National Archives declassification
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National Archives declassification is John Kiriakou's account of why U.S. government records stay secret long past the 30-to-35-year statutory-declassification deadline. The National Archives, the ultimate repository of classified documents, runs a computer system 20 years out of date; its head, he says, has repeatedly asked Congress for a smaller budget; and the system has no connectivity, forcing agencies to mail documents double-wrapped by hand. The result is a Freedom of Information Act backlog he estimates at 500 years, he filed a request in 2015 about a 1950s science-fiction writer's possible CIA work, and nine years later was told he would be answered in "about 30 more." As an analyst, he once spent six weeks of 12-hour days clearing an eight-foot stack of Middle East FOIA documents, almost none still classified. In a separate telling, Kiriakou puts the National Archives' declassification queue at 600 years at the current pace, and says many federal agencies now over-classify simply to avoid embarrassment rather than for any genuine national-security reason. He makes the same point about the 9/11 Commission: despite being staffed with some of the country's best analysts and investigators, its members were never permitted to interview anybody from the CIA or anybody at Guantanamo, so it never got the full story.

The Mar-a-Lago affidavit and the limits of declassification

When the FBI's Mar-a-Lago search affidavit was unsealed in August 2022, Kiriakou discussed it with journalist Kevin Gosztola while declining, alongside co-host Michelle Witty, to comment substantively on air the way MSNBC's panel of eight commentators had, because the document was so heavily redacted that "we didn't have any idea what it said." Kiriakou was careful to distinguish his criticism of the Espionage Act itself from any defense of Donald Trump personally, calling it "a flawed law that is used to silence whistleblowers" and noting he had been accused online of being a Trump apologist simply for making that distinction.

On the underlying claim that Trump had declassified the documents before they went to the Archives, Kiriakou rejected the argument then being advanced by Kash Patel: there was, he said, no process of declassification ever undertaken, since a president who declassifies documents is legally required to have them posted to the National Archives' or a presidential library's website, "that was never done with a single page of these documents."

Storing classified material: the vaulted space

Kiriakou described the legal requirements for a "vaulted space" in which classified information may be stored: a steel vault door with a combination lock, motion detectors, a heavy-duty solid-steel safe rather than an ordinary one, and specially treated windows to defeat laser-vibration eavesdropping. Building one is expensive, he noted the government built one at the Eastern District of Virginia so Jeffrey Sterling could confer with his attorneys during his trial, at a cost of about $125,000. He recalls the same Jeffrey Sterling trial, and the earlier Tom Drake case, invoking the Classified Information Procedures Act to protect information he says wasn't really classified in the first place, to the point that the government would replace a word it considered classified with a substitute like "swimming pool," and one witness testified in earnest that the word "zarf," standing alone, was unclassified.

What former presidents retain

A former president leaves office with only a secret-level security clearance and no longer receives daily briefings. If he wants to be briefed on a subject, he can call a CIA liaison officer at Langley and ask that an analyst be sent to brief him at the secret level, but that briefing excludes anything derived from NSA intercepts or from human sources, unless the CIA's Directorate of Operations has specifically pre-cleared it. In another telling, Kiriakou says every former president retains a lifetime secret-level (not top-secret) clearance and is entitled to a secret-level briefing from a CIA analyst any time he requests one; over his career he personally briefed Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush this way multiple times. He says the only clearance revocation he ever heard of in his career was that of CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner, who, preparing to give a speech about pro-democracy movements in the Persian Gulf on a cruise ship, was deliberately briefed only at the unclassified level; when Kiriakou asked why, he was told simply: "Because we hate him. That's why."

The Intelligence Identities Protection Act exposure

Kiriakou, who pleaded guilty to a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act himself, said that if even a single name of a CIA officer who served overseas within the prior five years, active or retired, turned up among the retained Mar-a-Lago documents, that alone would violate the IIPA. The law, enacted in 1981 originally to counter Philip Agee's exposés of CIA officers, has since been extended to cover NSA undercover officers, certain contractors, and Navy SEALs.

A precedent from 1996

Kiriakou has separately recalled the case of a female CIA colleague who, in 1996, was having an affair with a retired senior CIA officer and revealed classified information to him during "pillow talk"; he disclosed it on CNN. She was not charged with espionage, instead she received a letter of reprimand in her personnel file, a four-week unpaid suspension, and a two-year promotion freeze, for theft of government property.

Sentencing exposure and prison classification

Discussing what a Trump conviction on comparable facts might carry, Kiriakou noted Espionage Act section 793(e) carries a maximum 10 years per count, matching the IIPA's 10-year maximum, with obstruction of justice and false statements each carrying five years; a non-Trump defendant, he estimated, would likely serve two to four years, noting Reality Winner's unusually harsh sentence of five years and three months. Because a national-security case of this kind would make a convicted Trump ineligible for a minimum-security work camp, he would go to a real high-security prison, the same designation Kiriakou says he was given himself: "I was told right to my face in prison that I was too dangerous to allow the public to be exposed to me."

Two reasons nothing gets released

Kiriakou separates capacity from will. On capacity, the agencies "can't keep up with the amount of information that needs to be declassified, they just bureaucratically don't have the staff and resources for it," and it is not going to be funded by Congress.

On will, he is equally direct: "they don't want to declassify these materials." When a mandatory review date arrives, the practice he describes is to go through the material "and try to find a new reason why it should be delayed."

Underneath both sits the volume problem he traces to classified email and the habit of stamping everything, "billions and billions of classified documents being created every single year, with no mechanism to police them or to eventually declassify them."

See also

- Operation Mockingbird
- Jason Leopold
- Espionage Act
- Intelligence Identities Protection Act
- Jeffrey Sterling
