Russiagate
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Russiagate is John Kiriakou's term for the recurring claim that Russia covertly interfered in U.S. elections, which he rejects as "just a lie." The Mueller report, he notes, found no Russian interference in 2016, though the government keeps repeating the charge under a "take our word for it, it's classified" posture. The DNC emails, he says, were authentic primary-source documents leaked in person, NSA technical director Bill Binney, a member of the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, released a study concluding the data was downloaded at a speed only possible via local copying onto a thumb drive, roughly 20 times faster than any remote hack could achieve, and it was Craig Murray who couriered the thumb drive to WikiLeaks. Kiriakou says he does not believe Russian intelligence conducted the DNC hack; he suspects instead an internal whistleblower, motivated by anger over how the DNC treated Bernie Sanders during the primary. He has speculated that Cyrillic letters and "Iron Felix" references found in the hacked documents may have been planted by a state actor other than Russia, possibly the CIA or Israel, to divert blame, noting that Israel benefited heavily from Trump's election, including the embassy move to Jerusalem and U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights. As for the fabled Facebook operation, Russia spent roughly $50,000, half after election day, in already-red or already-blue states, mostly cat emojis and jokes, against billions in campaign spending. In a separate telling he puts the same $50,000 into YouTube ads rather than Facebook, again none of it political, again about half spent after the election was already over, and the ads themselves nothing more than memes of "kittens and puppies and flowers." Kiriakou's blunter view: Hillary Clinton "was probably the only Democrat in America who couldn't beat Donald Trump."

Kiriakou singles out Rachel Maddow as emblematic of the media's role in manufacturing the story, recalling a clip in which she said "Russia," "Moscow," or "Putin" ninety times in the first hour of a single broadcast, a striking reversal, he notes, from her having previously mocked Mitt Romney for calling Russia a geopolitical threat. He also says he takes satisfaction that former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey are now being investigated for lying to Congress about Russian-interference claims, "about time these guys got a taste of their own medicine."

Kiriakou traces the broader political realignment around Russiagate back to 1993, when Bill Clinton's inauguration began an effort, akin to the Democratic Leadership Council's, to move the Democratic Party toward Wall Street and a more militarist foreign policy, including the attack on and breakup of Yugoslavia; he says he was serving in Greece, an Orthodox Christian country like Serbia, at the time, and recalls Greeks discussing withdrawing from NATO over that war. He attributes the leftward political realignment partly to Russiagate itself, when Trump's surprise 2016 win shocked the establishment.

The affair recurred, in Kiriakou's telling, around the Hunter Biden laptop story: Michael Morell testified that then-Biden campaign official (and later Secretary of State) Anthony Blinken directed him to write and organize the 51-signatory letter claiming the New York Post's laptop story had "all the hallmarks" of Russian disinformation, which was then leaked to journalist Natasha Bertrand at Politico. That Politico story was used to censor the New York Post's story on Facebook and Twitter, and the Post was kicked off Twitter altogether. Kiriakou wrote about the letter on his Substack, both the day before one such interview and four years earlier, arguing that former intelligence officials with security clearances should not be talking to the media at all. He says he personally knows every one of the 51 signatories, a mix, in his words, of the brilliant, the self-serving, and the patriotic, and notes the letter was carefully worded, using analytic-training qualifier language ("bears all the hallmarks of") rather than definitively calling the laptop Russian disinformation.

The 2018 indictments

Kiriakou's objection to the indictments returned by Robert Mueller's investigation rests on what the documents themselves concede. In the indictment of twelve Russians over the DNC hack, announced days before the Helsinki summit, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stated that it did not allege that any U.S. citizen had committed a crime, nor that the conspiracy had changed the vote count or affected any election result, a qualification carried inside the article rather than in the headline.

On the timing he is unequivocal: asked whether the announcement was one of the ways the intelligence community was undermining the president, he says that of course the timing was chosen to embarrass Donald Trump before he met the Russian leader.

The earlier indictment of the St Petersburg troll farm produced what Kiriakou regards as the test of whether the prosecutions were meant to be tried. The defendants responded by demanding discovery, and the prosecutors had to return to court to say they were not ready and needed another sixty days. His conclusion: "if you're not ready for discovery then why did you indict them in the first place, you never expected them to go to court and ask for discovery, you did it just to embarrass people and to push this agenda."

He separates this from any brief for the president, noting that he is no fan of Trump's but that "we don't have to love the CIA and the FBI just because we don't like Donald Trump."

"Take his word for it"

Asked in August 2018 where he stood, Kiriakou's answer was about evidence rather than about Donald Trump: "we've seen no evidence yet of Russian collusion, or the Trump campaign's collusion with the Russian government. All we have is John Brennan and the likes of John Brennan telling us to take his word for it, because if we had seen what he's seen, we would know."

He treated that as a claim requiring a track record, and found Brennan's wanting; the four denials he set against it are listed at John Brennan. The wider point he drew from the episode is that a viewer need not accept the accuser in order to reject the accused, see no good guy.

See also

- Bill Binney
- Craig Murray
