Title: Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou On Espionage Act Prosec
Show: Kevin Gosztola (The Dissenter)
Date: 2023-04-14
URL: https://youtu.be/vmY7r4ggP6o
Duration: 45:00

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[00:02] hello everyone and welcome to the shadow proof YouTube channel uh please take a moment as you are joining to like the shadow proof Channel while you are here uh take a moment to make sure you're able to get notifications when we do broadcasts in the future and I'm very pleased to be joined Again by former CIA officer and whistleblower and a good friend of mine John kiriaku welcome back thanks Kevin very happy it's very timely uh that we are getting together I we

[00:33] kind of plan this ahead but today um the subject of our show uh it would seem the person who is behind this leak that we're going to be talking about was arrested there's a very good chance I think we can be 99.99 certain that the justice department found the individual who was involved in this leak which has dominated a lot of our attention over the last uh week a little bit over a week that we've been And discussing in

[01:04] the media there's been a lot of discussion over these highly sensitive documents that came from the Pentagon first we had reporting from The New York Times that went into some detail about these documents and apparently they're still circulating online you can see them they're photographs that were posted to a video game well first it was to this group that this person had Jack

[01:35] to Sarah who was sort of this like figure who set up this room where he had young men and boys who are Were Somehow involved in the military he's an air National Guardsman and uh and he had all of these people basically reveling in the access that he had to classified documents he was sharing the materials with them so I'll let you I'll let you get in here

[02:05] I'm just trying to set this all up for everyone because there's a lot that has been going on and in the last uh 24 hours we saw that the Washington Post came out with this big story that was identifying that he was on a military base right and then just today just today arrested and so before um I get your first reaction to what we're dealing with here I'd like to play uh attorney general Merrick Garland presenting uh that that they had

[02:37] arrested this man today the justice department arrested Jack Douglas to Shara in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal retention and transmission of classified National Defense information Tashara is an employee of the United States Air Force National Guard FBI agents took to share into custody earlier this afternoon without incident he will have an initial appearance at the U.S District Court for the District of Massachusetts I want to thank the FBI justice

[03:08] department prosecutors and our colleagues at the Department of Defense for their diligent work on this case this investigation is ongoing we will share more information at the appropriate time thanks everyone okay so to let you in I just have one more basic detail we're looking at over a hundred documents it looks like that we're probably shared and then again just to stress what has been kind of bizarre about this and how it isn't the

[03:39] sort of standard case that we've been discussing in the past between you and me John you know we typically are talking about people who leaked information to the press or perhaps they themselves revealed information publicly through some means this person was posting this to Discord in this exclusive group and then it looks like a teenage user went and shared it to a video game chat room for Minecraft and was settling an argument

[04:09] by showing off a photograph to um one of these doctors and we'll get to the documents after I let you in here I mean your reaction to what we're seeing with the arrest of Jack to Sarah well I've got couple of thoughts right off the bat at first I I wasn't entirely convinced that this was a leak case uh I thought that there was evidence that might suggest that it was a covert action

[04:40] PL uh program uh only because only because for example on the information that was relevant to the to the conflict in Ukraine both the Russians and the ukrainians denied the the veracity of the information that was number one number two was the information about the Israeli Mossad being opposed to Benjamin netanyahu's plans to take over the country's courts

[05:11] would not have been a natural fit ought not to have been a natural fit for the Mossad for Shin Bet the domestic intelligence organization in Israel it would have but for for Mossad that just didn't make any sense to me and the third the third thing that I thought was odd was the report that the Egyptians had apparently planned to sell missiles to the Russians but but president uh uh Abdul fatah sisi had told underlings not

[05:43] to let the Americans uh know because because uh the Americans would have been upset well you can't move a missile 10 feet anywhere on planet Earth without uh satellites capturing the movement and reporting that back to Washington so I thought you know this is almost just too convenient for for it to be a leak I I wonder if they're leaking it on purpose and you know for for a good for a leak to be a good covert Action Program 90 or

[06:16] 95 percent of it has to be true and then you mix the falsehoods in with the overwhelming number of documents that are true that's how you get the other side to believe that the leak is actually a leak so I wasn't sure that this was really real until today when they arrested this guy Jack Tashara okay number one number two um I have had at least a half a dozen calls

[06:46] from news outlets around the the world really uh asking me if this guy's a whistleblower and my immediate reaction is that he does not appear to be a whistleblower one of the things I learned in my own case and I learned this from jessalyn radak the the famed um whistleblower attorney and former head of Ethics at the justice department who helped me greatly in my own case one

[07:19] of the first things that jessalyn taught me was that there is a legal definition of whistleblowing it's bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or Public Safety and that doesn't appear to be what tashiro was doing now she she also taught me that motivation is irrelevant so you can like Chelsea Manning was angry at her commanding officer uh when she released her information but that

[07:50] information happened to be in the public service so whether we like Chelsea Manning or a lot or not whether you agree with what Chelsea Manning did or not Chelsea Manning is a whistleblower and I'm just not seeing the public value in what's been released so far now Jack Tashira hasn't made a statement it's very very early in the process so we really shouldn't jump to any conclusions until we know more and preferably until we know more from Jack to Shira or from his attorney

[08:26] can't hear you because I need to unmute myself hello all right we can live stream okay so the uh way you're talking is is basically my view as well that the behavior of to share as it's been reported would suggest that he's not somebody who we could support as a whistleblower that in fact what he was doing is the kind of thing that has been acute that has been

[08:56] lobbed at Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning where they say oh they were posting this information to enrich themselves they were doing this for their own ego well that's not what stone nermatting did but it almost looks like that's what Tashara was doing with this room because he was building yes uh I don't want to be too hyperbolic but it's only like 24 people it almost looks like a small cult that he was yes he was he was putting together um and I mean that in just like the definitional sense I'm not suggesting

[09:28] that you doing anything that was particularly harmful to the people in the group but just that like he was trying to boost his image among this small group of people through his access to this information which is exactly what I would imagine when you go through training you would be told not to do I mean like you can't do this to boost your stature in your community I'm glad that you that you raised that because that was a point that I I was hoping to

[09:59] make too that normally when people leak information that's not for the purpose of whistleblowing they do it for a very small number of reasons uh number one is adrenaline the excitement of leaking something watching it hit the press and then just sort of sitting back and watching watching The Fallout number two is to impress somebody usually to impress a journalist oh check out my access I have access to such important information take a look at it

[10:31] um and number three um Revenge uh maybe you've been passed over for promotion and by God you're going to get back at your boss and you're going to do that by leaking this information embarrassing the whole organization the military the CIA the FBI whatever it is this appears to be again at this early stage this appears to be um an effort by an immature young man to impress people and we we know from The

[11:02] Washington Post yesterday that when he was posting this stuff on Discord he was annotating it to explain what some of the the code words meant like no foreign or orcon no foreign meaning not releasable to foreign governments or Khan meaning originator controlled and then got angry that nobody was asking questions about it so that sort of leads me to believe that this is not a whistleblowing case

[11:33] and he's in trouble uh because what he did by the letter of the law is how the justice department would prosecute or what the kind of case he'd be looking for to prosecute someone for violating the Espionage Act and in that statement that attorney mayor attorney general Merrick Garland gave he speaks about classified National Defense information which is the tale the tell that they are going to probably tomorrow when he's arraigned charge him with violating the

[12:06] Espionage Act not for all 100 documents but likely a handful of them so that they have enough to put him in prison and and there's this is so high profile it's brought a lot of embarrassment if you listen to the Pentagon they didn't know who was leaking they had no idea what this was that was happening and it's been I think it's brought shame to them because it looks like they're not able to guard their secrets so they're

[12:36] probably going to do a lot to bring an Espionage Act case against him I think that they will do a lot and I think that this will end up being um this will end up going to a plea bargain yeah he'll take a plea to to an Espionage charge or two or five or whatever it's going to be and he's going to get a substantial uh prison prison sentence uh you make another important point there Kevin and that is uh the embarrassment that this has caused the

[13:06] federal government they they genuinely did know where this was coming from and they didn't know he was posting sorry to interrupt you but it was going up in early March and for three weeks this was out nobody paid attention it was just sitting there for three weeks and so um two crazy things happened earlier this week because they didn't know where it was coming from number one the Pentagon restricted access to the Secretary of defense's morning briefing and the morning briefing that is given to the uh

[13:37] The Joint Chiefs of Staff now when they say morning briefing that goes to the Joint Chiefs or to the secretary plus their AIDS and their Hangers On and their deputies and their deputies deputies so it's not just the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense it's it's 50 people that are getting this briefing they're tightening that up significantly so it's closer to 10 or 20 people that are going to get the briefing day before yesterday the CIA announced that it was going to begin phasing out printers can you imagine

[14:08] this they're going to start phasing out printers so people can't print these documents and take them home or make photocopies of them or do whatever it is they're going to do to try to get them out so they that to me that tells me that they genuinely didn't know where to look the third issue this guy is a 21 year old Massachusetts Air National Guard Junior nobody and

[14:38] a reservist and a reservist on top of it and he had access to this kind of classified information why why would he have access to this kind of information so I think that's gonna that's gonna be tightened up as well and that suggests a lot because I can't help but bring in all of the work all of everything that we both have been paying close attention to over the last 10 to 15 years you because of what

[15:10] you went through in your case going through a prosecution me following Chelsea Manning seeing that they developed an Insider threat program under Obama all of this technology and infrastructure was supposed to be put in place yes and I suppose what it comes down to is that's still not enough I mean basically we learn what people like NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and others have have taught us is that you know they're collecting so much

[15:41] that they probably don't even know where to look to identify Insider threats yeah and when you create something like a million new classified documents a week I think is the number or three million a week whatever the number is I I don't recall now um and you have 50 000 people who have top secret security clearances how can you possibly keep a lid on all that it's just not

[16:13] possible yeah so let me just again I want to emphasize some of the the sensitivity of what has been posted so I just would like to show some of these headlines and it is kind of remarked so there's a there's a little bit of conversation about the news media that we should have here and how they've handled this okay so on one hand like you get you get these organizations that go on and on when Edward Snowden and Chelsea

[16:43] Manning have released documents and Wikileaks have published documents and you know they're repeating these things like oh Wikileaks has blood on their hands and they're taking it seriously and then and and they're suggesting that certain things would damage the damage the standing of the US military the image the ability of Wars to be fought and they're taking that very seriously and in this instance even though they support the war in Ukraine they support the efforts of what are unfolding with

[17:15] NATO and they want to defeat Russia and and beat them in the uh the preemptive military Invasion that Russia launched the fact is that they were aggressively investigating these documents like look so look at this so I just want to make this point that they you know they start off by highlighting that the leaked document to reveal the depth of the U.S spying efforts and Russia's military struggles they're revealing how much the U.S government

[17:45] had penetrated Russia in in different parts of the government and in their intelligence services and how much they knew about Russia um again like I'm not saying that I'm against this I just want to point out that you're you're told all the time by these media institutions how to think about certain things that are published um and that come from security agencies especially when it comes to leaks and it's like they were really encouraging the spread of this information even when

[18:17] they support this effort in Ukraine and you have here that leaked documents suggest Ukrainian air defense is in Peril if not reinforced I mean we kind of knew that they had problems but this lays it out in some great detail and then you have this in particular which suggests that yes they were spying on South Korea um because they wanted South Korea to do more to support the war in Ukraine um and then of course this just goes

[18:49] back to what we learned from The Washington Post but um but I mean to that point that uh all the time like if it's Wikileaks it's bad but if the New York Times is digging into these leaks that could be damaging to the US government it's just fine you're absolutely right um I had a German reporter call me yesterday and we talked about exactly this issue and she said I I don't believe that these documents are real

[19:20] and I said really why is that and she said because for example the South Korea document it shows that the that the um American government was spying on on South Korea and South Korea as an ally and I said but it's well documented that the U.S spies on its allies on Germany and and I said that I said just to ask Angela Merkel she'll tell you all about the CIA spying and NSA spying on her and she said yes but that's in the past and Hillary Clinton apologized for it I have

[19:53] a hard time believing that the CIA would continue to spy on on Angela Merkel and I said with all due respect only a fool would think that the United States wasn't spying on its allies I said look thanks to Ed Snowden we know that NSA spies on everybody all of us if they're spying on me and they're spying on you why wouldn't they be spying on Angela Merkel and she said well I didn't think about it that way and I said yeah they are they're spying

[20:26] on everybody and they're spying on Ukraine partly because apparently apparently Ukraine doesn't trust us because they believe we're gonna leak their secrets so that's like that's coming out in the documents that apparently we have to spy on Ukraine to find out things about the health of their military operations yes I think you are exactly right I I think you're exactly right and there was another point that I made uh with her

[20:56] that that I want to sort of reiterate with you a person who is a whistleblower you know you give you give the idea of going public a great deal of thought unless you're me I was an idiot I just blurted it out but anyway most people give it a lot of thought and in this day and age what you do after giving it thought is you hire an attorney like jessalyn radak or you engage Wikileaks or the New York Times The Washington Post or whatever

[21:27] you don't post it on Discord for a bunch of 16 year olds to watch it and then have one of the 16 year olds put it on on a Minecraft bulletin board I mean my 11 year old plays Minecraft every day he's not going to care about about these classified documents on a Minecraft bulletin board this is just not the way a whistleblower a legitimate whistleblower would be trying to influence U.S policy that he or she believes is wrong or illegal immoral

[21:59] unethical it just doesn't make any sense and so that leads me to believe that he's just showing off what the US military can do that this is these are people having conversations they're not ideological they're not probably well informed they're just motivated by isn't this neat what these documents say about what the U.S militaries do I mean apparently some of these involved what depending on thought about this the so-called spy balloon from China over

[22:30] the United States uh we won't go back over that um but uh let me ask you another question here and then I'll have another and then we'll wrap up our discussion uh so as we wind this down it's been brought up by a good colleague and a friend of mine Matt Kennard that uh he he objected to how it looks like the New York Times worked with a Belling cat and is celebrating their ability to unlearn and identify this Jack to Shara

[23:01] what do you think about the way that the media wanted to uncover and help the FBI figure out the source of these documents even as they were publishing Scoops some of these headlines are some of the biggest headlines related to the war in recent months oh yeah this this is deeply disturbing to me um you know organizations like bellingcat for example or Hamilton 68 I

[23:32] think these are very dangerous organizations in that they purport to be independent they're not independent if you look at their Boards of directors they're replete with former directors of the CIA former directors of National Intelligence four-star generals uh in in the case of Hamilton 68 the former director general of NATO these are not these are not people that are going to be friendly to a legitimate whistleblower um and like you I was taken aback at the

[24:03] way the New York Times And The Washington Post while they were patting themselves on the back for the Scoops they were coming up with were actually critical of the leaks critical of the leaker and very happy to condemn the person not even knowing who it was and work with bellingcat and apparently with the FBI to shut the whole thing down can you imagine anything like that

[24:34] happening um during the the revelations surrounding the Pentagon papers yeah I can't even imagine such a thing happening I I just have a really difficult time and I I bet you do as well with the idea of a press organization simultaneously helping the FBI identify a source and then meanwhile also using those documents to publish major news stories that are informative like largely speaking those headlines I

[25:06] read to you whether they're hugely revelatory or not in your mind maybe you go oh I suspected that that's not surprising whatever they published these headlines based on primary source documents that they didn't have and it's an un varnished look at the state of a conflict that is now unfolded for over a year that's right that's right they like to have it now both ways so either either you're going

[25:38] to be an independent journalist even better an independent investigative journalist or you're going to be the mouthpiece of the empire you can't be both and it looks like they're choosing to be the mouthpiece of the empire all right so I'd like to get your reaction here to some of these details that are in the story from the Washington Post I just I I so I build our conversation as the wild story behind this leak and and in fact the

[26:12] news media has been really hung up on this um and I I think it is very different from Snowden I think it's very different from Chelsea Manning that's that's what you said earlier and I've been saying something along the lines and but one of the reasons why it's different is because you have this culture of of what went on and uh and as you were saying you already shared the detail that was in the post story about how uh they were just transcribing these

[26:45] to start off the reason why Jack to share I got himself in trouble is he he was taking photos of actual documents and as people have said he took pictures of the documents on his countertop and there were also objects in his home where people could see right things that would help the FBI identify yes his location coffee mug plant yeah exactly and not very good maybe if he continued to transcribe the documents he would have gotten away with it actually because there's nothing physical for us

[27:17] to share right and you remember the FBI whistleblower Terry Aubry um Terry doesn't get a lot of press but uh he's the one who blew the whistle on system racism at the FBI he he um took a photograph of his computer screen at the FBI and the FBI you know went through security coverage security footage of literally every FBI field office that they had in America

[27:49] until they found a shot of him taking the picture of the screen and that's how they got him I think that I mean the the military is a heck of a lot bigger than the FBI and I think you're right if he had continued to transcribe these these cables instead of um instead of finally releasing them uh I think it would have been very difficult to track him down at least in the near term okay so we hear this was like a refuge

[28:20] during the pandemic I think that's when Discord really flourished that a lot of people who weren't able to go out so they were joining these communities and meeting with each other um there's this young person who with the consent of his mother um I'm a little concerned about this by the way because it seems like this person probably should not have been talking to the media when they were connected to somebody who's sharing classified documents uh they're like very easily could have been hauled before a grand jury to be forced to

[28:53] testify against this person who they revered I'm this young person I don't know how old they are exactly I know they were a teenager um but they really looked up to this Jack to share yeah and the and the government could have put them through a lot of pressure to to testify against him if they needed it um okay so they talk about this tight-knit family and then here's what they say rather than spend his time copying documents by keyboard he took photographs of the genuine articles and dropped them in the server these were

[29:23] more Vivid and arresting documents than the plain text renderings some featured details of Battlefield conditions in Ukraine and highly classified satellite images of the aftermath of Russian military uh missiles missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical facilities they also have sketches of the potential trajectory of North Korean ballistic nuclear missiles that could reach the United States that brings to mind Stephen Kim who got in trouble releasing information to James Rosen because that

[29:54] involved North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities so um then it goes on to say that he uh the dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation reminded the group that OJ OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the US government if you had classified documents you'd want to flex at least a little bit like hey I'm the big guy uh this young person said he was speaking to the post there's a little bit of showing off to friends but as well as wanting to keep us informed I mean I

[30:24] think more of it is flexing but um but then they go on to present that um he um he he was uh at a uh at a shooting range at one point right they described this um and how uh basically you know he yelled racial slurs and epithets into the camera so anyways let's end by this just considering I

[30:55] always like to focus on the power on the powerful the people who are actually in the centers of power who get to make the decisions in this moment it's really tough we are put in this position where we're supposed to judge the actions of someone like Jack to Shara and say what he did or didn't do and and make judgments on what is right and wrong and I think it's you know I I know where I come down on it but I think what's a more useful point to end on in our conversation is more towards the policy questions of our government which is

[31:26] that we continue to see the Espionage Act being wielded and I would expect it to be wielded again tomorrow and read and when we look at this case I would like to know what your opinion is but when I look at this case this looks like the a clear and deliberate mishandling of classified information but really we should ask ourselves should jack Tashara be punished as if he's a spy should he be treated as somebody who betrayed his country and set back the war effort in

[31:57] Ukraine and helped Russia because that's how he's going to be treated by the justice department yeah and I think that the answer to that question is no he shouldn't be you know I wrote her not bad not too long ago it was when uh Donald Trump was caught with classified documents at Mar-A-Lago and uh Joe Lauria at Consortium news entitled it uh don't charge Donald Trump with Espionage or anybody else and it's because the Espionage Act is is broken uh did the guy commit Espionage

[32:29] in my mind no because in my mind Espionage is done on on behalf of of a foreign country um did he mishandle classified information absolutely yes and he should be punished for that but Espionage to me is something that's different now I'm going to lose that battle because um the Espionage Act is used exactly for cases like this as well as for whistleblowers and leakers and Traders and everybody else is all just lumped

[33:01] into one uh one category uh you're right Kev that he's going to be charged with Espionage tomorrow whether he's actually committed Espionage as we think it's defined or not that's an argument to have on Capitol Hill but yeah he's going to be charged tomorrow it really shows you that there should be some law pastor we should do something to reform so that the justice department has options I don't know if it wants options we could have a pretty good

[33:33] discussion and probably fill out a whole hour discussing whether the National Security State wants to move away from the power that they're able to wield by bringing the Espionage Act it's possible that having something that could be more mild in its consequences in in its ramifications would make them fear the ability or the or the or a future where more young people would do this I mean I wonder if they would tell you that if

[34:04] Jack and other people like him knew that the most that would happen would they would lose their position in the reserve yeah they would no longer have access to security to to classified information um if that was all that would happen uh then there would be so many more people who were doing it so we shouldn't allow we we should be harsh we should bring the Espionage Act so we can protect two two comments on that um when I was at the CIA when I was still on the analytics side this was in

[34:35] 1996. I sat next to a woman who was having an affair with a paid commentator from CNN and in the course of pillow talk she said something to him he repeated it on the air on CNN CIA security was able to trace it directly back to her and as soon as they called her in she confessed in tears today she would be charged with Espionage and she would be facing 10

[35:06] years in prison in 1996 um she was given four weeks without pay they put a letter in her personnel file and she was not eligible for promotion for one year now that was an appropriate punishment she didn't deserve to go to a maximum security penitentiary for 10 years for letting something slip out but the Espionage Act today is this one-size-fits-all punishment before I joined the CIA I worked at the office of

[35:38] personnel management as a federal investigator doing investigations for people's background or background investigations for people's security clearances there was one person a woman that I was investigating and a year earlier she had taken a classified briefing book home with her she stopped at a bar in Old Town Alexandria Virginia because it happened to be St Patrick's Day and she got drunk and then when she left the bar as she

[36:08] was getting into a cab she put the briefing book on the roof of the cab the cab drove away and the briefing book flew everywhere somebody picked up the papers which were all marked Secret at the top and bottom and called the FBI the FBI sent two agents over picked all these up of course these documents were easily traceable back to this woman and she received four weeks leave without pay and she was not

[36:39] permitted to be promoted now again today that's an Espionage charge carrying 10 years in prison um the law has never changed the law has never been updated it's never been reformed it's never been amended it's just that we've decided to treat it differently in court and the climate hasn't been particularly good for efforts to try and reform the Espionage Act but it got modif modestly better when it looked like you could say

[37:09] to both political parties hey your president Donald Trump he technically violated the Espionage Act hey Democrats your President Joe Biden he's got documents in his possession that he mishandles it looks like he could be charged with violating the Espionage Act so maybe you might want to think about having some way to modify this so that you are able to have a different different tiers when it

[37:40] comes to prosecutions you know you could say like okay it's this severe okay it's that much more severe or it's that much more severe and you could have maybe multiple different laws or codes on the books that would make it possible to go after uh but we just have this one size fits all as uh basically people like jessalyn radak have called it it's a sledgehammer that you can bring down over people like you anybody who's who's leaking and it doesn't matter your

[38:10] motivations um so thank you John um we really appreciate you uh for for joining us um and uh that you know there's gonna be much more to follow with this case so I'm sure we'll have further conversations um let me make one more final point and I'll let you have any closing thoughts and you can you can plug uh your stuff and let people know where they can go to support you but uh what I'll just say is another thing that bothered me this has

[38:42] nothing really do to do with our like specific conversation about Jack Tashara but one thing that bothered me is when I was reading the coverage of this yeah people felt like if they didn't casually mention that it was possible that Russia could be behind this that they were like somehow I guess not being good little journalists of the United States uh and even though there was no evidence I've just noticed that like every pundit who's I mean I was even watching an ABC News broadcast where like we have all

[39:13] this information before us but he still felt motivated to say it could be Russia and there's just no evidence at all and I mean it just says a lot about the climate we live in where you can just casually suggest it's a foreign power without any evidence whatsoever it's like the 50s all over again yeah you know it's like we've got to we've got to Rally against a common enemy and if you don't do it you're not a you're not a patriotic American it's just outrageous

[39:46] all right so John it's up to you um I got one question for you from some people who have been following you can answer this and then plug your show um is the uh someone wants to know um how heavily the CIA and these intelligence agencies are recruiting from high school and college and uh so it has nothing really to do with what we've been talking about or maybe it kind of does but you can answer that and then tell people where they can find your work they they don't recruit from high school but they recruit very heavily in college very heavily uh in

[40:18] two ways first the CIA has this program called the um uh shoot I forget what it's called um anyway they embed retiring CIA officers in colleges and universities all around the country so you'll have an intelligence fellow for example a friend of mine is the intelligence fellow at Indiana University in Indiana they're they're at Cornell and Pitt and Harvard and Princeton and they're everywhere

[40:49] they're everywhere I was recruited in college I had no intention of applying to the CIA my graduate school advisor was a CIA officer undercover as as a an academic advisor and he recruited me into the CIA that's technically illegal now in that we have the Equal Employment Opportunity Act from 1993 so rather than to clandestinely recruit you they're overtly

[41:20] CIA officers in the last two years of their career and they would welcome you coming up and asking questions and if you're interested in joining the CIA they will connect you with a CIA recruiter that's one way the other way is the CIA recruiters actually go to all of these schools all around the country my ex-wife was a CIA recruiter and um you know they'll do job fairs at

[41:50] 200 300 colleges around the country every year they're looking for very specific skills they're looking for hard foreign languages 14 specific foreign languages they're looking for people who are very very tech savvy but you know when I was recruited on the day that I was sworn in on one side of me was a hairdresser who got a certificate from The Falls Church Virginia school of beauty she became a master wig maker and on the other side of me was a guy who

[42:22] had a cartoon in one of the local free papers and he became a master forger so they're looking for for everybody and they're they're on universities like white on rice and where can people subscribe to you ah yes thank you uh I am on uh sub stack now I I just got my Twitter account back it had been hacked by some low life but three weeks later yesterday I got it back so I'm at John kiriaku and same thing at sub stack it's um it's uh John

[42:56] kiriaku.substack.com all right well and and thank you for the kind thoughts on the Julian Assange Rally from a couple of days ago um guy tried to set himself on fire and a couple of us were able to disrupt him so thank you for those those kind thoughts well you're uh you're a lifesaver and you're also uh I mean we don't know that guy could have lit himself on fire and then ended up lighting other people on fire at the rally depending whoever was trying I'll tell you he he had doused himself he

[43:27] first he had he doused his genitals and then his clothes in Sterno he had this bottle of Sterno and he was so nervous that he was shaking and only because he was shaking he couldn't get the lighter lit and so skip countenhauser knocked it out of his uh hand and I kicked it and I shoved him and and he didn't light himself on fire and but you know you had security at the

[43:58] protest that was protecting all of you right right I mean after you tackled him yeah right he was after I tackled him the guy finally got up off the hood of his car and came over and said uh you know maybe uh you're under arrest awful it's the good fine people of our country that are protecting us and protecting our kids and schools from being shot at so exactly and this guy was all Laden down with body armor the cop was it's like dude are you gonna

[44:28] come over here and help us okay all right well everyone thank you for tuning in I'm just gonna throw this up here so everybody who stumbles on this video knows that this is where you can find me and my work I'll be covering um Regular updates on Jack to Shara including including what I think is important in these moments is false and in proper or inaccurate representations of the Espionage Act and what it can and can't

[45:00] do and also like poor framings of Snowden and Chelsea Manning there will be ways in which they discuss whistleblowers that we support in order to make comments about Jack to Shara and it's always important to make sure that they don't stray from what actually happened in these cases so you can follow I mean you listen to John on his radio show and political Misfits or you can follow my dissenter newsletter we'll definitely be trying to keep them honest and make sure that they don't

[45:32] um tell too many misrepresentations that they are able to get away with so thank you everyone Thanks for tuning in I'm gonna wind this down we'll wrap this up and we'll be back soon with another conversation on the shadowproof channel until next time thank you
