FBI Arrest Strategies
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Per John Kiriakou, the FBI times arrests strategically to maximize pressure on detainees. He says the FBI "loves" to make arrests on Fridays, or on Thursdays after 5 p.m., because there are no federal arraignments on Fridays, meaning someone arrested Thursday evening spends Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights in jail before finally being arraigned on Monday. He describes this stretch in jail, which in Washington, D.C. he calls a very dangerous place, as designed to leave detainees "beaten up a couple of times and softened up" and more willing to accept a plea deal by the time they are arraigned.

Kiriakou says he personally experienced this: FBI agents told him to turn himself in at their Washington field office on a Monday morning, after having kept close surveillance on him "from Thursday to Monday." A separate telling has him learning of his own investigation in real time: in 2012, after the FBI had already been investigating him for four years, he went to the Bureau's Washington field office believing he was there to help with someone else's case, only realizing an hour and twenty minutes in that he himself was the subject. An agent then told him, in a low voice, that his house was being raided as they spoke; when Kiriakou asked if he was under arrest, the agent said "not yet," and Kiriakou immediately invoked his right to an attorney, by his account, the only thing that kept him from being arrested that day. He separately says he had already been told the FBI intended to arrest him on a Monday, but that the interview happened on a Thursday, and that invoking his right to counsel was again what saved him from an arrest that would otherwise have left him sitting through arraignment-free Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights in jail.

During that 2012 raid, twelve FBI agents entered his home while his wife sat with their then-three-month-old son; they seized his desktop and laptop computers, his late mother's laptop, hundreds of business cards, thumb drives, his DVD collection, his entire iTunes catalog, and even 5,000 photographs of his children, which were not returned to him for two and a half years. A second raid followed in 2019, during a child-custody dispute, after his ex-wife told police he was hoarding weapons and "planning something big." Twenty-two FBI agents raided his house, smashed a hole in his kitchen wall, and dumped his potted plants onto the floor searching for weapons in the soil; he was never charged with a crime. Before either raid, Kiriakou says a reporter told him over lunch that he was under FBI surveillance because agents suspected he was the source for the ACLU's "John Adams project", a project he says he had never heard of.

Just a couple of days after his 2012 arrest, he met with the Government Accountability Project's attorney Jesselyn Raddack, who told him that under the legal definition of whistleblowing, he qualified regardless of his own motivation. He says the arrest-timing tactic was "painfully evident" again years later, when the FBI applied the same Thursday-arrest, no-Friday-arraignment strategy to people arrested in connection with January 6.

Manufactured plots and entrapment

Kiriakou also describes a separate FBI tactic he considers widely criticized: entrapment operations in which an agent poses online as a terrorist figure, identifies a vulnerable person, talks them into a plot, and arrests them once they act, generating a publicized "terror plot" arrest. He says agents have a career incentive to do this, since they are not promoted for declining to prosecute. As an example, he cites the "Route 62 bridge conspiracy" in Cleveland, Ohio, in which an FBI informant embedded with three drunk men in a bar first floated the idea of blowing up a bridge, then supplied them with inert detonators and explosives; when nothing happened, the FBI arrested them, and the men, who had merely been drinking and talking, received sentences of 20 to 30 years for a plot the FBI itself had originated.

Kiriakou says that for a period during Trump's first term, these fabricated-plot tactics shifted from targeting Muslim Americans toward targeting MAGA supporters, citing the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, in which he says the plotters were themselves FBI agents, as an example. He also recalls Vietnam-era anti-war coordinating-committee meetings where, unbeknownst to any of the attendees, literally everyone present was an FBI agent, each unknowingly reporting on the others.

Why Thursday

Kiriakou says the FBI intended to arrest him on the day it informed him of the charge, and that "the only thing that saved me was I said 'I want to speak to my lawyer, and I want to speak to him right now.'"

The day was not incidental. "That was on a Thursday. The FBI likes to arrest people on Thursdays, because the courts don't arraign new prisoners on Fridays, and so you have to spend Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night in jail. And frankly they hope that you have a rough time, maybe you get beaten up, it softens you up a little bit, and then you're more willing to take a deal."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- FBI
