Government Accountability Project
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The Government Accountability Project, generally shortened to GAP, is a Washington whistleblower-advocacy organization that took John Kiriakou's case after his 2012 arrest, through its attorney Jesselyn Radack. Kiriakou has dated the approach both as the day after his arrest and as a couple of days after it.

How the meeting happened

Kiriakou's fullest telling starts with a phone call. A friend rang him at about six in the morning to say there was an article about him in that day's Washington Post and that a woman quoted in it was complimentary, he should call her. He phoned the office number at half past six and Radack answered: "Oh thank god you called. Please come into the office." His own reaction was the same, "oh thank god, I need a friendly ear." He sat with Radack and her assistant Kathleen McClellan for two or three hours.

"You're the poster boy of whistleblowing"

By Kiriakou's account he sought Radack out to thank her and to correct her: he knew she took only whistleblower cases, and he did not consider himself one. "She chuckled and she said you're the poster boy of whistleblowing, and I said no I'm not, I'm just a guy who saw an illegality and said something." Radack's answer was that the term is not a matter of self-image: there is a legal definition of whistleblowing, it turns on the act of bringing wrongdoing to light, and the discloser's motivation is irrelevant. Kiriakou has since described this as one of the things he learned from the case, that he is a whistleblower.

Jesselyn Radack

Radack was one of the eleven lawyers Kiriakou says represented him. She headed the national security practice at the Government Accountability Project, which Kiriakou also identifies by its site, whistleblower.org, before moving to ExposeFacts.

Kiriakou recounts her earlier career at the Justice Department, where she was chief of professional ethics in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. She happened to be on duty the day American forces captured John Walker Lindh, the FBI called from Afghanistan to say they had taken an American citizen in a fort during a gun battle with the Taliban and to ask what to do, and Radack told them he was an American citizen with constitutional rights and had to be read those rights. They did not. Days later Attorney General John Ashcroft said on television that Lindh had been read his rights, had waived them, and had confessed, which Kiriakou says was a lie. Because the warning was never given, the confession could not be used in court, and the death-penalty case the government wanted collapsed into a sentence Kiriakou puts at somewhere between fifteen and twenty years.

Radack paid for it. She was driven out of the Justice Department as a whistleblower in the Lindh case, the government tried to revoke her law license and put her on the no-fly list, and her career never recovered, after which, Kiriakou says, she went to the Government Accountability Project "for no money, just to help other national security whistleblowers."

Place in the whistleblower-support landscape

Asked where a whistleblower should turn, Kiriakou names GAP first among a short list of Washington NGOs: the Government Accountability Project, the Project on Government Oversight, the National Whistleblower Defense Center, and WHISPeR, the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program.

Asked in 2017 whether a crowdsourced fund for whistleblowers should exist, he called it a good idea and a need not yet met, The Intercept, he said, had tried something similar and was generally bad at it, and pointed to the UBS banking whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld, who after winning a $104 million settlement from the federal government had decided to use his own money to set up something of the kind, above all to cover whistleblowers' legal defense costs.

The referral list

Asked what a prospective whistleblower should actually do, Kiriakou gives a standing answer and a threshold. The threshold is the statutory one, "waste, fraud, abuse and illegality, threats to the public health or public safety, which is the legal definition of whistleblowing."

The destinations are three. "They can go to GAP, the Government Accountability Project. They're at whistleblower.org. They can go to the National Whistleblower Center here in Washington DC, and there are top attorneys there who can help them file a whistleblower case or whistleblower protection case. And then there's WikiLeaks."

On the third he makes a claim about handling rather than about publication: WikiLeaks is "the only organization out there that solicits information and vows to protect it, and protect it they do. Unlike the Intercept, unlike the Guardian or any host of other organizations or outlets, WikiLeaks is the only one that takes your security seriously." He notes in the same passage how much is never traced at all: the source of the Panama Papers remains unknown, and "there was a journalist in Malta who was murdered after refusing to divulge the name of her sources relative to the Panama Papers."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Jesselyn Radack
- John Walker Lindh
