Prosecution as promotion
========================

Prosecution as promotion is John Kiriakou's account of why national-security investigations produce charges even when they have not found the crime they were opened to find. The engine, in his description, is the career structure of the people conducting them.

The mechanism

Looking at the attorneys and agents working for Robert Mueller in 2018, career Justice Department attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys, FBI agents, Kiriakou describes a single professional requirement: "this is how they get promoted, they have to show scalps." Advancement up the chain of command is measured in people charged.

The consequence he draws is that the charge filed need not match the conduct originally suspected. Investigators indict as many people as they can, he says, even on what he calls throwaway felony charges, making a false statement, perjury, conspiracy "whatever that means," wire fraud, because each one is a scalp.

The observation it rests on

Kiriakou dates his own understanding of this to the day he took his plea, and credits it to his wife. What she told him made her angriest that day was not the sentence he had accepted but the machinery behind it: "one of the things that makes me so angry today is that somebody's going to get promoted for this."

He applies the same reading to his own case, in which twelve FBI agents surveilled him for three years without finding a crime, and to the investigations of Donald Trump, treating them as instances of one mechanism rather than as opposed political causes.

See also

- The John Kiriakou Task Force
- Robert Mueller
- Heather Kiriakou
- Espionage Act
- John Brennan
