all the material in Obama's administration

[34:37] should be Declassified well then they're going to go through it and try to find a new reason why it should be delayed as far as declassification some of that might be administrative uh just to cut them a break so they have less volume of material but some of it's going to be because they don't want us to have certain materials and uh and so it you know if that's the case and you just have uh officials that are going to just abscond and take off with

[35:08] material for their Memoirs or whatever they're going to do with it or just to keep it in storage I guess just like I don't know I'm sort of like imagining this like absurdity of uh of like a storage unit on like Pawn Stars and then you pull up the garage and then you find out that not only are there antiques there but Joe Biden also has some like documents in his in his uh storage unit that yeah exactly on this reality show

[35:39] anyways thank you John thank you for your time I appreciate it uh maybe you want to take a moment to tell people where they can find your work once again thank you thank you I've moved everything over to sub stack so it's John kiriaku.substack.com it's called um loud and clear with John kiriaku thanks for checking it out all right everyone
