"Do not ever attempt to contact me again"
=========================================

Among the accounts John Kiriakou gives of the weeks before he reported to prison is a single email exchange he has described as the end of a working relationship of years.

The request

Kiriakou said that "a couple of nights, a week, a week or so before I left for prison," he was "at my wit's end trying to save myself." He wrote to John Kerry, by then Secretary of State, at what he describes as "his private personal email address."

The request was narrow. Kiriakou did not ask to have the conviction vacated. "Mr. Secretary, I'm begging you to help me," he says he wrote. "Please ask the president if he'll commute my sentence. The conviction would still stand, but I could work and earn money for my family and keep my family together and put food on the table." A commutation would have left the criminal record intact and removed only the imprisonment.

The reply

Kerry did not answer immediately. Kiriakou says he "waited two, three days" and then responded.

The reply, in Kiriakou's account, consisted of one sentence: "Please do not ever attempt to contact me again." There was no explanation and no reason given. "That was the last time I heard from him," Kiriakou said.

When Ted Rall called the answer cold and brutal, Kiriakou agreed: "It was awful. It really was."

The prior relationship

What gives the exchange its weight in Kiriakou's telling is that the two men were not strangers. In the same conversation he said flatly: "I worked for Kerry for two and a half years, closely, closely with Kerry." His assessment of Kerry in that passage is unsparing, he calls him a scumbag and "a fake progressive," and says there is "literally nothing progressive about him at all", and he illustrates the judgement with a separate account of Kerry's arrangements to avoid a mooring tax on an ocean-going yacht.

Kiriakou offers the email as the concluding fact rather than as an argument: a man he had staffed for years, holding an office with access to the president, answering a request for help with a single line forbidding further contact.

See also

- John Kerry
- The Kerry yacht tax
- Kiriakou pardon request
- Ted Rall
